Through an interdisciplinary conversation with contributors from social anthropology, religious studies, film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Crafting Chinese Memories is a novel book which addresses how works of art shape memories, and offers new ways of conceptualising storytelling, memory-making, art, and materiality. It explores the memories of artists, filmmakers, novelists, storytellers, and persons who come to terms with their own histories even as they reveal the social memories of watershed events in modern China.
Author(s): Katherine Swancutt
Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement; 11
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 240
City: New York
Contents
List of Figures
Foreword. Conceptualizing Chinese Memories • Jialin Liu and Raphael Woolf
Introduction. Materiality, Imagination and the Memorable • Katherine Swancutt
Part I. Curating Memories through Art and Film
1. The Memory Palace of a Chinese Painter • Benoît Vermander
2. Jia Zhangke’s Memory Project, 24 City: Rewriting History, Rethinking Historiography • Chris Berry
Part II. Framing Memories through Literature and the Body
3. ‘Swimming against the Current’: The Mediation of Cultural Memory in the Writings by Christa Wolf and Ding Ling • Yejun Zou
4. Chinese Body-Expression and Cultural Memory in Mo Yan’s Big Breasts & Wide Hips • Wei Luan
5. Remembering Statelessness in Food Stories from Jewish Shanghai • Anna Reading
Part III. Propagating Memories through Storytelling
6. From Personal Connections to Mutual Trust: Building Memories with the Children of the Chinese Staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service • Chihyun Chang
7. Jailhouse Blues, Storytelling and Becoming the Stuff of Legends in Southwest China • Katherine Swancutt (苏梦林) and Jiarimuji (嘉日姆几)
Conclusion. Layers, Traces, Fields and Storehouses of Memory • Katherine Swancutt
Index
