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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.
“An ambitious, original interdisciplinary project of memory studies that brings together contributions from several academic disciplines – art, film, literature, history, and anthropology. Its highly interesting case studies investigate how memories about/in modern and contemporary China are made through various forms of storytelling and embedded in their materiality.” • Rui Kunze, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Katherine Swancutt is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King's College London. She is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant (2020-2026) 'Cosmological Visionaries' and has conducted research across Inner Asia on shamanic and animistic religion for upwards of two decades. Key publications include: Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (Berghahn, 2018) and Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn, 2012).
List of Illustrations
Foreword: Conceptualising Chinese Memories
Jialin Liu and Raphael Woolf
Introduction: Materiality, Imagination and the Memorable
Katherine Swancutt
Part I: Curating Memories through Art and Film
Chapter 1. The Memory Palace of a Chinese Painter
Benoît Vermander
Chapter 2. Jia Zhangke’s Memory Project, 24 City: Rewriting History, Rethinking Historiography
Chris Berry
Part II: Framing Memories through Literature and the Body
Chapter 3. ‘Swimming against the Current’: The Mediation of Cultural Memory in the Writings by Christa Wolf and Ding Ling
Yejun Zou
Chapter 4. Chinese Body-Expression and Cultural Memory in Mo Yan’s Big Breasts & Wide Hips
Wei Luan
Chapter 5. Remembering Statelessness in Food Stories from Jewish Shanghai
Anna Reading
Part III: Propagating Memories through Storytelling
Chapter 6. From Personal Connections to Mutual Trust: Building Memories with the Children of the Chinese Staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service
Chihyun Chang
Chapter 7. Jailhouse Blues, Storytelling, and Becoming the Stuff of Legends in Southwest China
Katherine Swancutt and Jiarimuji
Conclusion: Layers, Traces, Fields, and Storehouses of Memory
Katherine Swancutt
Index