Utopian Ruins
de Jie Li
"Utopian ruins imagines a memorial museum for the Mao era. Such a museum would need to capture both the utopian possibility and the often-catastrophic histories of the period, not an easy task since most accounts are organized around one point of view or the other. The museum would face additional challenges due to the limited forms of documentation and presentation that were allowed to exist and circulate during the Maoist period, which of those have survived, and which ones would be possible to display now. The book is organized around the different media that might compose the archive of such a museum: personal documents, photography, film, and collections of objects. Working with these primary documents and indexical traces, Jie Li assembles each chapter like a memorial exhibit, offering testimonies of the Mao era. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on written records of the Mao era in the form of the dossiers of two revolutionaries later labeled rightists. Chapter 1 explores Lin Zhao's prison writings and family letters and how she later became seen as a martyr. Chapter 2 focuses on the contrasting case of Nie Gannu and describes how the government relied on information supplied by citizens to construct dossiers, a pervasive surveillance technology that also left a record for future generations. Chapter 3 describes the contradictory role of photography during the Great Leap Forward, as it depicted utopian images while the citizens lived dystopian realities. In Chapter 4 Li discusses the response to the 1970s European documentaries about China by Michelangelo Antonioni and Joris Ivens. Chapter 5 looks at films focusing on Chinese workers, and Chapter 6 describes the existing museums for Mao's memorabilia and the memorial sites for death and loss"--
