The geopolitics of memory production in China, Hong Kong, and Anglo-America: Reading memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1980 to 2006.

摘要

My dissertation embraces a comparative framework and is concerned with memories of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Anglo-America from 1980 to 2006 by victims, second-generation survivors, and party-denounced perpetrators. In terms of analytic methodology, my project stresses the discursive nature of memory and highlights the transnational creation of Cultural Revolution memory. It considers how the Cultural Revolution is remembered under the party's surveillance, how the official history is contested by sensitive figures in Hong Kong, and how overseas Chinese produce bestsellers and turn personal and family memory into a national history in the Diaspora. I challenge readers' fetish of alternative narratives and criticize some reductive readings of these memory performances. The critical issues examined in my dissertation include text and context, memory and history, narrative and genre, subjectivity and signification, authorship and impunity, and power and desire. By examining various geocultural cases, I illuminate the challenges in remembering this political event and the urgency for historically and discursively analyzing memoirs of the Cultural Revolution.