Abstract
The transgenerational ghosts of trauma from war, death and injustice within Chinese twentieth century history are carried through the remembrances and silences of mediated, diasporic visions of memory. These ghosts are visible through Chinese cinema at the intersection of modern China’s national interests, issues of power and the transnational distribution/production of official memory. These relations also suggest an insistence to produce particular national, unified identifications within the collective imaginations of spectators across generations in the Chinese diaspora. While some national wounds are ‘chosen’ and remembered (for example, Western colonialism, Imperial Japanese invasion), other collective traumas continue to be disavowed through cinematic memory productions. In response to these issues of historical rewriting and memory production, I propose alternate ways of seeing cinema through a critical autoethnography that juxtaposes other mediations of memory. I explore how this approach to cinema spectatorship enables diasporic subjects to interrogate how affective trauma transmits unconsciously across generations.
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Notes
Approaching cinema and spectatorship by drawing on work affiliated with embodiment and film subverts the dominance of the ‘visual’ and the limits of conventional film analysis by opening up multi-sensory ways of engaging and reading moving images. What is rendered visible on the screen is not merely ‘seen’, but also invites our bodies to subjective experiences of smells, ‘suffocating’ feelings of chest and stomach constrictions, and even sensitizations of skin to touch (Sobchack, 2004, p. 61; see also Marks, 2000). Marks (2000, p. xi), in fact, embraces this primacy of the ‘tactile’ and the ‘synaesthetic’ in cinema with her appeal to its ‘haptic’ visuality, where ‘the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’ (Marks, 2002, p. 2). Haptic looking opens itself up to ‘discern texture’ instead of form, and an inclination to ‘graze than to gaze’, as a film that ‘touches’ and felt like organic ‘skin’ (ibid., p. 162).
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To, N. Haunting memories of war in Chinese cinema and diaspora: Visions of national trauma, power and autoethnographic collage. Subjectivity 8, 335–357 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.13