Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China by Margaret Hillenbrand

Abstract

Reviewed by: Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China by Margaret Hillenbrand Yiu Fai Chow (bio) Margaret Hillenbrand. Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. xx, 312 pp. 66 illustrations. Paperback $27.95, isbn 9781478008002. Let me start by exposing myself to something negative, as a homage to a book titled Negative Exposures, and as a disclaimer, perhaps. I want to say: how could I write a review that could possibly do justice to this eloquently written monograph? Margaret Hillenbrand’s work deserves to be read in good time—or rather in bad time, in our bad time when thought control, history doctoring, fake news, conspiracy theories, and many other forms of cryptocracy are on the rise, claiming alternative truth, justice, and reality. Scrutinizing contemporary China’s turbulent past and its conspicuous as well as consistent disavowal of that turbulent past, Hillenbrand puts forward a simple but nonetheless elaborately and persuasively formulated argument against dominant ways of reading and explaining (away) such collective erasures of history. The author [End Page 291] takes issue with what she calls “the two-step story about why certain histories have such scant traction in China’s present” (p. 15). First, the state and the (self-)censorship apparatus have been modifying and managing historical expressions on an unprecedented scale; second, this top-down exercise has been so efficient that a discourse of collective amnesia has emerged, as if certain memories have been deleted from people’s mind. While acknowledging the power of the state, Hillenbrand also cautions against assuming its omnipotence. The two-step story, the author sharply points out, is not the whole story, as there are always people who remember. More importantly, the success story has drawn attention away from the popular practice of keeping secret, or, as encapsuled in the book’s subtitle, of knowing what not to know in contemporary China. In that sense, Hillenbrand’s book is first and foremost an appeal to redirect critical examination to what has been escaping scrutiny: “secrecy in public culture, secrecy as public culture” (p. 15). This appeal is relevant and urgent not only in the Chinese context; as Hillenbrand points out time and again, different states and populations across different times and places have been practicing this art of public secrecy to keep the unsayable unsayable, not the least now. In the author’s words, “we may be entering an epoch of renewed public secrecy” (p. 221). But then, if people do remember, how and what do they do with their memories when they are not supposed to speak them? It is this “agential process” (p. 3) in the practice of public secrecy that Hillenbrand continues to foreground after interrogating the potency of censorship and amnesia. In other words, if public secrets cannot possibly find their ways to official records, media reports, and other forms of documentation, Hillenbrand argues that aesthetic works, with their fluidity and opacity, are the perfect sites to listen to the unsayable. For the purpose of this book, she spends the bulk of the chapters on one form of aesthetic works, what she calls “photo-forms.” They are works that work with photographs—in her cases, historical photographs—and, more significantly and poignantly, they also refer to and converse with the source images through myriad ways of repurposing, of appropriation. They open up alternative spaces in territories heavily policed by censorship and amnesia, where spectators form their own alliances with the works and to each other. Hillenbrand elucidates all such delicacy in the four main empirical chapters that follow the theoretical contextualization. She takes us through a rich array of photo-forms—elite and vernacular, professional and amateur, famous and lesser known, online and offline, authored and authorless—to explore how they proliferate and operate in tandem with and against public secrecy, how they hide and expose key aspects of China’s historical milestones: the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests. In her concluding chapter, Hillenbrand revisits the book and questions the political [End Page 292] potentials of photo-forms. While, admittedly, such aesthetic works may not bring an end to public secrecy in...