CfP: Trauma, Reconciliation, and Mnemonic Justice in Modern China
Trauma, Reconciliation, and Mnemonic Justice in Modern China
Bin Xu (Emory University)
Zhiyi Yang (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Thomas B. Gold (University of California, Berkeley)
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (William Faulkner) The past survives in lived experience, socially and politically constructed narratives, as well as common, shared, and institutionalized cultural or historical memories. Traumatic past, in particular, constantly finds itself unburied and assuming new forms, while subjugating the living to the spell of an eternal hauntology. In China, where the legitimacy of governance is deeply rooted in a narrative of linear progress and exultant triumphalism, remembrance itself becomes deeply political and sometimes dangerous. And yet, as Paul Ricoeur argues, the duty of memory demands maintaining the feeling of being obligated with respect to others, especially our own victims. Even if we can no longer “make whole what has been smashed” (Walter Benjamin), scholars bear the duty to question which parts of the past can be salvaged from the ruins of oblivion, what burdens of memory can be alleviated, which mortal foes can find reconciliation, what justice may be restored, and whether power and privilege also carry the burden of implicated political responsibility (Michael Rothberg) for crimes of the past. It means fighting not only external forces such as political censorship and repression, but also other less obvious culprits, such as identity stereotypes, hackneyed concepts, and hegemonic centrism, living within the heart of each agent and site of memory.
The three editors of this volume, coming from interdisciplinary backgrounds, hereby solicit contributions to address lacunae in our current memory scholarship on recent Chinese history, exploring how individuals, organizations, and institutions have taken, or fail to take, actions to seek truth and justice. The geopolitical scope of contributions includes not only mainland China but also other Sinophone areas in the global space. In other contexts, mnemonic justice usually includes economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation (Nancy Fraser), through a plethora of means such as collecting oral and archival testimonies, investigating responsibilities for historical wrongs and crimes, setting up truth and reconciliation committees, and undertaking transitional justice legal actions. Many of these forms of mnemonic justice cannot take place in the contemporary PRC, as they require institutional actions. Yet, this absence should not prevent scholars from empirically identifying similar and different practices. Examining such practices should include not only traditional legal actions, but also, given the political restrictions in China, literature, art, popular culture, local lore, museums and monuments, and public policy, especially those policies dealing with so-called “historically remaining issues.” We should explore how some of the forms can become normative in the future, what social and political conditions are conducive to mnemonic justice, and what innovations could be made in Sinophone cultures. Our agenda not just goes beyond the common academic discourses that debunk political manipulation of the past, but calls attention to, and hopefully addresses, the historical traumata of millions of individuals and families that remain unprocessed and inherited across generations. Such a process is urgently needed to transform traumatic pasts into a neutral book of history.
We particularly welcome contributions to this edited volume that venture across disciplinary boundaries, especially the boundary between social sciences and the humanities. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to:
- Cultural and literary representations of trauma which implicitly or explicitly address the demand for historical justices;
- Sites of memory, including monuments, memorials, and museums;
- Public policies that deal with the “historically remaining issues,” for instance, those pertaining to housing, hukou, pensions, health care, etc., due to state-forced migration;
- Academic and public debates over truth, justice, and implicated subjectivity concerning recent events in Chinese history;
- Activism and movements that demand historical justice, including legal actions that address political crimes and problems in the past;
- How the Chinese demand for mnemonic justice has been shaped by and engages in dialogue with comparable international discourses, for instance, on genocide, war, famine, and totalitarian crimes.
If you would like to join us for this project, please send an abstract in English (max. 250 words) to bin.xu[at]emory.edu by September 1, 2025. We will solicit selected contributors for full papers in the weeks that follow. The preliminary timeline for submitting the full paper (approximately 8,000 words in English) is March 31, 2026. We plan to submit the volume to an established academic press in the summer of 2026.
Should you have any questions, feel free to contact any of the organizers.
Bin Xu
Associate Professor of Sociology
Emory University, USA
bin.xu[at]emory.edu
Personal Website: www.binxu.net
Zhiyi Yang
Professor of Sinology
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
z.yang[at]em.uni-frankfurt.de
Personal Website: https://zhiyiyang.com/
Thomas Gold
Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkley
Email: tbgold[at]berkeley.edu
https://sociology.berkeley.edu/professor-emeritus/thomas-b-gold