Commemorating ruins & ruined commemorations: the Beichuan National Earthquake Museum

This conference paper is based on fieldwork I conducted at the National Earthquake Museum (which includes the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial Museum and the Beichuan Earthquake Relic Site), as part of a larger research project titled “Sites and Sights of Commemoration.” This project examines the ways specific Chinese episodes of trauma have recently been commemorated in state-funded Chinese museums and films, and interrogates the ways that these “sites” and “sights” discursively, representationally, and affectively create meaning. The purpose of the museum and memorial site is to commemorate the earthquake and the destruction it caused. In this contribution, I examine how the museum and the memorial site are doing their “memory work,” but in contrasting ways. They are what Alison Landsberg calls “experiential sites” – sites whose meanings come from the visitor’s experience of them. In order to examine these various functions further, I start by examining my experience at the site, starting first with the museum. I begin by examining the patriotic text displayed at the entrance of the museum before examining the imagery that repeats throughout the museum. I then turn to the ruin itself, and examine how it offers another type of labour that is different than the museum. I argue that, although created to memorialize the event, the ruined site is not as effective politically, per se, but is more effective affectively; that is to say, the feelings of passing through the ruin produce different meanings in different ways, some of which I interpret as subverting the dominant political ideology, expressed in the accompanying museum