Melancholia Competes with Loss

This study examines the memoryscape of China’s 2008 Wenchuan earthquake as officialized by the 5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial Museum. As a response to popular scholarly discourse on heritage made of “difficult” pasts, analyses of the museum’s memory politics aim at critically inquiring into whether a monolithic “natural disaster” memorial can be diplomatic and therefore exempt from the paradigm for commemorating “difficult heritage” as polylithic pasts. Within this framework, the concepts of land art and melancholia are enlisted to illustrate an alternative view of the Wenchuan Memorial Museum’s hegemonic memory politics as a means to curtail and peripheralize individual entries to a nationalized trauma. Further investigation into the earthquake survivors’ “unnaturalized” modes of memory-making provides a Chinese perspective on natural disaster as myth and on the harm done by “naturalizing” irreconcilable identities in memory-making strategies. As contemporary investments in authoritative memory-making become internationally prevalent, this research reevaluates the ethics behind palimpsestic memorials in China and beyond.