nostalgia | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Fashion is Most Glorious!

June 19, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Walking on Chunxi Lu in Chengdu I passed a full sized advertisement which draws upon the imagery and language of the Cultural Revolution. Featuring a worker, peasant, soldier trio the text plays on slogans common during the CR. The CR slogans I’m familiar with, but I’m a bit unsure about the exact translation of the edited ones in the advertisement, so hopefully someone can help me with this. Below I have given my best shot at these phrasings and then […]

Categories: Advertising, China, Nostalgia, Politics • Tags: Chunxi Lu, Cultural Revolution, 红色年代, 革命, fashion, marketing, nostalgia, Revolution, slogans, 口号

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Museum Fatigue Reads, May 17, 2014

May 16, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Diagrams in Anthropology: Lines and Interactions Utopian Origins of Restroom Symbols The Special Obligations of Tenured Faculty After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen Young Chinese Maoists Set Up “Hippy” Commune Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Book) 为什么会没有中国队长？(Why Don’t We Have a Captain America?) The Search for General Tso – Trailer from Wicked Delicate Films on Vimeo. Marxism and the Critique of Value (Book) Wages for Facebook The Sad, Slow Death of America’s Retail Workforce The Postcapital Economy […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: cinema, diagrams, Facebook, food, General Tso, Historical Films, Karl Marx, labor, Logistics, Mao, Mars, nostalgia, symbols, Tenured Faculty, value, video games

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Ghosts in the City

January 16, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This month I am finally whittling away at a few of the books in my pile. Among these is the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life—Living and Cooking. I have been meaning to read it since visiting de Certeau’s grave back in 2012. And now that I am in the middle of it, I’m embarrassed that I waited so long. I didn’t expect that most of the book consists of two projects by the book’s co-authors, Pierre Mayol and Luce […]

Categories: Consumption, Everyday Things, Mythologies, Photo Essays, Urban • Tags: Ghosts in the City, Michel de Certeau, museums, neighborhood, nostalgia, Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, urban planning

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Among Warm Objects

September 29, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“These wild objects, stemming from indecipherable pasts, are for us the equivalent of what the gods of antiquity were, the ‘spirits’ of the place. Like their divine ancestors, these objects play roles of actors in the city, not because of what they do or say but because their strangeness is silent, as well as their existence, concealed from actuality. Their withdrawal makes people speak—it generates narratives—and allows action; through its ambiguity, it ‘authorizes’ spaces of operations.” —Michel de Certeau, “Ghosts […]

Categories: Antiques, Collecting, Consumption, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Photo Essays, Value • Tags: carnivalesque, commodity chain, flâneur, global commodity, Junk Bonanza, maker culture, memory, Michel de Certeau, nostalgia, patina, practice, Shakopee, shopping, souvenir, vintage, warm objects

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An Afternoon Lunch at the Zhiqing Villa

June 27, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Ten years ago this month I finished my PhD dissertation, “Remembering Red: Memory and Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution in Late 1990s China,” in the anthropology department at the University of Washington in Seattle. My dissertation research examined nostalgia and memory of the Cultural Revolution among members of the generation who were most active in it. Specifically I looked at memorial practices of former “educated youth” or zhiqing who were sent down to the Chinese countryside beginning in the fall of […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Video clips • Tags: chinese countryside, food, nostalgia, video, zhiqing

Finding Red Flag Canal

July 14, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

One summer of my early graduate school career I made friends with the very large man who managed the audiovisual collection at the University of Washington. I don’t remember his name. He was friendly in a grumpy sort of way and loved quirky films and videos almost as much as he loved rollercoasters. I had come to him with a request for some films for a class I was TAing, when we got to talking about China. He told me […]

Categories: China, Memory, Museums, Mythologies, Nostalgia, Photo Essays • Tags: China, Cultural Revolution, 紅旗渠, nostalgia, Red Flag Canal, red tourism

Performing Cultural Revolution Nostalgia

June 7, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

I have been mulling over and trying to make sense of what exactly took place at the Cultural Revolution theme restaurant that I visited last week. I have photos, video, and some notes I wrote after returning to my hotel room that night, but none of them help very much. I thought maybe some time to reflect would make a difference, but the past seven days have just made things seem even more unreal. It all comes back to one […]

Categories: China, Food, Play, Politics • Tags: Beijing, China, Cultural Revolution, memory, nostalgia