Podcast appearances and mentions of Denise Y Ho

I'm joined today by Profs. Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho to talk about their new edited volume, Material Contradictions in Mao's China, published in December 2022 by the University of Washington Press. Our editors have brought together ten chapters or “case studies” by scholars in various disciplines, as well as a theoretical and methodological reflection on materiality, contradiction, and "the socialist uncanny" (by Jonathan Bach) that ends the book.  The book moves through various types of materials and attendant tensions that characterized everyday life in Mao's China. In addition to exploring the role of materiality in producing social life and thus redeeming the complexity of socialist material life, the authors in this volume employ the methodological tools of not only their own disciplines, but of dialectical materialism. They seek to better understand Mao's China precisely through the material practices and contradictions that the Chairman himself understood as crucial tools of social practice. We're here today, in other words, to talk about another new book in Chinese studies that asks us to take socialism seriously. It's really an incredibly generative text for anyone who is thinking about materiality, temporality, and the way that social life was constructed and experienced in socialist China. In addition to the Material Contradictions volume, we will also discuss The Mao Era in Objects, a related material culture project on which our two editors have also collaborated. Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

I'm joined today by Profs. Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho to talk about their new edited volume, Material Contradictions in Mao's China, published in December 2022 by the University of Washington Press. Our editors have brought together ten chapters or “case studies” by scholars in various disciplines, as well as a theoretical and methodological reflection on materiality, contradiction, and "the socialist uncanny" (by Jonathan Bach) that ends the book.  The book moves through various types of materials and attendant tensions that characterized everyday life in Mao's China. In addition to exploring the role of materiality in producing social life and thus redeeming the complexity of socialist material life, the authors in this volume employ the methodological tools of not only their own disciplines, but of dialectical materialism. They seek to better understand Mao's China precisely through the material practices and contradictions that the Chairman himself understood as crucial tools of social practice. We're here today, in other words, to talk about another new book in Chinese studies that asks us to take socialism seriously. It's really an incredibly generative text for anyone who is thinking about materiality, temporality, and the way that social life was constructed and experienced in socialist China. In addition to the Material Contradictions volume, we will also discuss The Mao Era in Objects, a related material culture project on which our two editors have also collaborated. Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

I'm joined today by Profs. Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho to talk about their new edited volume, Material Contradictions in Mao's China, published in December 2022 by the University of Washington Press. Our editors have brought together ten chapters or “case studies” by scholars in various disciplines, as well as a theoretical and methodological reflection on materiality, contradiction, and "the socialist uncanny" (by Jonathan Bach) that ends the book.  The book moves through various types of materials and attendant tensions that characterized everyday life in Mao's China. In addition to exploring the role of materiality in producing social life and thus redeeming the complexity of socialist material life, the authors in this volume employ the methodological tools of not only their own disciplines, but of dialectical materialism. They seek to better understand Mao's China precisely through the material practices and contradictions that the Chairman himself understood as crucial tools of social practice. We're here today, in other words, to talk about another new book in Chinese studies that asks us to take socialism seriously. It's really an incredibly generative text for anyone who is thinking about materiality, temporality, and the way that social life was constructed and experienced in socialist China. In addition to the Material Contradictions volume, we will also discuss The Mao Era in Objects, a related material culture project on which our two editors have also collaborated. Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

I'm joined today by Profs. Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho to talk about their new edited volume, Material Contradictions in Mao's China, published in December 2022 by the University of Washington Press. Our editors have brought together ten chapters or “case studies” by scholars in various disciplines, as well as a theoretical and methodological reflection on materiality, contradiction, and "the socialist uncanny" (by Jonathan Bach) that ends the book.  The book moves through various types of materials and attendant tensions that characterized everyday life in Mao's China. In addition to exploring the role of materiality in producing social life and thus redeeming the complexity of socialist material life, the authors in this volume employ the methodological tools of not only their own disciplines, but of dialectical materialism. They seek to better understand Mao's China precisely through the material practices and contradictions that the Chairman himself understood as crucial tools of social practice. We're here today, in other words, to talk about another new book in Chinese studies that asks us to take socialism seriously. It's really an incredibly generative text for anyone who is thinking about materiality, temporality, and the way that social life was constructed and experienced in socialist China. In addition to the Material Contradictions volume, we will also discuss The Mao Era in Objects, a related material culture project on which our two editors have also collaborated. Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

In early June 2019, residents of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest proposed legislation by the Hong Kong government that would enable extradition from the city to mainland China. Over the ensuing months, heavy-handed tactics by the police only swelled the movement, which has grown to involve over a million residents of Hong Kong. The demonstrators' demands have also expanded to encompass an investigation into police brutality, the resignation of Chief Executive Carrie Lam and the establishment of free democratic elections in the city. Although the extradition bill itself has been withdrawn, protests seem certain to continue. For many Hong Kongers, the proposed legislation was merely the latest attempt by Beijing to undermine the unique "one country, two systems" status under which the city enjoys a large decree of economic and legal autonomy. What's at stake in this standoff between protesters, Hong Kong's government, and Beijing? How did Hong Kong's autonomy come about in the first place, and how might it be at risk? On this month's episode of History Talk, host Lauren Henry discusses this pivotal moment in Hong Kong's history with two experts on modern China: Dr. Denise Y. Ho and Melvin Barnes Jr. To learn more about the history of Hong Kong and China, read our feature article, Hong Kong in Protest, by Melvin Barnes Jr. Be sure to check our other coverage of the region: Remembering Tiananmen: The View from Hong Kong, The United States, China, and the Money Question, China Dreams and the “Road to Revival”, and Modern China and Its Institutions.Professor Ho has also published her own analysis of the protests in Hong Kong: Summer of protest: Are we witnessing a turning point in Hong Kong politics? Posted: September 2019 Connect with us! Email: Origins@osu.edu Twitter: @OriginsOSU Instagram: @OriginsOSU Facebook: @OriginsOSU Find transcripts, background reading, and more at origins.osu.edu

As the twentieth century drew to a close, Hong Kong, recently transformed into a Special Administrative Region of the PRC, seemed a city totally unlike any of its neighbors. Many observers were surprised by how light a touch Beijing seemed to be exerting in the wake of the 1997 handover, and the striking contrast between what could be said, done, and published in Hong Kong, compared to mainland metropolitan cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. Since the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule in 2017, controls have tightened dramatically amid fears of tighter political censorship and enhanced self-censorship. However, with the anniversary of the June 4th Massacre approaching, Hong Kong is still the only place on PRC soil where it can be discussed and marked in public. In 2019, what was once a chasm between civic life in Hong Kong and cities such as Guangzhou and Beijing is rapidly closing. What does the future hold for Hong Kong? Will it become just another Chinese city that makes up the Greater Bay Area? The speakers, who have been tracking issues relating to higher education, journalism, protest, and the arts, address Hong Kong's future under Chinese rule. Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University. She is an historian of modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period (1949-1976). Her first book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also co-editing a volume with Jennifer Altehenger of King’s College London on the material culture of the Mao period. Dr. Ho is currently at work on a new research project on Hong Kong and China, entitled Cross-Border Relations. Louisa Lim is an award-winning journalist who grew up in Hong Kong and reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. She is a senior lecturer in audiovisual journalism at the University of Melbourne, and is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Hong Kong. She also co-hosts The Little Red Podcast, a podcast about China beyond the Beijing beltway, which won the News & Current Affairs award at the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. Her writing about Hong Kong has appeared in the anthology Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections from a Borrowed Place, as well as The New York Times and The New Yorker, and she is the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. His most recent book is the third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2018), which he coauthored with Maura Cunningham. In addition to contributing to academic venues, he has written many reviews and commentaries for newspapers, magazines, and journals of opinion, including pieces on Hong Kong that have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, serves as an academic editor for the China Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University, and the author of "Curating Revolution: Politics on Display of Mao’s China" (2018). Using a wide variety of primary sources, including Shanghai’s municipal and district archives and oral history, "Curating Revolution" depicts displays of revolution and history, politics and class, and art and science. Analyzing China’s “socialist museums” and “new exhibitions,” Ho demonstrates how Mao-era exhibitionary culture both reflected and made revolution. Denise Y. Ho is an historian of modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period (1949-1976). She is also interested in urban history, the study of information and propaganda, and material culture. Ho teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary China, the history of Shanghai, the uses of the past in modern China, and the historiography of the Republican era and the PRC. The "Harvard on China Podcast" is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. Download and read the transcript for this podcast interview on our website: https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/denise-ho-modern-china-lecture-series/

“In Mao's China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho's new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how...

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Revolutionary activity in Mao’s China was a public affair: through mass meetings, trials, and self-criticism, China’s communist leaders made class struggle a public, participatory experience. The mass line, however, extended far beyond Red Guard units parading through Beijing. In a new book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China, Yale University professor and China historian Denise Y. Ho examines how museum curators in Shanghai sought to reinterpret China’s past through the artifacts they displayed in their exhibitions. Dr. Ho argues that the exhibits provided ‘object lessons’ in ideology and political activism, serving as the medium for both mass education and mass mobilization. Professor Ho joined us on May 8, 2018, for a discussion of her book, museum curation, and how the narrative legacy of China’s historical artifacts was reinvented in Maoist Shanghai.  Denise Y. Ho is an assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Mao years; she is also interested in urban history, the study of information and propaganda, and the history of memory. Her scholarship has appeared in The China Quarterly, Frontiers of History in China, History Compass, and Modern China, and her writings on art, culture, and history in The Atlantic, ChinaFile, Dissent, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation among other publications. Prior to joining the history department at Yale, Professor Ho taught at the University of Kentucky and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  Dr. Ho received her bachelor’s degree in history from Yale, and her master’s and doctoral degrees, also in history, from Harvard. She is a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.