Commemorating a difficult disaster: Naturalizing and denaturalizing the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China

Abstract

This article addresses a gap in memory studies—memory of disasters—by asking what distinctive features of difficult disasters shape content and form of commemorations. I draw on textual and visual data to examine official and oppositional commemorations of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China. I argue that tension between natural and unnatural interpretations of the earthquake shapes both the content and form of the commemorations. This tension is manifested in three focal issues in the content of commemorations: natural or unnatural causes of the suffering and death, political and moral reaction to the earthquake, and consequences of the earthquake. In form, the state carries out large-scale rituals, builds memorials, and creates a “topography of forgetting” so that the ruins with a possible “natural explanation” are preserved and the ones with unnatural explanations removed and covered. In contrast, the oppositional commemorations are small in scale and only survive at the margins.

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