The ‘darkest history’ must live: narrating Sino-Japanese relations through museum geopolitics

Abstract

<p>While scholars have increasingly focused on the intersectional analysis of tourism and geopolitics, the material and affective dimensions underlying the geopolitical implications of tourism remain underexplored. This paper analyses the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders (MH-VNM-JI) in Nanjing, China, focusing on how it sustains and intensifies geopolitical narrations of militarism, fascism, and massacres inflicted by Japanese invaders during WWII through the creation of an affective environment while enacting dark tourism experiences. Drawing on the recent debates on the geopolitics of tourism, affective geopolitics, and the materiality of geopolitics, this paper delineates how the MH-VNM-JI significantly shapes popular geopolitical relations between China and Japan by engineering visitors’ affective experiences and, by extension, geopolitical subjectivities. The MH-VNM-JI serves not only as a static tourism infrastructure that transmits fixed and dogmatic geopolitical knowledge through its exhibits but also as a dynamic space that actively preserves and transforms Sino-Japanese geopolitical knowledge through the structuring of tourists’ embodied and affective experiences. In this vein, this study also contributes to the broader research agenda of exploring the connections between museums, tourism, and geopolitics.</p>