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“The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army” and the Politics of Representation and Resistance

Tidy, Charlotte K.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1276552047

Abstract Details

2010, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies/Communication.
This thesis describes the “First Emperor” exhibition as a rhetorical artifact that functions as a vector of shifting identities in the contemporary context of a global political economy that involves Britain, China, and the U.S. I describe how the exhibition’s content represents and communicates competing dominant narratives about the positions of Britain, China, and the U.S. within the global political economy that are expressed in terms of finance, culture, corporatization, and government. These dominant narratives work to reassert the colonial politics of Britain and the U.S. and, alternately, to assert the new identity of modern China as a world leader in terms of global trade in both manufactured and cultural products. I identify the visiting audience for the exhibition as an implied public of “global citizens”, which replace the conventional implied public that is hailed at museum exhibitions. The identity of the global citizen is more closely aligned with that of the corporate sponsor of the exhibition, Morgan Stanley, than with conventional domestic national identity. “The First Emperor” marks the beginnings of a new era of exhibition and display that has emerged in the contemporary context of globalization. In this context the conventions of exhibition and display of non-western peoples and cultures by western museums and curators is revised at the same time as it is informed by the genealogy of colonial politics. Finally, I describe the acts of protest and resistance that took place at the “First Emperor” exhibition and the privatization of the public sphere, in which the protests took place, as facilitated by the exhibition’s corporate sponsor, Morgan Stanley. As in the exhibition content itself, the ostensibly counter-hegemonic protests that took place at “The First Emperor” were multivalent in that they served to reinforce Eurocentric and Sinophobic dominant narratives at the same time as they employed strategies of counter-hegemonic resistance in order to communicate these narratives to the public audience.
Dr Ellen Gorsevski (Advisor)
Dr Allie Terry-Fritsch (Committee Member)
119 p.
American Studies; Museums
Museum exhibitions; The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army; globalization; rhetorical-critical; resistance

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Tidy, C. K. (2010). “The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army” and the Politics of Representation and Resistance [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1276552047

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Tidy, Charlotte. “The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army” and the Politics of Representation and Resistance. 2010. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1276552047.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Tidy, Charlotte. "“The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army” and the Politics of Representation and Resistance." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1276552047

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1276552047
5,121
© 2010, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License “The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army” and the Politics of Representation and Resistance by Charlotte K. Tidy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.