Photographical History, Everyday Life, and Memory: Wang Anyi as a Storyteller BAN WANG* Abstract Postmodernists view all reality as representation and visual spectacle. This essay challenges this claim through film analysis of third world cinema and by tracing the tension between photography and history to the earlier debate of moder- nity in Siegfried Kracauer’s work. The essay goes on to show the possibility of historically grounded visual images. By looking at the Chinese novelist Wang Anyi’s photo narratives, the essay argues for a photographical image capable of fostering a sense of history deeply rooted in everyday life, communal practice, and social reality. Instead of being the inauthentic mirror of consumer culture, the photographical image is integral to historical imagination, narratives of everyday practice, and cultural memory. ***** Authenticity and Reality in Photographical Representation The prominence of visual experience and image in historical studies goes hand in hand with the rise of consumer society, mass media, and ever innovative digital technology. From a longer perspective of modern history, the focus on vision alone runs the risk of eliding deeply grounded historical experiences and complex political con- flict, turning history into a spectacle. Much work has been done on the ahistorical nature of visuality. 1 Less attention, however, has been paid to the visual dimension of cross-cultural communication and exchange. In this area, the reduction of history into mere visual images raises a number of old problems: orientalism, stereotyping, the mirroring of self and other, racism, cultural imperialism, etc. Overall, the visual perspective on third world cultures is premised on an evolutionary time lag between those at the end of history and others still mired in it, lagging behind in the “imaginary waiting room of history,” so to speak. 2 Thus, the most important question stemming from this burial of history in visuality is How to assess the reality and authenticity of a “foreign” image that is somehow still mired in history? In this essay I will discuss the increasing prominence of photog- raphy in contemporary China and its place in the tensions between visual spectacle, memory, and history. By looking at the Chinese novelist Wang Anyi’s comments on a collection of photos of Shang- * Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University. Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 25 No. 2 June 2012 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2012.01430.x © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.