Toward a memorial ethics of hope? Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum

Abstract

Taking further Ann Rigney’s urge to expand her case study on memories of hope, this article investigates the positive turn in memory studies by focusing on Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum as a memorial ethics of hope yet pointing out the museum politics that prevents it from achieving its aim. After defining the concept of memorial ethics of hope, the next sections look into the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum’s exhibiting strategies and tropes: first, how the narrative of the museum testifies to the alterity of the Other and the responsibility of those who offered the Jewish refugees the hope of living, and second, the way in which several artifacts that are generally associated in Holocaust museums with metonymies of death were re-semanticized in Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum as objects/memories of hope. The final section shows that the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum’s reinterpretation of painful memories as memories of hope remains unconvincing to most Western visitors.