Book Review: Saving the Nation: Chinese Protestant Elites and the Quest to Build a New China, 1922–1952 by Thomas H. Reilly

Abstract

that the contentious political meaning making transpires. The photo is an odd bird. In many ways it is the closest we come to a reproduction of the ‘real’, and yet we know it also as doctored and manipulated. Like the negatives through which the title shifts, the photo-forms dissected in this compelling work on visuality speak both to repression and visibility, inadmissible and unsayable but also publicly articulatable. While Hillenbrand does not use the term, we see how the photo-forms emerge as a marker and space of the liminal. While liminal spaces indicate transitions and rites of passage, they are also spaces of power – above, beyond, and outside of time and place. Hillenbrand shows us how critique is made possible through their presence.