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95 Chapter 4 Martyrdom and Memory Monuments, Memorials, and Museums for Dead Heroes Near the end of the Cultural Revolution model drama Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun), the male leader of the detachment, Hong Changqing, is captured by the evil landlord Nan Batian and burned at the base of a banyan tree. After the detachment succeeds in defeating Nan, its members solemnly gather around the tree, bow their heads in deep respect, and recall the memory of Hong’s heroic sacrifice. Wu Qinghua, the female heroine who was once a slave girl in Nan’s compound but who escaped and was taken in by the detachment, is then given Hong’s bag, symbolic of her assumption of his position and a sign of her inheritance of his revolutionary spirit. Hong’s martyrdom—and the commemoration of that martyrdom— infuses the revolution with renewed vigor. This is the essence of revolutionary martyrdom in the Mao era: the martyr dies bravely and defiantly for a cause he resolutely believes in, his death is commemorated and remembered solemnly by the living, and the martyr’s spirit propels the revolution to success. Although in marketera China the solemnity and sacredness of revolutionary martyrdom sometimes seems to have been subsumed in more commercial and commodified forms of revolutionary memory—such as the Red Detachment of Women Memorial Park (Hongse niangzi jun jinianyuan; est. 2000) in Hainan1—martyrs of the revolution continue to be commemorated throughout the country with memorial halls and memorial parks and through state speeches and rituals. In all societies, memorialization of the dead constitutes an important marker of cultural and ethical values. Remembering the dead, in particular those thought to have distinguished themselves morally or politically, creates continuity between past and present and helps to forge a sense of cultural identity. Societies designate certain dead figures for emulation, transforming them into martyrs as a way of highlighting moral, cultural, and political values deemed integral to the present. My concern in this chapter is not the psychological impulse behind self-sacrifice and dying for a cause; rather, I focus on the ideological and political construction of martyrs and martyrdom—how martyrs are both products of religious, moral, ideological, political, and cultural value 96 Chapter 4 systems and how they are made to contribute to those systems. Martyrs are commemorated for both politically subversive and conservative purposes: whereas dissident groups seek to disrupt state authority by drawing attention to a continuing injustice embodied in the figure of the martyr, states themselves maintain their legitimacy by recalling martyrs whose deaths are the product of an unjust system now eliminated. As the case of Iran demonstrates, this dual function can be embodied in a single political entity. As Ravinder Kaur (2010, 441) puts it, “During the revolution, the Shi’a tradition of martyrdom and its dramatic performances of ritual mourning and self-sacrifice become central to the mass mobilization against the monarchy. Once the revolutionary government came into existence, this sacred tradition was regulated to create ‘martyrs’ as a fixed category, in order to consolidate the legacy of the revolution.” Martyrdom has, of course, a strong religious dimension and is often central to religions, particularly the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and ­ Islam. Although the term is generally not applied to him within the church, Christ is the king of martyrs, having sacrificed himself for the good of mankind.2 As it evolved into a religion, Christianity placed Christ’s self-sacrifice at its ideological core, and in the early years of the church his martyrdom was an emotional draw for the church’s appeal to a broad base. As Elizabeth Castelli (2004, 4) argues, Christian martyrs served ideological and political purposes for the fledgling church, “whereby Christian identity was indelibly marked by the collective memory of the religious suffering of others.”3 Christian martyrs have been memorialized over the centuries through written accounts (acta and passions), paintings, and displays of their relics (Salisbury 2004, 4–5). Islam also has a long tradition of glorifying those who died for the faith, a tradition it likely inherited from Christianity. Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, is revered in both Sunni and Shi’a sects (though his place is particularly strong in the latter) as a martyr who died heroically in the Battle of Karbala fighting the tyranny of Umayyad rule (Kaur 2010). In recent years, the Western press has paid much attention to martyrdom as practiced and commemorated by radical Islamic groups, but it...

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