The View from the Border Crossing

Book Review| March 01 2020 The View from the Border Crossing China at Its Limits: An Empire’s Rise beyond Its Borders, by Messmer, Matthias; Chuang, Hsin-Mei, Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber, 2018, 416 pages, €59.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-3-7356-0404-0 Luke Robinson Luke Robinson Luke Robinson teaches film studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (2013) and editor (with Chris Berry) of Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2020) 16 (1): 132–134. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017345 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Luke Robinson; The View from the Border Crossing. Cultural Politics 1 March 2020; 16 (1): 132–134. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8017345 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search The China travelogue boasts an illustrious history. From Marco Polo to Peter Hessler, Western writers have long used the genre as a point of entry for broader assessments of the nation and its relationship to the outside world. Still and moving images, from early newsreels to the contemporary photo-book, have played a similar role. In China at Its Limits, Matthias Messmer and Hsin-Mei Chuang bring these two forms together. Combining “solid academic research” (414) with five years of travel around and across China’s borders, they have written a book that they emphasize is neither “purely academic . . . nor a comprehensive travel documentary” (12). Instead it weaves together historical narrative, images, and reportage in an attempt to capture for the general reader what China’s global reemergence looks like from the country’s margins.Messmer and Chuang focus on borderlands for several reasons. China’s... © 2020 Duke University Press2020 You do not currently have access to this content

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