Villages dammed, villages repossessed: a memorial movement in northwest China

In this article, I employ the concept of repossession to analyze the politics of memory in the rural county of Yongjing, northwest China. I focus on an innovative social movement that works toward community recovery from the devastating impacts of forced resettlement and farmland destruction. I suggest why this movement should be considered a social process by which memories of trauma were transformed into a political discourse that holds a powerful state bureaucracy accountable for a multiplicity of injuries inflicted in the name of economic development. The concept of repossession, strictly defined within the context of collective actions, refers to the attempts of displaced and disenfranchised peasants to regain a politically silenced voice of resentment, reestablish a material basis of village life, and reconstruct a ruined landscape of popular religion