Do not be fooled by the modest, precise, and careful tone of Yomi Braester's prose. In Witness Against History, he makes a powerful contribution to the transformation of scholarship on modern Chinese culture. In recent years, scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and David Der-wei Wang have argued that the focus on the May Fourth movement has been too singular, obscuring important schools and authors that do not fit that agenda. Braester takes this argument home to May Fourth culture and its inheritors in literature and film. This work has been assumed to uphold the standard of modernity as nationalism, realism, rationalism, and humanism. This makes it part of a larger reform or revolution effort to reinsert China into “history,” understood as Hegelian progress. Braester understands the shock of the modern new as trauma, and this is reflected in all the works he has chosen.