University of Hawai'i Press
Justin O'Connor and Xin Gu. Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China. Bristol, UK/Chicago, United States: Intellect, 2020. 316 pp. Paperback $32.50, isbn 9781789382303.
Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng, editors. Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. 264 pp. Hardcover $95.00, isbn 9781438479255.

Justin O'Connor and Xin Gu. Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China. Bristol, UK/Chicago, United States: Intellect, 2020. 316 pp. Paperback $32.50, isbn 9781789382303.

Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng, editors. Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. 264 pp. Hardcover $95.00, isbn 9781438479255.

Shanghai, an unequivocally distinctive cosmopolitan city, has been a critical subject of scholarly studies and popular interest since the nineteenth century. "Shanghai fever" (Shanghaire), coupled with Shanghai nostalgia, became a sensational literary, cinematic, and cultural phenomenon in the 1990s and has continued throughout the turn of the twenty-first century as the post-Mao era unfolds. After a few temporarily dormant years following the culmination of the fervor, Shanghai has reemerged in recent global scholarship as a path to understand Chinese modernity and China's rise to the world's second largest economy. The question as to what kind of pivotal role Shanghai plays in conjuring the so-called China's lost modernity causes a resurfacing of intellectual debates about Shanghai—"the other China." Book publications in 2020 such as Justin O'Connor and Xin Gu's Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China and Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng's edited volume Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries are two distinct examples. Shanghai is rediscovered as an overdetermined city where culture, commerce, and politics converge to herald China's search for modernity.

Red Creative

Looking through the lens of creative economy and cultural industries of the post-1992 market reform era, Red Creative sees Shanghai's cosmopolitan past, present, and future as uniquely interwoven despite the historical ruptures [End Page 83] experienced by a nation under colonialism, socialism, and capitalism. Situating Shanghai as China's preeminent global city and a cultural and economic hub, the book compels readers to reexamine alternative modernities outside the confines of universally claimed Western modernity. Shanghai in this case, as argued by the authors, forms a paradoxical relation with both the Chinese state and the West considering its multifold identities as "Paris of the Orient" in the pre-Communist era, the cradle of the Chinese Communist Party, the "sin city" in the Mao era, and a resurged consumer brand image since China's integration with global neoliberal capitalism. Titled "Red Creative," the book juxtaposes the seemingly two oppositional words "red" (communist/socialist) and "creative" (capitalist/neoliberal) by posing key questions as to whether limitations of the Chinese state and market are compatible with the power of creativity; whether Shanghai can be exemplary in redefining creative industries given the constrained habitus of artistic and cultural work under state neoliberalism, and how to reconcile the tension between a still contestably "despotic" polity and its cultural policies in the nation's most culturally dynamic city of Shanghai.

It is in this context that the book resorts to Shanghai for answers. It comprises eight chapters, in addition to the Introduction and Epilogue. Sharing nostalgic sentiments toward Shanghai Modern—a term often associated with Leo Ou-fan Lee's writings on Shanghai in its heyday of a blooming new urban culture (1930-1945), the authors of Red Creative lament a lost Shanghai splendor that was dismantled by Mao's peasant revolution and Communist takeover of the city. They hope to see that Shanghai's return to the forefront of the nation's reform program in 1992 will open up possibilities for intellectuals, artists, and cultural professionals to follow in the footsteps of the May Fourth intelligentsia by engaging in cultural industries with a sense of regained subjectivity and freedom. However, based on the meticulous research on the state's cultural policies and creative clusters, the authors find the issue is China's neoliberal practice that problematically places creative economy between the authoritarian state and the infallible market (p. 15). In other words, the resurgence of Shanghai Modern in post-Mao China transmutes Shanghai into a one-dimensional urban consumer society whose new forms of state censorship and neoliberal functions countervail the inherent traits of Shanghai cosmopolitanism and limit the autonomy of artistic, intellectual, and creative labor.

Shanghai Modern and Cosmopolitanism

The term Shanghai Modern is central to readers' understanding of the main argument and conclusion reached in Red Creative. Stated by the authors, "This historical moment, when the city, as a Western-administered 'concession port', floated free of the Chinese state, we have called Shanghai Modern" (p. 176). This kind of uncanny autonomy that Shanghai gained in the war-wrecked [End Page 84] Republican era (1911-1949), seen by the authors, was absent after the communist takeover of the city in 1949. Shanghai Modern, for the authors, represents neither the path to a capitalist modernity China never took, nor the commercial cultural capital now available for a new cosmopolitan post-Mao China (p. 91). Borrowing comparative references from Leo Ou-fan Lee and Akbar Abbas's interpretations of Shanghai's bygone glory, Red Creative critiques the change of Shanghai's destiny in the Mao era when "the city could no longer enjoy the privilege of being a law unto itself: it was clearly the nation that now held sway over the city" (p. 114). Shanghai's loss of autonomy and preeminence, hence for the authors, was derived from Mao's anti-urbanism policies and antagonism toward colonial capitalism. Thereby, the end of the tumultuous years of war and revolution marked a new beginning for Shanghai, namely, a potential rebirth of Shanghai modern in a new era of contentious debates on postsocialism and global capitalism. It is in this context that the book hopes to relink the pre-socialist Shanghai modern with the state-sponsored neoliberal present through Shanghai's new coming of age as a creative city,

Shanghai, though possessed of a difficult heritage, presented an important resource for the government as a memory-image of a cosmopolitan urbanity imbued with the patina of history. Suitably frame[d], this history could provide the imaginary for a 'creative city', positioning Shanghai as a global commercial and financial center, the self-conscious, media-savvy driver of a new Chinese cosmopolitan modernity (pp. 176-77).

This kind of anticipation, however, finds itself somewhat wishful thinking. After all Shanghai Modern is not replicable under the new historical condition. Despite the patina of history that Shanghai claims, to refashion its cosmopolitan modernity through the imaginary of a creative city in a socialist-neoliberal state means to learn how to maneuver between the all-encompassing power of the state and the market. Inspired by Akbar Abbas's view on questioning the assumption that cosmopolitanism has an unproblematic and universal value, the authors critique globalization that replaces internationalization in the post-Mao era when Shanghai revives cosmopolitanism from an imagined pre-1949 past. For Abbas, and endorsed by the authors, globalization fundamentally differs from internationalization in that globalization produces a different intermediary between the local and the global, something Abbas calls "arbitrage." In other words, "global flows bypass the nation state, and the task of translation and intermediation was no longer the job of the educated cosmopolitan artist-intellectual but undertaken directly by capitalist corporations themselves" (p. 202). What puzzles the authors is therefore the question which echoes the title of the book, can Shanghai spearhead a kind of red creative under the increased state censorship and an unruly global market? This question leads readers to rethink how Shanghai's quintessential cosmopolitan haipai culture can help regenerate new creative energy in the age of neoliberal globalization. [End Page 85]

Creative City through Haipai Nostalgia

The book offers an interesting perspective on the historical development of haipai—a distinctive Shanghai cultural style that was deeply rooted in commerce and cosmopolitanism during the golden decades of the Republican era, contrasting with Jingpai—Beijing style. The book critiques the unmediated return of haipai as an urban cultural sensibility, reminiscent of "objects frozen, pickled, mummified come back to the present as nostalgia," which "sidesteps the occasion it presents to think through the profound challenges of China's encounter with modernity" (p. 205). In other words, the authors see that the return of haipai in post-1992 Shanghai does not evoke sufficient intellectual dialogues about the possibilities of modernity in China, possibilities that can go beyond the existing forms and systems known as Communist modernization and Fordist capitalism. From here, the book turns to the question of the creative city and argues that the creative city is predicated on a global neoliberal turn, from aspatial fix to global fix. In the case of post-1992 Shanghai, this turn appears as a confluence of the cultural and economic, that is, haipai cosmopolitanism repackaged in a Shanghai nostalgia fervor as the new image capital.

The book hence relies on key cultural theorists and urban historians such as Raymond Williams, Manuel Castells, and Marshall Berman to analyze the process of neoliberlization of the city. It argues, "the roots of the 'creative city' lay in the retrieval and relaunch of the urban as a distinct cultural and economic capacity" (p. 194). The book sees the significant distinction between how the city is perceived in the golden age of pre-1949 cosmopolitan modernity as opposed to under neoliberal capitalism when the city is instrumentalized to rearticulate its identity for a global competitive endgame. Indebted to Williams's "structure of feelings" and Berman's "modernism in the streets," the authors point out the intricate relations between cultural symbols, erfahrung, and social practice. The revival of haipai through Shanghai nostalgia, in this account, is exactly a case in point from which the creative city becomes a strategic branding mechanism of culture sponsored by a neoliberal state. The making of the creative city is thereby the making of neoliberal urbanism.

The question of nostalgia in the case of Shanghai is further explored by the authors through its role as intermediation. Cosmopolitan nostalgia, or haipai nostalgia, is engineered with neoliberalism that promotes urban cultural consumption such as local tourism, memory recuperation, identity reconstruction, and media representation. By the active making and remaking of history through imagined nostalgia, as argued by the authors, Shanghai is conceived as "a combination of 'global city' and 'creative city', in which cultural production - television, films, video games, performing arts, recorded music, publishing, the visual arts, craft and 'design' goods, architecture, graphic design and advertising - feeds directly into real estate, image capital [End Page 86] and the new cultural or 'creative' economy of the city" (p. 190). That is to say, cultural infrastructure building feeds into the making of a creative city, and vice versa. This kind of mutually beneficial collaboration between urban culture and economic development through the practices of urban regeneration, in the authors' view, is one of the definitive attributes of urban planning strategy promoted by the post-1992 Shanghai city government. Culture, in other words, is reproduced and consumed for capital gain in the name of global competitiveness, urbanization, and gentrification.

Impasse of Shanghai Creative Industry

It is in this context that the book delves into a few compelling case studies to examine how the creative landscape of Shanghai is rebuilt into a global brand name. Pudong, Xintiandi, and creative clusters such as M50, Taikang Road, 1933 Old Millfun, and Bridge 8 are among the featured landmarks. The authors argue that with the official takeoff of the Shanghai Creative Industries Center (SCIC) in 1998, transnational art exchanges come to the fore to redefine creative urban spaces that are emblematic of a new urban cultural sensibility. However, highly problematic revenue-seeking practices arise from this SCIC launching process. Although art and design showcase a type of postindustrial lure of Shanghai that promotes urban-industrial aesthetics, the change of real estate regulation policies that took place in the early 2000swas operated under a neoliberal model of governance, that is, creative businesses are asked to pay commercial-level rent for low-cost industrial space. As a result, land speculation is played out by multiple interconnected parties including the city and district government, State-owned enterprises, and real estate developers (p. 271). Confronting the profound root cause of the impasse faced by the short-lived CICs in Shanghai, the authors state that the problem lies not only in the cultural image making of the city, which positions Shanghai as "China's cultural center and international metropolis," but also derives from ideological conformity that increasingly poses challenges to artists and cultural professionals in the age of social media and digitization. Thus, Shanghai creative industries are sandwiched between two scissor blades—ideology and commerce. "The relentless absorption of the sphere of culture into the system of capital accumulation" and the "progressive reduction of the culture system to the logic of the commodity" deprives one of the deeper need for knowledge and meaning (p. 297). The authors thereby ask, what exactly is "a good life" in the current political climate in China? In other words, how does China confront its own political deficit while steadfastly seeking economic development and social prosperity? The book concludes by suggesting that in order for China to become "Red Creative," it is imperative that the Chinese Communist Party opens itself up to possible radical changes. [End Page 87]

Inspiration and Critique

Red Creative provides an intriguing account of China's development in creative economy in the post-Mao era. Shanghai, highlighted as a city that revitalized its pre-1949 capitalist modernity through post-1992 neoliberal development, conjures up intellectual discussions about what the authors call "the China challenge." In lieu of regarding culture as enlightenment, as it was once perceived by the May Fourth Movement in 1919, culture is being subjected to new forms of scrutiny and control under Chinese-style state neoliberalism for profit and image making.

Neoliberal urbanism exemplified by the case of Shanghai, however, sometimes perplexes the authors. On the one hand, the authors vehemently critique neoliberal practices; on the other hand, they tend to accredit urban regeneration to the seeming effectiveness of post-Mao Chinese state policies. Urban spaces such as Shanghai Pudong and Xintiandi are two of such examples. The futuristic skyline of Pudong is celebrated by the authors as the "new Manhattan of the East," announcing "a new quality of Chinese urban modernity" (p. 184). Comparably, Xintiandi, the infamous "creative destruction" of Shanghai vernacular architecture and habitus, is ironically animated by the authors' ambiguous argument, where Xintiandi resembles "a foundational moment of heritage-led urban regeneration" (p. 202). The question of the right to the city, à la Henri Lefebvre, is discussed in a relatively brief fashion. The massive demolition of homes, displacement of residents, and other forms of state violence that emerged from the dismantling of Shanghai heritage is largely left understudied. Pudong and Xintiandi are rather depicted with an ambivalent tone that echoes the authors' calling for an authentic return of Shanghai Modern. Thus, it becomes unclear whether by privileging the cosmopolitan taste of a "Shanghai Modern 2.0" that relies on the creative labor, the authors may have overlooked a crucial aspect of state neoliberalism, that is, the dismantling of a quintessential Shanghai vernacular habitus and heritage that belonged to the ordinary urbanites. It is in this sense that Red Creative encounters its own challenge. Creative economy is built against the backdrop of insurmountable obstacles in Chinese cities—there are not only tensions between the creative labor vis-à-vis the state and the market, but also real struggles between the disfranchised commoners and state-engineered neoliberal urban sprawl.

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai

Compared to Red Creative, Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng's edited volume Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai: Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries captures Shanghai through literary, cinematic, and artistic representations. Positioning Shanghai as a city of paradoxes and contradictions, this anthology intends to present international [End Page 88] and cross-disciplinary views on the contentious history of Shanghai by questioning and debunking binaries of East and West, traditional and modern, and cosmopolitanism and provincialism. Playing with the two oppositional words, revealing and reveiling, the authors of the collection strive to move away from an orientalizing gaze toward a set of nuanced, heterogenous perspectives on Shanghai. Revealing, at the same time, is also an act of veiling, or reveiling Shanghai from the vantage point of the changing perceptions of authenticity and identity of the city over the past hundred years. Organized by the central question as to how Shanghai has metamorphosed in global imaginations, the eleven essays of the volume offer readers detailed analyses and historical interpretations of genre-defining novels, films, memoirs, and performances about Shanghai. Three major motifs are investigated, namely, how old Shanghai is remembered and imagined as the epitome of Chinese modernity; how Shanghai becomes "the other" under the foreign and diasporic gazes; and how Shanghai has been reinvented in the new millennium.

The Shanghai Lady

Shanghai cosmopolitanism is often associated with the imagery of the Shanghai lady. Modern and mystified, captivating and fateful, the Shanghai lady serves as a mirror image of what modernity is in a city that is imbued with intriguing stories and histories, told and untold. A few essays of this volume study how this transformative imagery is depicted and represented by a corpus of modern and contemporary Chinese literature. The Shanghai lady, in this sense, is a literary and sociopolitical trope that derives from a cacophonic experience of modernity.

In Andrew David Field's essay "The Shanghai Lady: 1880s-1990s: A Fictional Figure Adrift in the Maelstrom of Chinese Modernity," the imagery of the Shanghai lady—teahouse courtesans, cabaret singsong girls, and modern women—emerges as a dynamic modern figure that thrives, falls, and revives like the vicissitudes of Shanghai modernity. Writing through the voices of Leo Ou-fan Lee and Wen-hsien Yeh, Field states, "We find her/the Shanghai lady continuously caught up in the maelstrom of modern urban life … She thrives within the nexus of consumption and entertainment culture that flourishes in the heart of the city's foreign settlements." The Shanghai lady is thus "a product of Shanghai's role as indigenizer of foreign culture" and "the cultural matrix of Chinese modernity" (p. 179). She is a fluid and non-monolithic figure who unfolds herself with the changing social, cultural, and political conditions of Shanghai, emblematic of the problems of Shanghai modernity. Connecting three key historical periods 1880s-1930s, 1940s-1990s, and post-1990, Field explores how the historical transformation of Shanghai lady imagery is captured in modern Chinese literature, including Han Bangqing's renowned 1892 novel The Sing-Song Girl of Shanghai (Haishang hua liezhuan), neoperceptionist [End Page 89] writers Mu Shiying and Liu Na'ou's romantic tales of the 1930s Shanghai, and Wang Anyi's enchanting fictional account of a former "Miss Shanghai Third Place" in post-1949 Shanghai.

Highlighting Wang Anyi alone, Lisa Bernstein's essay "Wang Anyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow: Memories of Shanghai as Commentary on Modern Society" ties Shanghai's trauma to the nostalgia of the novel's protagonist—Wang Qiyao, "Miss Shanghai Third Place." Citing Rey Chow, Bernstein discovers the fate-defying subjectivity of Wang Qiyao as a modern Shanghai woman, who "does not simply amount to a new type of literary content, but, more so, to a new agency, a dialectic of resistance-in-givenness that is constitutive of modernity in a non-Western, but Westernized context" (p. 97). In other words, for Bernstein, the fictional femme fatale invokes fate, only to resist it. This sense of resistance and resilience is seen by Bernstein as a quality of overcoming fatalism, as well as gender and class inequality, in a contemporary global society. Memories of Shanghai is therefore a conscientious remembering and transcending the past, or borrowing Svetlana Boym's words through Bernstein, a type of reflective nostalgia that "dwells on the ambivalence of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity" (p. 88). Wang's Shanghai lady becomes illuminating for Bernstein as it leads one to critically reflect the culture of materialism and commodified social relations that are predetermined by the unequivocal contradictions of modernity, Shanghai par excellence.

Polarized Metropolis

The question as to whether Shanghai is China's lost modernity emerges from the anthology through the critique of urban polarization. Yuan Muzhi'stwo iconic films that defined the cinematic lingo of the 1930s Shanghai—Scenes of City Life (1935) and Street Angel (1937)—are brought to light by Mariagrazia Costantino's essay "'City Lights' and the Dream of Shanghai" and Gabriel F. Y. Tsang's essay "The Architectural Structure of Prewar Shanghai: Analysis of the Longtang Setting in Street Angel." Portraying light as a phantasmagoric visual apparatus vis-à-vis the underprivileged darkness of Shanghai society, Costantino sees Yuan's "casting light" permeate the Shanghai urban landscape with a profoundly political implication. Phantasmagoria of capitalism and the plague of the impending wars form stark contrast, reminiscent of what Costantino calls the chiaroscuro technique with which Yuan skillfully directs the movement of the camera. Shanghai is animated by neon lights, rushing cars, dance hall crowds, and most of all, signs and symbols of omnipresent modernity superimposing on one another. Whether inaccessible or polarized, Costantino argues, the manifestation of Shanghai modernity through dialectical cinematic representation renders a powerful critique of colonial capitalism. [End Page 90]

The dark pit of Shanghai modernity is observed by both Costantino and Tsang. Rather than centering on the magic of light, Tsang analyzes the irreconcilable social divide by examining the vernacular architecture longtang and its underrepresented dwellers. Played by the renowned actress Zhou Xuan, the protagonist of Yuan's Street Angel, Xiao Hong, is a singsong girl who lives in the longtang. The film unfolds another story of a Shanghai underclass whose beauty and tragedy are shaped by the exploitative darkness and vice of Shanghai society. Sharing comparable concerns, the poignancy of Xiao Hong's life is further elaborated by Tsang as something inevitable and melancholic resulting from the deep urban-rural divide. The glittering lights of Shanghai, for Tsang, separate the rich and the poor, the magnificent and the dismal. Xiao Hong, unlike the glamorous Shanghai lady delineated in Field's essay, who embodies "the seductive side of Shanghai's materialistic culture" (p. 192) and glamour of ten miles of foreign stretch (shili yangchang), becomes an antithetical reminder of the unsurmountable social disparity in an unfathomable society that segregates those of aboveground and underground. For Tsang, Shanghai modern of the 1930s is portrayed with a critical sensibility by Yuan as the Shanghai lady imagery enters the polarized vernacular cityscape.

Shanghai Reinvented as a Postmodern City

The sense of nostalgia continues to define the ways in which the old Shanghai is remembered and reinvented since the strengthened market reforms in the 1990s. The so-called ur-postmodern Shanghai renders the unfixing of the modern self. Observed by Grant Hamilton in "J.G. Ballard's Shanghai: The Ur-Postmodern City" and Heather Patrick in "Constructed City, Constructed Self: Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby and the Unfixing of the Modern Self," the question of the postmodern city is explored through the account of a British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard's compelling proposition, that is, Shanghai was "purpose-built by the West as a test-metropolis of the future" (p. 154). Hamilton argues that Ballard's autobiographical-fictional writing depicts the 1930s Shanghai as the world's first postmodern city that prefigures Western literary thought of the late twentieth century. Shanghai at the height of its phantasmagoric development, for Ballard, is not only a city of oppositional forces but also a prophet of the future—a kind of future that, asserted by Hamilton, is already deployed by Shanghai modern. The uncanny future-oriented otherness identified in Shanghai's past suggests an interesting parallel with Fredric Jameson's powerful critique of postmodernism. Postmodernism, a new cultural form for Jameson, argued by Hamilton, is perceived as the "West's idea of the future coming back to the lands of its birth from its gestation in the East" (p. 154). Discovered by Hamilton, the close affinity between Ballard's Shanghai and postmodernism compels readers to contemplate on the postmodern attributes [End Page 91] of Shanghai modern as well as the dialectically entangled relations between East and West, history and image. The seemingly self-contradictory perception of the postmodern city is reminiscent of the superimposed, futuristic skyline of Shanghai Pudong financial district that the authors of Red Creative find illuminating, and at the same time, eerie and unsettling.

In "Shanghai in The White Countess: Production and Consumption of an Oriental City through the Western Cinematic Gaze," Chu-Chueh Cheng brilliantly critiques the Western vision of the Orient that is produced by the 2005 film The White Countess. Cheng points out that Shanghai is imagined under the Western cinematic gaze as "both a postmodern spectacle and a simulation loop" (p. 159). Mass media, for Cheng, problematically mediates the Western gaze through literary and cinematic misrepresentation and exoticization of the old Shanghai of the 1930s. Foreign to Shanghai themselves, the director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro of The White Countess collectively perpetuate the mystified imagery of an opulent and decadent Shanghai by whimsically staging a Caucasian romance in an inauthentic Shanghai setting from which the old Shanghai ambiance is reassembled not in Shanghai, rather in foreign places such as Thailand and London. In Cheng's words, Shanghai is identified as "a highly coveted object," and "when a city becomes a cultural myth, its symbolic manifestation is more important than its actual presence" (pp. 165, 170). Indebted to Jean Baudrillard's interpretation of simulation and simulacra, Cheng sees that The White Countess precisely and inadvertently blurs the lines of the real and the copy, something critiqued by Baudrillard as a definitive trait of the postmodern world in which "a copy that depicts something for which no original exists" (p. 165). In other words, for Cheng, by perpetuating this sensational effect in a consumer society and postmodern megacity that Shanghai is identified with, the Western vision casted in the film is materialized and reproduced. To this end, the old Shanghai emerges to surface the postmodern condition, whether as the real or simulation, by subjugating itself to the indissoluble binary of the Orient vis-à-vis the West as "a sumptuous collage of disjointed images of glamor and calamity" (p. 159). Cheng's reading of this unflattering film thereby serves as a timely reminder of the problematic reinvention and reimagination of Shanghai in the new millennium.

The question of urban identity in a postmodern Shanghai becomes increasingly appealing for writers in the 1990s. Accelerated urban expansion forecasts a kind of monstrosity and alienation of the self. This is the vantage point from which Heather Patrick's essay unpacks Wei Hui's 1999 novel Shanghai Baby. If Wang Anyi's protagonist Wang Qiyao "epitomizes nostalgia for an imagined past" (p. 88), Wei Hui's semiautobiographical self Nikki symbolizes the destabilized relations between the unfixing of the modern self and the ruthless "gaze of the outside world" (p. 200) during the nation's [End Page 92] marching toward the strengthened market reforms and integration with global capitalism. Nikki's untimely coming of age, for Patrick, is synchronized with Shanghai's search for a new identity—an identity that unveils pathological narcissism under the postmodern condition. The self, making and unfixing through gendered performativity, "writes herself into existence" (p. 206). Thereby, these kinds of destabilized relationships between the author-narrator and readers, as well as between the self and the myriad of performative identities are overdetermined by Wei Hui's self-conscious construction and deconstruction of the urban self. Overconsumption, entertainment, libido, and nihilism, all of which seem to depict Wei Hui's protagonist Nikki as an aimless, unanchored reconciliation with the reinvented self in a city that is precipitated by history, nostalgia, commodity, image, and performance. Patrick writes with a critical tone, "Shanghai, with its pulsing lights, performative architecture, and bohemian neighborhoods, is characterized by Wei Hui as a city in want of an outsider's gaze, a city beholden to the West for its very being" (p. 211). The imagery of the Shanghai Lady, if to any extent Wei Hui consciously desires to recreate through writing, is redefined by her protagonist Nikki—a lost soul of the post-1970 generation that is consumed by her "solipsistic escape" from the postmodern spectacles of Shanghai.

Inspiration and Critique

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai offers readers well-structured historical perspectives on the enigma of Shanghai. It showcases cultural representations of a quintessential cosmopolitanism that is placed between edges of modernity and postmodernity. What concerns a great number of essays in this anthology is Shanghai's tension-charged relations to the outside world, namely, the West, as well as the rest of China. The question "under whose gaze" conjures up the ways in which Shanghai and its accompanying literary, cinematic, and artistic protagonists negotiate their destinies. Authors of the volume play the role of cultural critics and intermediaries who help decode, reveal, and reveil a transforming and yet timeless Shanghai.

The paradoxical characteristics of Shanghai are what the book intends to capture, including communism vis-à-vis capitalism (p. 1). What remains understudied, however, is Shanghai in the Mao era when the oppositional politics, cultures, and ideologies were at play. Briefly discussed in the book, this critical historical period is largely left unexamined. Shanghai, in this account, lacks key historical narrations and representations from the vantage point of its encounter with the 1949 revolution and the first thirty years of the People's Republic of China (1949-1979). Unlike Red Creative, Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai does not foreground the post-1949 Chinese state in its analyses of literary and cinematic representations of Shanghai. Hence, in most instances, Shanghai is reimagined and reinvented either as a quasi-colonial or postcolonial [End Page 93] city that bypasses the socialist revolution, transformation, and state neoliberalism. The question of "Shanghai as other" thus often falls back to the binary of East and West, orientalized and occidentalized. Diverse perspectives notwithstanding, the occasional unevenness of the essays in terms of rigor of analysis may have resulted from the still contentious representations of Shanghai modern and postmodern. Readers would find it more engaging if the anthology also included a few recently produced TV series that feature Shanghai in the era of post-reforms and globalization. After all, TV is a vital medium that deciphers Chinese society, and further the complexities of Shanghai.

Such quibbles are meant to provoke a continuous intellectual debate on Shanghai's historical and contemporary place in mapping and remapping China's tortuous path to modernity and postmodernity. The in-depth research and theoretical analysis provided by Red Creative and Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai contributes greatly to the interdisciplinary Shanghai Studies and China Studies. Both books can benefit a global readership, in particular undergraduate and graduate students and scholars who seek to be informed and illuminated by the critical scholarship on the enduring vigor and myth of city of Shanghai. [End Page 94]

Lei Ping

Lei Ping is interim chair of the Languages Department and assistant professor of China studies at The New School University in New York City. Her research centers on Marxism, urbanism, cultural sociology, and social classes in Asian and global economies and societies. Her writings have appeared in leading peer-reviewed academic journals such as Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, China Review International, and NewBooks Asia. She serves on the editorial board of Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism as well as Journal of Urban Studies and Public Administration.

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