Description
Book SynopsisChina is urbanizing at an unprecedented speed. Filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers all try to come to terms with the changes of their city. How is the Chinese city-as-spectacle, visualised and thus imagined and reimagined, if not contested, in art and popular culture? What are the possible escape routes from a completely commodified cityscape? How to realign artistic expressions of the spectacle with everyday practices? The imaginations of the Chinese city in art and popular culture that this book explores are not taken as merely mirroring or reflecting ŸrealityŒ, on the contrary, they are part and parcel of the construction, destruction and deconstruction of that ŸrealityŒ. As such, these imaginations are enmeshed in the social, material and political realities that produce Chinese cityscapes. Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture brings together essays by an interdisciplinary team of experts on Chinese cities, including world-renowned scholars like Ackbar Abbas and Chua Beng Huat, as well as leading cultural critics like Ou Ning. Aiming to steer away from an exclusive focus on Mainland China, the adjective Chinese has a cultural meaning and includes places like Singapore and Hong Kong.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Imagining Chinese Cities JEROEN DE KLOET AND LENA SCHEEN 1 Speed and Spectacle in Chinese Cities ACKBAR ABBAS 2 Planned Demimonde and its Aestheticisation in Singapore City CHUA BENG HUAT 3 Coming of Age in RMB City ROBIN VISSER 4 The Architecture of Utopia: From Rem Koolhaas’ Scale Models to RMB City YOMI BRAESTER 5 Fantasies of a Disappearing and Reappearing Chinese City JEROEN DE KLOET 6 Tuning Urban China JEROEN GROENEWEGEN 7 The City’s (Dis)appearance in Propaganda STEFAN LANDSBERGER 8 Claiming the Past, Presenting the Present, Selling the Future: Imagining a New Beijing, Great Olympics GLADYS PAK LEI CHONG 9 Shanghai in Film and Literature: The Danger of Nostalgia GREGORY BRACKEN 10 Nostalgia, Place, and Making Peace with Modernity in East Asia MARGARET HILLENBRAND 11 Femme Fatales and Male Narcissists: Shanghai Spectacle Narrated, Packaged and Sold LENA SCHEEN 12 City Regeneration and Its Opposition OU NING 13 Law, Embodiment, and the Case of “Harborcide” JOHN NGUYET ERNI
