Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)

278 Pages·2007·1.2 MB·English

by  Alexander Des Forges

Mediasphere Shanghai
Mediasphere
the aesthetics of
a study of the weatherhead east asian institute
Shanghai
cultural production
Alexander Des Forges
University of Hawai‘i Press • Honolulu
© 2007 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Des Forges, Alexander Townsend.
Mediasphere Shanghai : the aesthetics of cultural production / Alexander Des
Forges.
p. cm. — (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8248-3081-6 (alk. paper)
1. Shanghai (China) I. Title.
DS796.S24D47 2007
700'.4251132—dc22
2007010395
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
Columbia University
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is Columbia University’s center for re-
search, publication, and teaching on modern and contemporary Asia Pacific
regions. The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute were inaugu-
rated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research
on modern and contemporary East Asia.
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free
paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Council on Library Resources.
Designed by Paul Herr
Composited by Santos Barbasa of the University of Hawaii Press
Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
To my parents

Contents
acknowledgments ix
conventions and abbreviations xi

Introduction 1
1 Rhetorics of Territory, Mixture, and Displacement 29
2 From Street Names to Brand Names: The Grid of Reference 56
3 Synchronized Reading: Installment Aesthetics and the Formation
of the Mediasphere 73
4 Desire Industries: Constant Motion and Endless Narrative 93
5 Brokers, Authors, “Shanghai People” 114
6 Marxists and Modern Girls: Shanghai Fiction and the 1930s 131
7 Lineages of the Contemporary and the Nostalgic 160
Epilogue: Shanghai 2000 180

notes 185
character glossary 239
bibliography 245
index 267
vii

Acknowledgments
This book focuses on the cultural production of a single city,
but I have accumulated debts in many places while research-
ing and writing it. I would especially like to thank my dissertation advisor,
Perry Link, for his unflagging support and many helpful suggestions over the
years. In Shanghai, I have benefited for almost a decade from the hospitality
and advice of Yuan Jin, originally of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
and now at Fudan University.
At a time when I was just beginning work on this project, Ono Kazuko pro-
vided invaluable assistance in the form of affiliation with the Kyoto University
Institute of the Humanities and many useful suggestions, for which I am very
grateful. I would also like to thank Andrew Plaks, Susan Naquin, and Patrick
Hanan for their willingness to read and comment on my work as it progressed,
and Wang Jiquan at Fudan University and Kim Moon-Kyong of the Kyoto
University Institute of the Humanities for taking the time to advise me on a
number of hard-to-find sources. I am particularly grateful to Wei Shaochang
for sharing stories of “old Shanghai,” and for his gift of a photograph of the
map on which figure 2 is based.
As this book took shape, it benefited greatly from comments and advice
generously provided by David Wang, Rey Chow, and Dorothy Ko; I would like
to thank them for their enthusiasm for this project. I am indebted to Madge
Huntington at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University for
her careful attention to questions of structure and wording; I would also like to
thank Pamela Kelley, Ann Ludeman, and Terre Fisher of University of Hawai‘i
Press for their energy and impressive efficiency.
As a study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cultural
production, this book makes use of a variety of texts and images that were
never intended to be collected and preserved, much less suffer the attention of
later scholars. For this reason, I am indebted to the librarians and staff at the
following institutions for carefully keeping the ephemera of previous centuries
and for sharing them with me: Shanghai Library (especially Feng Jinniu and
Zhu Junzhou), Shanghai Municipal Archives, Fudan University Library, Suzhou
ix