Abstract
Shanghai has long looked ahead and been associated with futurity. This was particularly the case in the 1920s and 1930s when it was seen as an eastern outpost of forward-thrusting capitalist development, with many westerners to the fore in many of the business enterprises thriving in the city, and the city itself being the most westernised in China. Such features of course condemned it as decadent following the liberation of Shanghai in 1949. For the communists, it was an opportunity to repudiate the western capitalist model of urban modernity which it represented for them, and remove from the country a major imperialist site. Despite the fact that a punitive 80% of the city’s income had been donated to the national government throughout the period leading up to it, this response became toxic in the Cultural Revolution, with a great deal of sacrilege and suffering accompanying the ultra-left excesses of the purge (Nien Cheng’s (1995) moving account of this period in the city’s history is just one among many examples of what this involved). The long-term consequence of all this was that until the 1990s, Shanghai suffered uninterrupted stagnation. Its association with futurity was lost.
Over the past 20 years or so, that has radically changed. The dispossessed future of Shanghai has become a source of pride and inspiration as the city has massively regenerated itself. Its lost reputation for futurity has been regained and reburnished. Shanghai is now synonymous with China’s rapid-pace urban restructuring and rise to global prominence. Its regeneration provides the context for Amanda Lagerkvist’s study of how elite visitors from the West currently partake in its transformation and in its spatial memory: the collective memory of the city, and in particular the mediated memory – in Reinhart Koselleck’s memorable term – of its futures past.
Shanghai is a dizzying composite of past and future, and Lagerkvist seeks to gain some sense of its fast-flowing temporal rhythms by investigating how the future is felt through memory practices. More specifically, she is interested in how memories of interwar Shanghai are appropriated by mobile Westerners, and how meanings are attributed by them to this ever-changing, hypermodernising city. There has certainly arisen a nostalgia for the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s, the period in which the city became known as the ‘Paris of the East’. A memory market for this period has emerged, both inside and outside China, while in Shanghai itself, it has been manifest in restaurants and bars as well as museums and heritage sites. Nostalgia for the quasi-colonial past runs parallel with the relentless modernisation of the present, which of course also finds strong echoes in the interwar period. Entrepreneurialism and consumerism can seem entirely compatible with nostalgia and a theatrical staging of the past. Economic capital is matched and complemented by symbolic capital, as it is, for example, in urban gentrification in western cities. In Lagerkvist’s view, Shanghai nostalgia ‘distinguishes itself through its particular regenerative form … its inclination towards futures past’ becoming realised in a force ‘that pulls forward while looking backward’ (pp. 15–16; emphasis in original).
At the start of her book, Lagerkvist draws up her theoretical framework, bringing together media, memory and performance studies, before moving on to look in detail at current recapitulations of the city’s collective memory of possessing futurity, particularly via the media, and the recurrent contours of what she calls the city’s retromodernity, as a result of which we experience the new through memories of the modern and ‘a sense of futurity through returns’ (p. 70). The next chapter explores Shanghai’s multitemporality, its diverse temporal rhythms and its sense of distinct yet interanimating times, all in one complex urban space. Following this, Lagerkvist turns directly to the elite Western sojourners who move through the city, examining how they interact with the place and its historical imaginary. A final chapter deals with the American expat community in Shanghai and the ways in which they make sense of the rise of China and the feel of the future which it continually seems to imply.
The book offers some interesting cultural analysis of various aspects of contemporary Shanghai, particularly through the prism of its retrospective futurity, one feature of which is the return of Westerners to its streets and buildings for the first time since the generation of J.G. Ballard’s parents, with their long drinks through long afternoons. Shanghai is re-modernising itself today at least partly through its collective memory of becoming modern in the early 20th century. This is the key focus of Lagerkvist’s study, with the city’s retrospective futurity seen through the lens of encounters with it by Western visitors. What remains to be seen – and it is an important question raised by the book – is whether Shanghai’s regenerative nostalgia will revive, extend and refine the cosmopolitanism of the interwar years which is central to what is celebrated. If we accept the view of Damian Harper, the prospect does not look promising: ‘A recurring sense – deriving from China’s constant ambivalence with the outside world – pervades that the city’s internationalism is both awkward and affected, while a marked absence of creative energy can make this fast-changing city seem oddly parochial and inward looking’ (Harper, 2006: 164). Watch this urban space.