By A. Lagerkvist
Contributing to present debates in regards to the globality and mediatisation of thoughts, Media and reminiscence in New Shanghai interrogates the city's fabulous regeneration into an emergent global centre, describing how Western elites partake within the construction of recent Shanghai by means of feeling its futures and acting its futures previous.
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Additional resources for Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past
Example text
7). Never properly interrogated as such in Nora’s seminal work, the media plays the familiar role of the accomplice (history is the principal crook): the media and “mass culture on a global scale” have caused authentic memory to collapse: “Indeed we have seen the tremendous dilation of our very mode of historical perception, which, with the help of the media, has substituted for a memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage the ephemeral film of current events” (ibid: 7–8). Within the current memory boom, our contemporary forms of memory and historical consciousness are intrinsically televisual and cinematic (ibid: 17).
Hence, the relationships between media and memory have currently become the object of renewed interest due to digitalization and the all-pervasive changes in our media environments and media use. Media have effects on how we remember, what we remember and perhaps the nature of memory itself (Garde Hansen et al. 2009). The very distinction between personal/private and public/ Memories in the Making 37 collective memories – as well as the previous primordial focus on national identity – are now also questioned and problematized.
This was a period of armed bodyguards, armor-plated cars, bullet-proof vests, and street pill boxes. [ ... ] the situation was beyond police control. (Finch qtd. in Wakeman 1996) This period was marked by the strained triangular relationship between the foreign settlement, the Japanese military and the puppet regime. Japanese gangsters threatened the inhabitants, especially in a district called Huxi – “the Badlands” – where most of the opium dens and brothels could be found. From Shanghai’s historical archive of dramatic brutality and upheaval, we may also recall the year 1949, which ended the epoch of Shanghai Modern as Chinese Communist rule began and Westerners fled the city.