Sun, "Urban landscape and cultural imagination: Literature, film, and visuality in semi-colonial Shanghai, 1927-1937," 1999.

Shao-yi Sun, Ph.D

Abstract (Summary)

This work is a study of the city of Shanghai's semi-colonial culture during the years of 1927 to 1937, the first decade of Chiang Kai-Shek's Nanjing Government. Drawing upon a wide variety of literary, cultural, and film theories, the author investigates various genres and types of "Shanghai narratives" that have been largely neglected or rarely researched: fiction, film, architecture, advertising, and fashion. The author further contends that, with the advent and flourishing of various models of interpretation that tried to "make sense" of the metropolis, Shanghai quickly transformed from a "natural landscape" to a deeply-layered "cultural landscape." The investigation of the competing discourses of the constructive and destructive potential of the metropolis, therefore, is more of an attempt to explore how the urban landscape of Shanghai was culturally imagined in ideological and gender terms than of an endeavor to document an already vanished past.

In emphasizing the hybrid nature of the urban experience of Shanghai, the author aims first to challenge the dominant discourse which celebrates the rural as the fundamental expression of the "indigenous" and "authentic" China and which reduces Shanghai as a mere symbol of national humiliation and moral degradation. The author's second aim is to establish Shanghai and its culture as an alternative model that not only challenges the unitary discourse of Chinese revolutionary nationalism, but also questions the conception that the metropolis was nothing but a Western import. The third aim of this work is to renounce totalizing explanatory models in dealing with Shanghai's semi-colonial culture and to offer an alternative reading of the city by introducing the concepts of negotiation, resistance, dynamism, location, fluidity, and spatiality. Cities do not speak for themselves. It is humans who speak of cities and give them narrative power. In this sense, imagination, although seldom considered to be a material force, transcends its conceptual nature and becomes a concrete force in shaping and producing spaces and histories.

Advisor: Cheung, Dominic