“Shanghai Nostalgia” the Colonial Past as the Prologue.doc

Shanghai Nostalgia: Historical Memory, Community-Building, and Place-making in a late Socialist City Abstract As an outgrowth of my dissertation fieldwork conducted intermittently between 1997 and 2001, the present paper is an ethnographic examination of “Shanghai Nostalgia,” a multi-faceted phenomenon that characterizes the cultural scene of post-reform Shanghai and has affected its people in many spheres of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the emergence of “Shanghai Nostalgia” in the past decade answered the strategic need of the local people for rediscovering, reevaluating, and reinventing colonial Shanghai in the local and global contexts of post-Deng economic privatization, social stratification, and political liberalization. My central argument is that, as a reconstruction of the collective memory of a pre-communist colonial past (1843-1945), “Shanghai Nostalgia,” not only provides the Shanghainese with a means to critique their present, but also serves as a prologue for the future transformation of their own society. The focus of this study is on the rapid development of “Shanghai nostalgia” as cultural industry actively promoted by the post-Deng social and political elites in Shanghai. It also seeks to provide a multi-sited ethnography of the ongoing schemes of urban revitalization and neighborhood gentrification based on official historical accounts, local gazettes, individual life stories, unofficial histories of pre-1949 Shanghai, and personal anecdotes. Introduction From the mid-1980s to the 1990s, urban China witnessed the birth and growth of an industry of nostalgia in the realm of popular culture. A shared history of Maoist China dominated by successive political movements such as the anti-rightist campaign (1956-57), Great Leap Forward (1958-62), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) provided a space for the construction of a culture of nostalgia. Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city as well as its financial, commercial, a