China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: S. William Schaefer, University of Chicago
This interdisciplinary panel examines the complex ways in which cultural producers and consumers have articulated imaginary and material spaces of Shanghai through negotiating the boundaries between past and present, public and private, and self and community. It is through the construction of these heterogeneous spaces—often against the grain of the linear narrative of time and the nation—that Shanghai has been imagined as a unique arena of Chinese modernity.
We first probe the spatial articulations of memory, domesticity, and subjectivity in Republican Shanghai; we then consider the configuration of space in contemporary Shanghai through a typology of personae which in part draws upon the cultural reservoir of the past. William Schaefer explores the imbrication of the broken transmission of the past and the global circuit of culture through a critical reading of the modernist texts of Shi Zhecun, which represent colonial Shanghai as an unhomely space haunted by a ghostly past. Shelley Stephenson’s paper investigates the intersection of public and private and the construction of the domestic ideal by revisiting the debate in occupied Shanghai’s popular press over the abrupt retirement of film actress Chen Yunshang and her withdrawal into the domestic space. Haiyan Lee examines Mandarin Duck and Butterfly "novels of sentiment" of the 1910s, and suggests that not only domesticity but the very self-identity of the emerging urban middle-classes was produced through celebrations of virtuous love in the literary public sphere. Finally, James Farrer refocuses our attention to the 1990s, where a cast of "personae," derived partly from the gender/spatial imaginary of the Republican era and partly from contemporary popular culture and everyday experience, configure gender and sexuality in the distinctly "Shanghai style" (haipai). Together, these discussions of simultaneously real and imagined spaces invested with multiple meanings of history, community and identity contribute to an understanding of the peculiar experience of modernity associated with Shanghai.
William Schaefer, University of Chicago
Chinese literary and artistic modernism often has been driven by a cultural unease regarding the past and its memory. Written in the aftermath of twentieth-century repressions of the Chinese past, much of this work depicts disturbing returns of fragments of personal, cultural, and historical pasts.
This paper is part of a larger project which locates the work of Shi Zhecun, one of China’s earliest writers and editors of modernism, in the context of the cultural predicament of semi-colonial Shanghai, a center of modernity increasingly haunted in the late 1920s–early 1930s by the past. The "vertical" transmission of remainders of the past, fragmented by the upheavals of the early twentieth century, was enmeshed in the "horizontal" translation of globalizing culture that came with China’s changing location in the world.
While the bulk of the project concerns Shi’s mappings of this geography and archaeology of modernity in his modernist historical fiction, this paper outlines the cultural space which composes all of Shi’s fictions of the past, from the memory of semi-rural domestic spaces of the past in his early collection, New Year’s Lantern (Shangyuan deng), through his sanwen’s location of Chinese ruins in global modernity, to the ruptures of modern Shanghai and environs by uncanny fragments of the past concealed beneath its surface in the "urban gothic" stories in One Rainy Evening (Meiyu zhi xi). Shi’s work will be examined in the context of popular discourses of memory, archaeology and mummies, and the remainders of the past.
Shelley Stephenson, University of Chicago
Chen Yunshang was a little-known actress from Hong Kong when she was brought to Shanghai for the starring role in 1939’s hit film "Mulan Congjun" (Mulan Joins the Army). An overnight sensation, she dominated Shanghai’s star system for three years before suddenly retiring for the sake of marriage and motherhood. Though absent in person, Chen continued to maintain a strong presence in Shanghai’s popular press, where her departure from the film scene was viewed with a combination of incomprehension, resentment and longing, and where her performance of the new duties of domesticity—cooking, cleaning, mothering—were as faithfully reported, and critiqued, as had been her previous performance of the duties of stardom.
Drawing on data from the contemporary fan press, as well as from interviews with Chen and her fans, this paper analyzes the contestations between the private and public realms of the star in late Republican Shanghai. Even before retirement, Chen had been strongly associated in the press with the domestic environment, whether through exclusive reports on her bedroom decor, or through photographic images of the star cradling baby-surrogate dolls. Despite (or perhaps because of) the star persona’s firm grounding in the domestic, Chen’s retirement occasioned in the fan press an outpouring of discussion on a presumed incompatibility of home and career, and on marriage as a forsaking of modern feminist values. This paper explores this debate between private domesticity and public stardom, especially complicated in wartime Shanghai, where participation in the Japanese-controlled film industry was implicitly a public (and publicized) symbol of Sino-Japanese cooperation.
Haiyan Lee, Cornell University
Cultural production in the first two decades of the twentieth century was dominated by the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school whose historical status and significance have only recently been reassessed. This paper contributes to this effort by examining a typical Butterfly genre, the yanqing xiaoshuo (novel of sentiment), which was popularized by, among others, Xu Zhenya, Zhou Shoujuan, and Chen Diexian. The Butterfly novel of sentiment was frequently derided or even condemned by May Fourth intellectuals for its excessive sentimentality. In approaching this body of sentimental texts, I discard conventional biases as well as psychologistic explanations and look at how the sentimental text participates in the production, interrogation, and redefinition of the social order. In my paper, I draw on Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and other cultural historians to examine the linkages between sentimentalism, subjectivity, and the formation of a literary public sphere. I argue that sentimentalism heralds the emergence of the modern subject based on the centrality and universality of sentiment, which then becomes the basis of self-definition for the urban middle-classes. Through the shared experience of reading and weeping, the readers of sentimental fiction are transformed into private individuals capable of coming together to form a public: the "community of love." The sentimental community they inhabit is the "literary public sphere" which prepares them for their role in social and political arenas.