Lisa Bernstein & Chu-chueh Cheng 
Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai 
Cultural Representations from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai provides international and interdisciplinary perspectives on representations of Shanghai, a contested location within political discourse and cultural imagination. Shanghai’s complex history as a quasi-colonial city, and its contradictory identity as the birthplace of Communist China and the epitome of twenty-first-century capitalism, make it an especially fascinating subject. Contributors examine representations of Shanghai in film, art, literature, memoir, theater, and mass media from the past one hundred years. They address the ways in which texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have rewritten past and present Shanghai to reflect our own wishes and anguishes, show how the city resists static interpretations, and challenge notions of authentic representation and identity. By revealing and questioning persistent stereotypes and constructed versions of East and West, the essays offer diverse views so as to create a genuine exchange with contemporary global audiences. A wide variety of texts are discussed, including the films
Street Angel (1937) and
The White Countess (2005), and the novels
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1996) and
Shanghai Baby (1999).

Table of Content

List of Illustrations



Introduction: Shanghai—Real and Imaginary


Lisa Bernstein and Chu-chueh Cheng




Part I: Old Shanghai Remembered and Imagined



1. Shanghai and the Birth of Chinese Nationalism: The May 30th Movement and the
North-China Daily News


Graham J. Matthews



2. The Architectural Structure of Prewar Shanghai: Analysis of the
Longtang Setting in
Street Angel (1937)


Gabriel F. Y. Tsang



3. ‘City Lights’ and the Dream of Shanghai


Mariagrazia Costantino



4. Wang Anyi’s
Song of Everlasting Sorrow: Memories of Shanghai as Commentary on Modern Society


Lisa Bernstein




Part II: Shanghai as Other



5. Japanese Accounts of Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries


Lianying Shan



6. Shanghai: City of Sin—City of Hope: Representations of Shanghai in Memoirs by Jewish Exiles and in Literary Texts about This Diaspora


Jennifer E. Michaels



7. J. G. Ballard’s Shanghai: The Ur-Postmodern City


Grant Hamilton



8. Shanghai in
The White Countess: Production and Consumption of an Oriental City through the Western Cinematic Gaze


Chu-chueh Cheng




Part III: Shanghai Reinvented for the New Millennium



9. The Shanghai Lady, 1880s–1990s: A Fictional Figure Adrift in the Maelstrom of Chinese Modernity


Andrew David Field



10. Constructed City, Constructed Self: Wei Hui’s
Shanghai Baby and the Unfixing of the Modern Self


Heather Patrick



11. ‘Only Shanghainese Can Understand’: Popularity of Vernacular Performance and Shanghainese Identity


Fang Xu



Contributors

Index

About the author

Lisa Bernstein teaches literature and women’s studies at the University of Maryland University College and is the editor of
(M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body.
Chu-chueh Cheng is Professor of English at National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan, and author of
The Margin without Centre: Kazuo Ishiguro.