Written from interdisciplinary perspectives across global urban, cultural, and area studies, the thirteen essays collected in Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture present a dynamic texture of wide-ranging critical analyses of the representation of the Chinese city. Inspired by French Situationist Guy Debord's writings on the society of the spectacle, many contributors to this edited volume revisit the dialectical relations between imagination and reality, construction and deconstruction, and longing and belonging, in the context of Chinese modernity and global capitalism. Together, these interdisciplinary essays address the urgently felt need in the field of Chinese urban studies to interpret the art and literature produced in the context of the recent radical urbanization in Greater China.
The volume seeks to “seriously engage with the rapid circulation of imaginations of the Chinese city” (p. 13). Citing Debord, editors Jeroen de Kloet and Lena Scheen highlight the fluidity denoted by the notion of “city-as-spectacle.” They believe that “spectacle” can only be captured as social relations that derive from everyday life and its representation, and that it is an intricate part of the constantly restructured urban fabric and its emphatic establishment of the coevalness of different urban forms and experiences. In other words, “spectacle” needs to be understood through the critique of oppositional binaries such as the “West” versus the “East,” “center” versus “periphery,” and the “developed” versus the “developing.” It is in this context that the editors attempt to examine the cultural-political juxtaposition of Chinese socialism and global capitalism by reading the Chinese city as a form of modernity and postmodernity on display, in other words, to explain that “an official commitment to communism can so smoothly be merged with an even stronger commitment to capitalism” (p. 14).
The major themes that emerge from the essays are urban demolition, nostalgia for the bygone, and temporal-spatial restructuring and staging of the Chinese city. Although trained in different academic disciplines, the authors write with shared concerns, such as how to position the Chinese city-as-spectacle and how to reconcile the dialectic relations between nationhood and a sense of cultural belonging, and between cosmopolitanism and world citizenship.
Spectacle in the Chinese city cannot be addressed without discussing the cultural politics of demolition and nostalgia. Stefan Landsberger, Gladys Pak Lei Chong, Gregory Bracken, Margaret Hillenbrand, Ou Ning, John Nguyet Erni, and Chua Beng Huat all observe the consequences of Chinese urbanism, and regard many of them with a critical and empathetic eye. Artistic and literary themes, such as nostalgia for the past, delineation of the present, and longing for the future, are negotiated through the authors' quests for understanding Chinese modernity and postmodernity as they are embodied by the metamorphosis of the Chinese city. Although some case studies sound a one-tone celebration of urban regeneration, the majority of this cohort of scholars devote their attention to the fundamental problems embedded within the Chinese hyper-urbanization process.
Ackbar Abbas proposes a fascinating perspective that explains the entanglement of socialism as a posthumous specter and an anti-spectacular performance of space. His reading of sixth-generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke's Still Life (Sanxia hao ren, 2006) enables possibilities for redefining what is real, visible, and intelligible. Meanwhile, his critique of the fifth-generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou's direction of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony calls for rethinking Tiananmen Square as a political and urban space that marked the symbolic turn of post-Mao Chinese socialism in 1989. Abbas's satiric interpretation of the relation between the mode of remembering and the mode of forgetting of the Chinese socialist experience in postsocialist China is evidently provocative: “Forgetting is also a matter of remembering as something else; that is, forgetting is additive, not subtractive” (p. 23). According to Abbas, the speed, scope, and scale of Chinese urbanism signifies a type of additive forgetting that creates an integrated urban space that is in constant negotiation with spectacle and anti-spectacle.
Dwelling on Cao Fei's futuristic art production, RMB City, Robin Visser, Yomi Braester, and Jeroen de Kloet all focus on political discourse, alternative space, and the Chinese city-as-spectacle. Visser discovers the discursive meaning that emanates from RMB City. She argues that productions such as Cao Fei's RMB City and Yu Hua's Brothers are critical of the spectacle and “have the potential to disrupt the spectacle” (p. 57). These temporal and spatial traces of critique, however, are nevertheless overshadowed by the monster-city-as-spectacle, and “become so quickly subsumed by the spectacle that [anti-spectacle] no longer has the power to haunt us” (p. 57). She thus aspires to an oppositional stance toward totality. Echoing Visser, Braester also envisions this kind of limitation of RMB City, a city that is built as an island on which modern Chinese architectural landmarks are viewed as an “avatar,” a “virtopia” (i.e., a virtual utopia) in the built environment. He identifies a crisis of representation conditioned by what he calls “neoliberal policies of urban growth through architectural technologies of visualization” (p. 73). Similarly, De Kloet portrays RMB City as “rooted in game culture,” “a surreal place,” and “a place where life waits to happen” (p. 79). For him, the modes of representation that traverse global consumption and materialism seem to forge a utopia/dystopia through a haptic world of Chinese urbanism. This type of critical sensibility is shared by Jeroen Broenewegen-Lau in his analyses of the projects of Chinese soundscape artists, and by Lena Scheen in her critique of the literary geography of Shanghai as a city of femmes fatales and male narcissists encapsulated in the overflow of global capital.
In conclusion, readers interested in cognitive mapping of the Chinese city-as-spectacle will be rewarded by reading this contemporary volume, which offers a timely intervention in the critique of the present radical urbanization in Greater China.
