The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city's image as a global metropolis. In "Shanghai Nightscapes", sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures – the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century. The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai's foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today's Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed".Shanghai Nightscapes" highlights the continuities in the city's nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China's greatest global city.
Contents:
Preface
1. Scenes and Nightscapes
2. The Golden Age of the Jazz Cabaret
3. The Fall and Rise of Social Dance
4. Transnational Club Cultures
5. Imbibing Cosmopolitanism
6. Jazz Metropolis
7. Nightlife Sexual Scenes
8. From Interzones to Transzones
9. Nightlife Neighborhoods
Notes
Index
About the Author
James Farrer is professor of sociology and global studies at Sophia University, Tokyo.
Andrew David Field is the author of "Shanghai's Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954" and "Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist".
Reviews
"In 'Shanghai Nightscapes', Farrer and Field use historical and ethnographic methods to shed new light on a question that has intrigued many scholars, novelists, journalists, and travel writers. Namely, to what extent have patterns from Shanghai's celebrated and notorious jazz age past reemerged in the contemporary era, as the protean city has become once again a hub for flows into China of foreign ideas, fashions, and lifestyles. Drawing on fiction, archival documents, interviews, and personal observations, they provide a vivid account of nocturnal life in two eras. They also demonstrate how much can be learned about continuity and change in a cosmopolitan metropolis by zeroing in on how residents of different nationalities disport themselves in dance halls, discos, clubs, and bars" – Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of "Global Shanghai and China in the 21st Century"
"Farrer and Field, two long-time observers of Shanghai's cultural scene, have written a compelling new book on the history of the nightlife in Shanghai from the Jazz Age to the market reform. With intimate knowledge on Shanghai's clubbing scenes, the book tells a story of both continuity and change in the sexual culture and nightlife of China's most cosmopolitan city. Shanghai emerges in the book as a nodal 'global city' at the crossroad of the transnational nightclub cultures. It's a must-read for students interested in urban China, cultural studies, sexuality, and globalization" – Xuefei Ren, author of "Building Globalization and Urban China"
