《上海的懷舊政治》 (The Politics of Shanghai Nostalgia)

Considering present-day Shanghai as a palimpsest, or a cityscape of a spectrum of diverse values and elements, this paper tries to understand how nostalgia works in the spatial fabric of Shanghai. In comparison with the ideas that assume that the local as a single end of the power relations in globalization, which is usually conceived as a victim or a tool in either nationalism and global capitalism, I argue that, rather than directly elicit nostalgia as a form of commodity fetishism, globalization provides a lens under which we observe that the historical tension between local and national dichotomies, or more precisely the rival understandings of Chinese modernity, is the intrinsic cause of Shanghai nostalgia.