Schaefer, Stephen William, “Relics of iconoclasm: Modernism, Shi Zhecun, and Shanghai's margins” (2000)

Title : “Relics of iconoclasm: Modernism, Shi Zhecun, and Shanghai's margins”

Author(s) : Schaefer, Stephen William

Year : 2000

Type : Dissertation

Subject : History

Keywords : culture

University : The University of Chicago

Language:Name : English

Support : Print

Abstract : This study argues that literary and visual modernism became in 1920s–1930s Shanghai a critical aesthetic for reconceiving Modern China's cultural identity, past, and location in the world. Republican Shanghai was defined by colonialist capitalism's fragmentation of its cityscape; the faltering of the iconoclastic, modernizing May Fourth Movement; conservative desires for a national essence; and the increasing mediation of China's relationship to its past and the world by the global circulation of images (photography, illustrated magazines, cinema), which also located the past in archaeological strata, or on China's “primitive” margins. Analyzing previously unexamined materials, I define Shanghai modernism by its engagement with changing relationships among place, image, word, and identity. Traditionalists resisted new visual media by defining Chinese culture through an identity of writing and images, or concealed the fragmentation of place and past by containing photomontage within traditional landscape aesthetics. Shanghai modernists, however, conceived verbal and visual images through the figure of photography as traces of different places and times, and created critical histories and geographies through collage and montage. They constituted Shanghai as a center of modernity vis-à-vis China's margins, even as others located Shanghai on the margins of global modernity. I center on Shi Zhecun—who as editor and writer mapped Shanghai modernism's global context—but also consider Fu Lei, Pang Xunqin, Shao Xunmei, Zhao Jiabi, Mu Fenellosa, Amy Lowell, Apollinaire, and James Frazer. Shi Zhecun's early fictions examine modernity's displacement of relics and memory in semi-rural landscapes. in a subsequent essay, Shi reconceives relics through a photographic image as fragmenting, circulating the globe, and returning the past to China in uncanny forms. Thus Shi's modernist historical tales reconstruct experiences of dislocation on China's geographic, cultural, and ethnic borders, and narrate the transformation of the past's remains into fetishes or relics. Shi's surrealist fictions represent Shanghai as both pastless and haunted by shadows, images, mummies, and ruins of others' pasts. Through pastiches of historical, literary, anthropological, and archaeological, texts and images, Shi's modernism critiques discourses of race and gender, essentialism and linear history underwriting them.