In the Mood for Colonial Revivals: Chinese Femininity and Colonial Modernity in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai

• In Event: 162. Haunting Femininity and Postcolonial Imaginations

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the revivification of Chinese colonial modernity across cultural domains. Examining a transmedia archive marked by the superimposition of three cities onto one another, I focus on the material, affective, and historical doublings that occur between Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. My analysis concentrates on femininity and the sartorial styles highlighted in visual media and hospitality venues. While Wong Kar-wai’s films turn on the nostalgic-futuristic distressing of a Chinese femininity of 1930s and 1960s Shanghai and Hong Kong, nightclubs such as Bangkok’s “Maggie Choo’s” likewise exploit Chinese femininity as part of the texture of revived colonial cosmopolitanisms. Physically, materially, and affectively, these styles of Chinese femininity and the location of post/colonial Bangkok furnish the raw material for the layering of cosmopolitan moods, textures, and histories. Especially the chronotope of Bangkok’s disavowed coloniality allows for the mobility in time necessary for the visceral reliving of a colonial ideal. Rather than dismiss it as merely bad taste or questionable politics, I examine this phenomenon as a fetish in the Marxian and psychoanalytic senses. What might the prevalence of distressed, translocal Chinese femininities tell us about alternate regional imaginaries in the present? I argue that the textures of femininity and of the city emerge as elements of film syntax and club and hotel decor, but also furnish a material substrate that breathes life into alternate regional imaginaries that exceed those of the Cold War and of an Asia ‘rising’ under the dominance of the People’s Republic of China.

Author

• Arnika Fuhrmann, Cornell University