Shadow Photographs, Ruins, and Shanghai's Projected Past

Extract

The foundations of global cities of the present and of cities striving to become global are firmly rooted in the colonial past—whether one considers a metropolitan center like London or cities that developed under colonialism, like Bombay, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Yet questions of foundations, roots, and the past are arguably most problematic in the formerly colonized cities. In Shanghai, for instance, the multiply colonized past has of late become a kind of virtual reality in the present remaking of the city; such redevelopment initiatives as the recent Xintiandi project, in which an entire neighborhood was emptied of its residents, restored to its colonial-era appearance, and transformed into a shopping and entertainment complex, offer the visitor nostalgic fantasies of the past as drained of critical understanding as the marshy ground beneath the project was of water. Tis perception of Shanghai and its past as a virtual reality produced out of a history of colonialism is, however, hardly new and indeed was a perception that haunted selfrepresentations of Shanghai at the height of the colonial era, during the first half of the twentieth century. As the modernist writer Mu Shiying put it in a 1933 text, Shanghai's streets were “transplanted from Europe” and “paved with shadows” (568).