Please note: This event has been postponed until further notice.
Nanjing Road can be perceived as a slice of Chinese modernity. Built in the mid-1840s by the earliest British residents shortly after the Opium War, Nanjing Road was Shanghai’s (and China’s) most central commercial place within a decade, encapsulating several salient aspects of modernity: industrialization, consumerism, science and technology, hygiene and order, and the emergence of the bourgeois class. Drawing upon a variety of sources including archival materials, fiction, and films, this paper provides a critical reading of Nanjing Road as a geocultural text, exploring multilayered interactions between cityscape, sensescape (smellscape in particular), and mediascape. Particular attention will be given to the sense of smell. I argue that apparently fleeting, elusive, and variegated odours helped contemporary passengers conceptualize physical, social and medial space, store memories, evoke desires, and engage with history. This study examines three historical junctures that, I believe, were important in the making and remaking of the mental images of Nanjing Road through olfaction. I first look at the initial phase of olfactory identity building in the 1850s and 1860s by means of deodorization, a key effort in urban modernization worldwide. Then I offer a reading of a 1930s olfactory/affective map of desire suggested in urban modernist writing. While the mental image of Nanjing Road acquired the meanings of eroticism, exoticism, and decadence during this process that peaked in the 1930s, these meanings were subjected to rigorous remolding in the Mao era by means of “re-deodorizing” in a new sense. This process is displayed on a new mediascape indicated in a Mao-era play/film, the focus of investigation in the third section of this paper. All in all, cognitive and affective mapping of Nanjing Road in the course of the long span of a century’s time will shed some light on the roles of the senses in the cultural history of Chinese modernity.
About the speaker:
Xuelei Huang is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922-1938 (2014), and a number of essays on Chinese film and cultural history published in Modern Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Twentieth-century China, and other academic journals. She has co-curated Chinese film programmes for the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival in Scotland and Edinburgh Filmhouse. She has also taken various research positions in Germany, Taiwan, France and Austria. Her current research project focuses on a social and cultural history of smell in modern China and explores the roles of sensory/olfactory experience in the shaping of modern social imaginaries.