Overview
- Argues China is ‘where the action is’ in terms of the future of capitalism and provides a series of detailed soundings of contemporary culture
- Sheds fresh cinematic light on surreal urban simulations characteristic of postsocialist Chinese cities
- Blends empirical data, fictocritical methods, 4E Psychogeography, film-philosophy and other interdisciplinary methods to create a different take on global media/urban theory
- Engineers an original encounter between the Chinese concept of Shi (?) and Western theories of urbanism, cinema and contemporary capitalism
- Shows that cinematicity of capital in China develops in tandem with a becoming-image and becoming-cinema of culture
- Develops a Realist fractal model that allows for Vertigenous scale shifts of analysis from the nation state down to individual embodied (trans)actions
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book dives into the mise-en-scène of contemporary China to explore the “becoming cinema” of Chinese cities, societies, and subjectivities. Set in the wake of China’s radical and rapid period of urbanization and infrastructural transformation, and situating itself in the processual city of Ningbo, the book combines empirical, ficto-critical, and philosophical methods to generate a dynamic account of everyday life as new forms of consumer culture bed in. Harnessing a Realist approach that allows for different scales of analysis, the book zooms in on five architectural assemblages including: surreal real estate showrooms; a fragmented history museum; China’s “first and best” Sino-foreign university; a new “Old town”; and weird gamified “any-now(here)-spaces.” Together these modern arrangements and machines for living cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up greater China.
Reviews
“In Chinese Urban Shi-nema, David Fleming and Simon Harrison offer an absolutely original, insightful, and witty analysis of Ningbo as a postsocialist semiocapitalist urban shi-nema. From the real estate showroom of Bali Sunday, the Ningbo History Museum, the UNNC campus, the actual Bali Sunday site, to the newly constructed Nantang ‘Old’ Street, the authors demonstrate how each form, affect, sensation, desire, anxiety, and decision is configured as a cinematic process of becoming. Written in a truly interdisciplinary manner, Fleming and Harrison employ film and media philosophy and theory, sociology, cultural studies, geography, and art history to engage us in all the intricate details and relationalities of these fascinating case studies. By putting Euro-American thoughts in conversation with their Chinese counterparts, the authors show how these conceptual frameworks have been alive in our everyday experience under neoliberalism––not only in China, but in every configurative element of global capitalism.” (Dr Victor Fan, King’s College London)
“Employing a judicious collection of case studies from film, architecture, higher education and the property market, Fleming and Harrison have produced a deftly-written psychogeography of the contemporary Chinese city. The authors peel back the skin of the city to reveal urbanscapes unfamiliar even to long-term residents of Ningbo, but nonetheless exhilarating. These observations are underpinned by a theory of the screen that is compelling to the reader in its articulation of a concept that here is inter-woven with motifs and ideas that draw on Chinese culture. For all those who seek insights from the collision of screens, global capitalism and contemporary Chinese urban culture, there is no more sure-footed guide than Fleming and Harrison’s impressive book.” (Professor Andrew White, University of Nottingham Ningbo China)
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
David H. Fleming is Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media and Culture division at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He is co-author of The Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulhumedia with William Brown (2020), and the author of Unbecoming Cinema (2017).
Simon Harrison is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. He is author of The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect (2018).Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Chinese Urban Shi-nema
Book Subtitle: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China
Authors: David H. Fleming, Simon Harrison
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49675-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-49674-6Published: 01 December 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-49677-7Published: 02 December 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-49675-3Published: 30 November 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 235
Number of Illustrations: 40 illustrations in colour
Topics: Asian Cinema and TV, Asian Culture, Urbanism