從「小城青年」到「新上海人」:《小時代》與大都會「新中產」之自我想像
Other Title
Imagining the Entitled Middle-class Self in the Global City: Tiny Times, Small-Town Youth and the New Shanghainese
Journal
台灣社會研究季刊
Journal Issue
106
Pages
43-87
Date Issued
2017
Author(s)
董牧孜
Abstract
This chapter seeks to examine images and imaginaries of classed selves in contemporary urban China, arguing that central to the cultural politics of middle-class identity is the ideology of conflating class as social strata with class as taste and distinction. An outline of the urbanization of China’s small towns, intra-city competition, and the effects of this hierarchized space on subject formation will be followed by a close reading of the urban writings of Guo Jingming, a small–town–boy–cum–Shanghainese writer. Both Guo’s early writings on Shanghai fever and his novels of the city’s second–generation nouveau riche will be discussed in an effort to reach a critical understanding of the methods by which an entitled middle–class self-image – marked by the accumulation of cultural capital, conspicuous consumption and the aestheticization of one’s lifestyle – is formed in a first–tier global city as well as why the success stories of this Shanghai newcomer are always haunted by the specter of his abandoned small–town identity. This inquiry will demonstrate thst what is central to Guo’s narratives is how he reproduces the urban imaginary of development built around the fictional paradigm of the “global city” by means of the dubious representations of class and the issues therein. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner.
Type
journal article