ABSTRACT
In the collection Shanghai Lounge Divas, rhythms from the past become encroached by the rhythms of today, in a remix of jazz originally recorded by Pathé in their Shanghai studio in the 1930s. Listening to these old songs – now encrusted by the sleek, groovy sounds of the global lounge – is one way of reading, or perhaps rather, hearing out the sensuous and obscure imaginary of today’s Shanghai. This CD seems illustrative of that specic experience of layers of time, those laminations of modernities and urban ideologies (cf. Qingyung 2006) that stand out as the quintessence of this hodgepodge place, where ‘yesterday’ always meets ‘tomorrow’. The unorthodox blending of styles within these remarkable tunes discloses those temporal co-existences and ‘juxtastructures’ of past, present and future (Crang and Travlou 2001), that are distinctive of this globalizing Asian mega city, a place where the 1930s as a mediated mythology and memory of the city (see Boyer 2002), are constantly materialized and replayed. While it seems valid to concede in line with – for example – Mike Crang that ‘places have always had different temporalities orchestrated through them’ (2001, 191), this, as I will attempt to show, has a particular pertinence in the context of contemporary Shanghai. While the city seems to exemplify broader cultural tendencies of modernization, that are patterned on global traits of late modern capitalism, the co-existences of temporalities are here radically heightened. Hence, in this chapter, I will gravitate to the singularities and specicities of Shanghai on this note. Drawing on Andreas Huyssen, I will discuss Shanghai as a locus of accumulated nonsynchronicities where ‘a very hybrid structure of temporality seems to be emerging’ (1995, 8). Hence, I will suggest that rather than simply recalling the past or moving together, if at different paces, into the future the rhythms of
the city also exemplify new emerging forms of modernization, pervaded by extraordinary frenzies of temporal overlap.
