Shanghai, 11 June 2010

Paper delivered at Flying University of the Transnational Humanities, Reseach Centre for Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, June 2010.

What's Wrong with the Alternative Modernities Thesis

Critical accounts of regionalism always seem to end up as debates about modernity. Defined sometimes in terms of time and at others in terms of social or political form, modernity is perhaps too general a concept. Without doubt it has enabling effects which move the discussion of regionalism beyond the polarising bind of universalism and particularism. Yet it can also inhibit discussion by swinging the debate away from historical detail and toward schematic simplifications of interactions between civilizations or cultures. It is by now widely recognised that modernity is a global phenomenon and not merely the result of the upheavals, industrialisation, revolutions and enlightenments that began to occur in Europe over five centuries ago. At the very least there is acceptance that modernity must reckon with the history of European colonialism and that the two way traffic between metropolis and colony was central to its emergence. More forcefully than this, the thesis of alternative or multiple modernities posits a plurality of modernities throughout the world. Each arises under different circumstances and interacts with the others, but nonetheless displays its own internal contradictions.  It is to this thesis that I wish to turn my attention today.

By Anja Kanngieser and Manuela Zechner

On 8th July 2010 a conversation with Chen Hangfeng and Chris Connery, hosted by Manuela Zechner and Anja Kanngieser, took place in Shanghai, looking into the present from the point of view of a desirable future.

Shanghai’s State of the Creative Arts at the Opening of the Rockbund Art Museum

Cross-posted from net critique

The Rockbund Art Museum, situated on the Northern tip of the Shanghai Bund area, opened May 2010 in conjunction with the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (expected visitors 70 million). The museum is part of a redevelopment area and is housed in the 1932 art deco building of the Royal Asiatic Society, once location of a natural history museum. As part of larger real estate development, still under construction at the time of the opening, the museum will fit into a most exclusive part of the inner city. According to the brochure of the Rockbund Investment Corporation that also owns the new museum the ‘urban renaissance’ at the birthplace of modern Shanghai celebrates ‘the glamour of heritage reborn.’ The aim is ‘to create the most elite luxury area in Shanghai.’ Rockbund will re-establish the northern tip of the Bund as a hub for arts and culture. Apartments are sold with the promise ‘to live in the lap of glamour.’