Un-masking Shanghai: History, Memory And Cosmopolitics in Wang Anyi's "Moonstruck" (Yuese liao ren, 2008)

Abstract

In the emergent society of consumption and under the sway of cosmopolitanism, Shanghai and her past are being dissolved into spectacles. Cultural production has demonstrated a decline to the immediate and the everyday, to consumption practices and personal pleasure. In opposition to this, writers like Wang Anyi strive to renew engagement with history and memory, endeavoring to understand the swift changes in social reality through revisiting the past. Previous scholarship on Wang probed occasionally the thematic implications of cosmopolitcs but has not engaged in systematic study of the relationship between local culture, memory, and the flow of migrant workers in the age of globalization. This paper aims to examine the notions of history and the body as the protagonists reconcile their estrangement in everyday life through recalling the memories that they have lost. It will also look closely at this work of Wang, for how it redefines contemporary Shanghai urbanites’ everyday experience through the issue of cosmopolitanism, and how the recovery of the past provides a critique of the materialistic culture of Shanghai and China. The aspects of local culture(s) and its resistant voices will also be highlighted.