Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City . By James Farrer and Andrew David Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. viii+266, $85.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/692529
ISSN1537-5390
Autores Tópico(s)Asian American and Pacific Histories
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewShanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City. By James Farrer and Andrew David Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. viii+266, $85.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).Tani BarlowTani BarlowRice University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFarrer and Field’s book Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City posits that pleasure seeking after dark in the city is driving modern, Chinese, liberated, erotic “identity” in Shanghai and China. The authors take a multilayer approach. First comes history. In the first third of the 20th century and again in post-Mao liberalization, Shanghai became the vortex of capital accumulation and consumer culture. Late 19th-century local pleasure seekers had also played sexual games, gotten stoned, and sought emotional release, but this traditional play revolved around an immobile male patron, a voyeur. Modern patrons get up and dance or are aroused in D.J.-curated sound fields. Second is globalization. “Clubbing” is said to pull Shanghai habitués into an international, cosmopolitan, interracial, propulsive world of international pleasure sharing. Despite superficial differences—for example, Chinese party in exclusive rooms and share expensive bottles of whiskey, foreign men drink at the open bars and go for easy pickups or alleyway blow jobs—both communities of night crawlers value individual emotional and erotic expression. Third, Farrer and Field establish a space called the “complex clubbing ecology” (p. 75). The authors present a lot of great data tracking class- and age-segregated, local or transnational, high-end and low-end, neighborhood nightlife. Finally, in the most durable idea (they pick up and put down notions including, club panopticon, sexual modernity, David Harvey’s “night time economy,” nightlife masculinity, George Simmel’s sociability theory, Irving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, and William Simon and John H. Gagnon’s sexual scripts) the authors distinguish between an “interzone in the 1930s, where people of various nationalities mixed in a common setting but remained largely segregated socially,” and the contemporary “transzone in which social and cultural mixing among races and nationalities” is commonplace (p. 149). This embellishes a perceived historical continuity and advertises the authors’ assumption that neoliberalization of sexual expression is a historically, politically, and progressive fact.The book provides material about Shanghai’s financiers, cultural entrepreneurs, and adventurers. It confirms multinational corporate imperialism’s role in Shanghai’s contemporary pleasure industry. But the general thesis suggests that night crawling creates opportunities for sexual play that pushes against authoritarian social controls. To make this point, Farrer and Field reference, in area studies style, whatever scholarship they fancy. This leads to some confusion. For instance, Farrer and Field underplay the conceptual work of historians Gail Hershatter and Catherine Yeh Vance, both highly regarded specialists on the demimonde the 20th-century Shanghai teahouses and brothels. Actually Hershatter and Vance each defines a “modern” distinctly at odds with Farrer and Field’s views (Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai [University of California Press, 1997]; and Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 [University of Washington Press, 2006]).In disciplinary terms, historians select facts to establish a general thesis. Vance argued that foot-binding aside, late 19th- and early 20th-century contemporaries associated courtesans and prostitutes with industrially produced commodities, and that is why public women exemplified modern commercial culture. Hershatter’s more diffuse thesis holds that voiceless sex workers’ lives, life strategies, and manipulation of modern glamor prove that women at all levels in the pleasure industry were subjects as well as sexual objects.Sociologists exploit historians’ empiricism at their own peril. Comparing sexual expression in 1883 to what might or might not be analogous practices in 1934 and 2014 establishes an imaginary trajectory. The voyeur elite consumer gives way to the active, individual, agential, male and female pleasure seeker. Sexual choice appears in story form to be an evolving, democratic alternative to old school gentry’s pleasure worlds. Farrer and Field also presume that the revolution and Maoist development polices formed a brief interregnum in the midst of a longue durée of cultural liberalization. That is supposition, not a fact. Centuries-long trends of labor involution and famine (bringing female rural labor to the city), rural rebellion (30 million dead just from the mid-19th-century Taiping Rebellion), multinational military and economic occupation, colonial governmentality, extraterritoriality, and the Unequal Treaty system, all shaped 20th-century political conflict over how the People’s Republic of China will manage opportunity and risk. Parallels are interesting but prove little.In this book, interdisciplinarity has messed with discipline. Had they relied on a less area-studies-influenced sociology, like Kimberly Kay Hoang’s monograph (Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work [Oakland: University of California, 2015]), Farrer and Field would have tightened up their generalization. Hoang’s study of clubbing in Vietnam reveals hostesses’ dynamic brokering of inequality in high-roller bar culture. There, elite prostitutes manage male desire and investment capital, are witness to the racial triumph of Asian male capitalists over the whites, and handle in- and out-group dynamics. This is the same phenomenon seen through a grounded analysis. Farrer and Field appear to have come to night crawling as young consumers and remained observers for decades. Hoang embedded herself and became a high-end prostitute manqué, a “hostess” participant observer. She relied on political connections and male patrons’ goodwill to participate in the service side and to deal in the cultural currencies she uncovered. Area studies have also tended to quarantine female labor migration studies. Farrer and Field might have broadened their study if they had asked where the migrant office workers, hostesses, patrons, and prostitutes originated. Sociologists Rhacel Salazar Parrenas (transnational hostessing), Pun Ngai (South China female factory workers), and Hairong Yan (migrant domestic workers) have all foregrounded historical forces that feed women into spaces like Shanghai’s club scenes (Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo [Stanford University Press, 2011]; Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace [Duke University Press, 2005]; and Hairong Yan, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China [Duke University Press, 2008]). Reference to studies about female labor might resolve questions I had about the actual prostitutes who populate these nightscapes, the streetwalkers, working girls, girls-for-hire in bars, and even the predatory, curious hookup girls who want a round of sex with a foreigner. Most of them came from somewhere else.Shanghai Nightscapes struggles methodologically to distinguish libido, self-expression, and personal choice from paid genital sex. In chapter 7, “Nightlife Sexual Scenes,” the authors introduce “sexual modernity,” meaning recognition that family formation and recreational sex are different. Farrer and Field’s celebration of what they characterize as an evolution of self-understanding while acknowledging that narcissistic self-realization under a male erotic gaze is in fact rooted in monetized genital sex also known as prostitution. Still this is a celebratory book. Orgasms and orgasmic play are unambiguously classified as historically progressive. This bias ends up nullifying the topic’s scholarly potential since the critique goes missing. Even granting a neoliberal position on sexual pleasure, it is hard to sell the idea that a girl masturbating a boy on a dance floor is emancipatory. It may be a lot of fun. But I am not yet convinced that a bar culture ethnography contributes to understanding what our conjoined social freedoms in the future are likely to be. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 123, Number 1July 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692529 For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Referência(s)