Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Shadow Modernism : Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925-1937, Hardback Book

Shadow Modernism : Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925-1937 Hardback

Hardback

Description

During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China's new media culture.

Described by the modernist writer Mu Shiying as "transplanted from Europe" and "paved with shadows," for many of its residents Shanghai was a city without a past paradoxically haunted by the absent past's traces.

In Shadow Modernism William Schaefer traces how photographic practices in Shanghai provided a forum within which to debate culture, ethnicity, history, and the very nature of images.

The central modernist form in China, photography was neither understood nor practiced as primarily a medium for realist representation; rather, photo layouts, shadow photography, and photomontage rearranged and recomposed time and space, cutting apart and stitching places, people, and periods together in novel and surreal ways.

Analyzing unknown and overlooked photographs, photomontages, cartoons, paintings, and experimental fiction and poetry, Schaefer shows how artists and writers used such fragmentation and juxtaposition to make visible the shadows of modernity in Shanghai: the violence, the past, the ethnic and cultural multiplicity excluded and repressed by the prevailing cultural politics of the era and yet hidden in plain sight.

Information

Other Formats

Save 6%

£97.00

£90.55

 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information