The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader

By Christoph Lindner

Shanghai, long known as mainland China's most cosmopolitan city, is today a global cultural capital. This book offers the first in-depth examination of contemporary Shanghai-based art and design - from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. Informed by years of in-situ research, the book looks beyond contemporary art's global hype to reveal the socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghai's transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Case studies reveal how Shanghai's global aesthetic constructs glamorising artifices that mask the conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity and anti-colonialist nationalism, as well as the city's repressed socialist past and its consumerist present.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0719065410
• ISBN13: 9780719065415
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.3"