Event

This talk will introduce the book Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City written by James Farrer and Andrew David Field (University of Chicago Press 2015). Since Orville Schell’s 1988 book Discos and Democracy urban nightlife has been identified as one of the visible markers of social change in China. Nightlife is a space in which class, gender, sexual, and other more subcultural identities are publicly performed. The urban nightscape is also a space of global flows, in which imported ideologies, images, sounds, tastes, and people are enjoyed and localized by Chinese people, especially youth. The talk will focus on the changes in the popular culture of dancing – from the 1920s to the present – showing how dance clubs have served as spaces for new forms of gendered sociability. In particular, the talk will focus on how dance clubs since the 1980s have transformed from mass leisure spaces into stages for conspicuous consumption and social distinction, with recent norms of clubbing sociability – focused on drinking rather than dancing--increasingly constricting interactions to exclusive in-groups.

James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, specializing in urban studies in East Asia, including research on expatriate communities, nightlife, sexuality, and food cultures. His publications include Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai, Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (with Andrew Field), and Globalization and Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Contact Zones (editor).