In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City [Paperback]

In the Mood for Textureconsiders the revival of Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity in contemporary Southeast Asian cultural production, both virtual and material. By analyzing how twentieth-century Shanghai and Hong Kong have been revived in modern Bangkok’s architecture, design, fashion, and nightlife, Arnika Fuhrmann shows how Chinese pasts are redeployed in contemporary film, literature, and hospitality venues to shape present visions of Asia. At the heart of this inquiry stand Shanghai and Hong Kong’s anomalous colonial temporalities and Thailand’s semi-colonial temporality of the “never” and “yet still” of colonization. Attending to the textures of built environments and agentive female subjects, Fuhrmann reconceptualizes the revival of Bangkok’s Chinese pasts and demonstrates how Southeast Asian imaginations can challenge both domestic and diasporic narratives of identity and collectivity beyond China.USIn the Mood for Textureanalyzes how Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity are revived in Bangkok through film, literature, architecture, fashion, and nightlife to shape present visions of Asia.Arnika Fuhrmann is Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is the author ofTeardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapongas well asGhostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema, which was published by Duke University Press.“Grounded by Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film, Fuhrmann explores the linkages between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. This expansive study considers the different ways movies, social media, literary texts, and architecture engage in Chinese revivalism to create a site of fantasy that makes possible a variety of spatial-temporal experiments. In the Mood for Textureis an outstanding, tour-de-force of investigation intl£i