Memories in the Making: Media, Memory, Performance

Abstract

The memory practices of concern in this book are now budding, locally and globally. Discussing the renewed importance of memory in our global age, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad argue that due to globalization (and not least through digitization) we have seen a dramatic transformation of both the spaces where memories emerge and are recalled, and in consequence how memory communities are composed (2010).¹ This resonates with the fact that there seems to be a matching of Shanghai’s memory politics and particularist identity with the driving forces and ideologies of the transnational elites and their memory practices. These groups make impressions on cities. As leading anthropologists have argued, through their distinct cultural competence, practices and discourses, and their cosmopolitan uniqueness, as well as their hypermobile careers, transnational elites navigate and set in motion the social production of world city space (Hannerz 1996; Beaverstock 2001). As these groups, who circulate the global city, dock in Shanghai, they also partake in the production of its local place identity formation through performances of memory that relate to Shanghai’s mediated memories, local heritage and vernacular culture of cosmopolitanism (cf. Beck 2002; Levy & Sznaider 2006; Rueda Laffond 2011: 176).