This book dives into the mise-en-scène of contemporary China to explore the “becoming cinema” of Chinese cities, societies, and subjectivities. Set in the wake of China’s radical and rapid period of urbanization and infrastructural transformation, and situating itself in the processual city of Ningbo, the book combines empirical, ficto-critical, and philosophical methods to generate a dynamic account of everyday life as new forms of consumer culture bed in. Harnessing a Realist approach that allows for different scales of analysis, the book zooms in on five architectural assemblages including: surreal real estate showrooms; a fragmented history museum; China’s “first and best” Sino-foreign university; a new “Old town”; and weird gamified “any-now(here)-spaces.” Together these modern arrangements and machines for living cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up greater China.
1. Introduction.-
2. Shi-Story and Theory.-
3. Commercial Overground
Shi-Nema: Some Notes onCinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream
(Un) Real Estate in Contemporary China.- 4. In-dependent Art Shi-Nema:
Decomposing the Main Melody via Monu-mental Time-Images.- 5. Transnational
Sci-Fi Shi-nema: Or, Diary Notes from Westworld Regarding Neoliberal
Dulosis, Academic Automatons and the Franchised Post-historical
University in the Era of Global Excellence.- 6. Shi-Nematic Games (Casino
Capitalism).-
7. Epilogue: Disneyfied Dreamwork Shinema-Tracing a New "Old"
Path Through the Inauthentic "Traditional.
David H. Fleming is Senior Lecturer in the Communication, Media and Culture division at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He is co-author of The Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulhumedia with William Brown (2020), and the author of Unbecoming Cinema (2017).
Simon Harrison is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. He is author of The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect (2018).
