MACMILLAN Chinese Urban Shi-nema: Cinematicity, Society and Millennial China

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.                  Review “The zeitgeist has landed in China. Negotiating the vertiginous landscape wrought in its wake, Fleming and Harrison chart its cultural contours with considerable acumen and aplomb.” (Professor David B. Clarke, Swansea University) “In Chinese Urban Shi-nema, David Fleming and Simon Harrison offer an absolutely original, insightful, and witty analysis of Ningbo as a postsocialist semiocapitalist urban shi-nema. From the real estate showroom of Bali Sunday, the Ningbo History Museum, the UNNC campus, the actual Bali Sunday site, to the newly constructed Nantang ‘Old’ Street, the authors demonstrate how each form, affect, sensation, desire, anxiety, and decision is configured as a cinematic process of becoming. Written in a truly interdisciplinary manner, Fleming and Harrison employ film and media philosophy and theory, sociology, cultural studies, geography, and art history to engage us in all the intricate details and relationalities of these fascinating case studies. By putting Euro-American thoughts in conversation with their Chinese counterparts, the authors show how these conceptual frameworks have been alive in our everyday experience under neoliberalism––not only in China, but in every configurative element of global capitalism.” (Dr Victor Fan, King’s College London) “Employing a judicious collection of case studies from film, architecture, higher education and the property market, Fleming and Harrison have produced a deftly-written psychogeography of the contemporary Chinese city. The authors peel back the skin of the city to reveal urbanscapes unfamiliar even to long-term residents of Ningbo, but nonetheless exhilarating. These observations are underpinned by a theory of the screen that is compelling to the reader in its articulation of a concept that here is inter-woven with motifs and ideas that draw on Chinese culture. For all those who seek insights from the collision of screens, global capitalism and contemporary Chinese urban culture, there is no more sure-footed guide than Fleming and Harrison’s impressive book.” (Professor Andrew White, University of Nottingham Ningbo China) About the Author 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).