Lexington Books
Pages: 276
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-7936-3531-0 • Hardback • June 2021 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-7936-3532-7 • eBook • June 2021 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Fang Xu is lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Studies Field program at University of California, Berkeley.
Chapter 1: A Cosmopolitan Past
Chapter 2: “China Dream” vs the Shanghai Dialect
Chapter 3: Geographical Displacement and Language Loss
Chapter 4: Social Integration and “New Shanghairen” as Euphemism
Chapter 5: Forever Waidiren or Honorary Shanghairen?
Silencing Shanghai is a lucid and poignant account of the precipitous decline of the distinctive Shanghai dialect, or language, that once thoroughly permeated life in this city. This unique ethnography treats this urban dialect as a lens on the struggle to maintain a distinct urban identity and culture in the face of neoliberal globalization and state-led nation-building. The book examines both insiders -- the Shanghairen -- and newcomers -- the new migrants from other parts of China -- as they try to maintain or establish their positions in this ever-changing global city.
— James Farrer, Professor of Sociology at Sophia University in Tokyo and author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai and International Migrants in China's Global City: The New Shanghailanders
Fang Xu’s Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China is a welcome addition to the limited, non-ideological scholarship about the world’s largest country that continues to suffer from ideological bias and related western exoticism. Employing a wide range of multimodal methods, quantitative and qualitative data, and linguistically-informed rich ethnography, Xu describes, discusses, and gives close up examples of the impact of a century of intensive Chinese nation-building, and subsequent neoliberal globalization of this great city.... I must note at the end of this review, that despite its modest 276-page length, Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China covers much more territory than I would be able to cover, even in a long review essay. In essence, it is a book that ought to be read in its entirety.
— Urbanities