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

In the Mood for Texture considers 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.

Arnika Fuhrmann is Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is the author of Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong as well as Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema, which was published by Duke University Press.