Benedict Anderson’s deservedly famous thesis about the origins and nature
of modern nationalism turns around the central notion of an “imagined
community.” This category provides him with a matrix out of which one
can apprehend-theoretically and historically-the different variants of nationalist discourse formulated over the last two hundred years. We will refer,
in the brief comments that follow, to three basic dimensions structuring
the fabric of Anderson’s argument: 1) the presuppositions implicit in the
notion of an “imagined” community; 2) the kind of substitutability or solidarity which is required to be a member of such a community; 3) the kind
of relationship that is established between such a community-which is by
definition finite or limited-and its outside. Before that, however, let us
describe the main features of Anderson’s thesis.

On Imagined Communities

Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity, by Marie-Claire Bergere, translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. xxii + 497 pp. US$80.00 (hardcover), US$29.95 (paperback). Do cities have destinies? Shanghai doyenne Marie-Claire Bergere has crafted a new grand synthesis of Shanghai history around this theme. The English title of Bergere' s book both affirms the city's historical mission and recalls Rhoads Murphey's Shanghai, Key to Modern China (1953), which portrayed Shanghai as fertile soil for the transplantation of modem Western commercial, financial and industrial institutions. Bergere's own meticulous scholarship of the 1980s, particularly her acclaimed Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, illuminated the social and economic structures of Shanghai's early-20 -century business class, and examined the ways in which Shanghai's economic dynamism of the early 1920s was built upon traditional Chinese social foundations, not simply upon the dynamism that developed from the transnational flows of trade and ideas that characterized Shanghai's existence as a treaty port. In this fashion, Bergere's Golden Age offered a nuanced critique of both simplistic models of Western influence and those of Marxian class analysis. We may ask, then, how Bergere's current invocation of a "gateway" metaphor builds upon her earlier rethinking of a Western-modeled modernity. Given the explosion of Shanghai studies both outside and within China in the past quarter century, we may ask, as well, how Bergere positions her new Shanghai history in the context of recent studies. In her new book, a survey of the twists and turns of Shanghai's development from the Opium War until the present, Bergere clarifies Shanghai's role in the production of Chinese modernity: "The originality of the town ... lay not in the implantation of a colonial modernity ... but rather in the welcome that its local society had given to that implantation, adopting and adapting it, and turning it into a modernity that was Chinese" (p. 2). Bergere appropriately notes that Shanghai was not "a wretched fishing village just waiting for foreign intervention" (p. 2). Nonetheless, the narrative begins at the moment of implantation, "when Shanghai's destiny was sealed" (p. 3). Bergere affirms Chinese as well as Western agency and mutual commercial cooperation. In this work of synthesis, attentiveness to the former integrates, more than extends, her earlier insights. An eagerness to dispel the excesses of an earlier generation of anti-colonial Chinese historiography leads her to hew to issues of economic development, and avoid theoretical analysis of the semicolonial structuring of the city. The book's judicious conclusion is ambivalent as to Shanghai's - or China's - ability to fulfill its mission and become what Bergere might consider truly modern. The book is structured by four chronological parts that register the political tectonics behind the flows and ebbs of Shanghai development: 1) the late Qing treaty-port years (1842-1911); 2) the pre-war Republic (1912-37); 3) war and revolution (1937-52); and 4) the People's Republic. Parts I and II contain 10 of the 14 chapters, reproducing the focus of the bulk of Bergere's formidable earlier publications (which enrich the current book with their insightful detail). The parts covering 1939 to the present are shorter, and consist of two chapters each. …

Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity

Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai

Between Sorrow and Strength. Women Refugees of the Nazi Period

In the Third Reich Leaving Home Culture Shock and Community Creation in Shanghai In the Designated Area The End of the War After the War 'Auf Wiedersehen, Shanghai! But where do we go?' Another New Life My Life as a Refugee

Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich

Title of Document: “AN UNCERTAIN LIFE IN ANOTHER WORLD”: GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN JEWISH REFUGEE LIFE IN SHANGHAI, 19381950” Elizabeth Rebecca Hyman, Master of Arts, 2014 Directed by: Professor Marsha Rozenblit, History Between 1938 and 1941, 20,000 Eastern and Central European Jews fled to Shanghai. Through a close examination or memoirs and oral histories, I argue that the manner in which the refugees experiences the approximately twelve years (1938-1950) they spent in Shanghai was informed by their nationality, gender, and age. Further, I argue that the twelve years they spent in Shanghai eroded the refugee’s behavioral, material, and emotional connections to their old lives in Germany and Austria until all they had left was language and memories. “AN UNCERTAIN LIFE IN ANOTHER WORLD”: GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN JEWISH REFUGEE LIFE IN SHANGHAI, 1938-1950

/pdf/an-uncertain-life-in-another-world-german-and-austrian-435qjtc6vi.pdf

Elizabeth Rebecca Hyman

Papers

"An Uncertain Life in Another World": German and Austrian Jewish Refugee Life in Shanghai, 1938-1950