UC Santa Barbara

My current research responds to two dilemmas in recent critical discourses: the writing of collective history from individual traumatic memories in Holocaust Studies and the construction of heroic fantasies from quotidian routines in Communist China’s quest for modernity. My dissertation project, “Stateless in Shanghai: History, Memory, and Cultural Representations of the Hongkou Jewish Ghetto 1933-1945” investigates how the Jewish exile in Shanghai from 1933 to 1945 has been represented, reimagined, and reconstructed in mass media productions such as literary fiction, cinema, theatrical performances, and museum exhibitions. In researching and comparing such mass media productions across cultures, my project investigates the historical realities of the Jewish exile in Shanghai. I conclude that in contemporary literature and visual media, the Jewish exile in Shanghai is presented not as objective historical events but as phenomenological horizons, inaccessible to social actors and subject to functional differentiation within social systems. I claim that the Jewish exile in Shanghai has become a medium for Western authors and filmmakers to nostalgically reminisce about the colonial past in the Orient. Simultaneously, the same historical past also functions as an agent for the Chinese nation-state to renegotiate international power and recreate a national biography. This dual sense of historical reality operates through modern mass media productions. The Sino-Jewish encounter eventually becomes a manufactured product that serves as the bearer of social communication.