Searching For Economic And Cosmopolitan Roots: The Historical Discourse Of “Hankou Merchant Port Nostalgia” In The Central Chinese City Of Wuhan 武汉

摘要

A small number of investigations have interrogated the role of historical discourse, historical imaginaries, selective remembering and heritage in new forms of local place marketing and urban branding in China (Wu, W., 1999; 2004; Pan, nd; 2005; Ren, 2008; Jansson and Lagerkvist, 2009; Law, 2012). The majority of this work has often focused on the large coastal city of Shanghai, leaving ordinary, quotidian and/or everyday cities outside of the mainstream of contemporary analysis. Specifically, second tier cities, have been less well examined in the process of understanding how elites construct selective forms of remembering and historical place marketing at the local urban level (Mullich, 2011). In the work that follows, we focus our sights upon the second tier city of Wuhan because it is both an interesting everyday city, and a competitive urban actor that has vigorously sought to improve its domestic and international political status. As we shall argue, selective remembering, nostalgia and heritage are now increasingly used by assemblages of state and non-state actors in Wuhan to improve the city's competitiveness and fortunes. In sum, this paper has two main lines of investigation: firstly, we shall explore the process by which selective remembering, histories and heritage are converted into new form of competitive urban cultural capital; secondly, this paper points to the critical dangers and problematics that emerge when selective remembering and historic urban branding lead to the production of new urban landscapes and commercial spaces; as we shall demonstrate, selective remembering and branding can sabotage and displace communities, informal economies, histories, lives and subjectivities.