The cosmopolitan imaginary and flexible identities of global city‐regions: articulating new cultural identities in Taipei and Shanghai

Abstract

Given the broad consensus among academic geographers that a new matrix of global city‐regions is on the rise, this paper attempts to show how urban linkage has become not only a social reality that produces various cosmopolitan identities but a discursive framework for the formulation and articulation of these identities so as to reproduce the urban networks. With a particular emphasis on the ‘imaginary of identity’ and its problems, I will explore Taipei‐Shanghai as a global city‐region first by examining the ideology inherent in the discourse of the so‐called ‘New Shanghai People’ (xin shanghai ren), a popular discourse which has recently emerged to represent the identity of transmigrants. The second part of the paper will analyze several representative cultural texts including Wang Wen‐hua’s bestsellers in Shanghai, The Protein Girl, its sequel The Protein Girl II, and Chen‐pin’s bestsellers in Taipei, a series of non‐fiction works on how to survive and succeed in Shanghai. Situating these texts in the context of the Taipei‐Shanghai linkage, I will critique the imagination of the cosmopolitan identity, enabled by the material conditions of the urban network, and further lay bare not just the intricate connections between the new geopolitical regionalism and cultural narrative of Chinese transmigrants but the intense contradictions between the flexible accumulation of capital and the production of ‘flexible citizenship’ in Aihwa Ong’s terms.

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