Amanda Lagerkvist, Research Fellow, SINAS, Uppsala University

Abstract
How do Americans, who represent the ‘single super power’, view the
rise of China; how do they renegotiate ‘Americanness’ in the context
of a place that aspires to world centrality and futurity? This
presentation is based on research that I have conducted within a
research fellowship (forskarassistenttjänst) at the Swedish Institute
for North American Studies, the department of English at Uppsala
University since 2007. In this paper, based on fieldwork in 2007 and
2009 among US:ian expatriates in Shanghai, I probe the timespace
imaginaries of this contact zone fusing perspectives on media space
with urban theory and transnational American Studies. Pursuing the
Chinese built compounds Forest Manor, Rancho Santa Fe, and the Racquet
Club where many Americans live, I analyze the Sino-US relationship
through the meanings and spatiotemporalities of these mythical
replications of ‘American’ home territories; structures that seem to
represent not the future, dynamism, newness and modernity but the West
as, in effect, a space of the past. Is this how Americans living in
Shanghai view themselves too?

För textunderlag samt information om MKV:s högre seminarium kontakta Sofia Johansson: sofia.johansson@sh.se