Shiloh Krupar, 2008, “Shanghaiing the Future: A De-tour of the Shanghai Urban Plan Exhibition Hall,”Public Culture 20.2, 307-320, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-027
ABSTRACT:
This de-tour, or reading drama, is derived from a performance I gave at the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers in March 2004, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is based on fieldwork done in Shanghai and the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall in July 2000 and, more recently, during the period of August 2004 through March 2005. The piece is divided into several vignettes that fuse images with different voices and rhetorical strategies. The purposes of this performative representational strategy are twofold: (1) to show some of SUPEH’s representations and visual discourse, the intended effects of its display strategies, and personal experiences of the author captured in SUPEH’s sights, and (2) to experiment with satire and the “de-tour” as a way to performatively analyze how a spectacular space works and the work that it does.
