The actions of looking and being looked at, according to Nicholas Mirzoeff, allowed varying groups or individuals to find and recognize each other. The abovementioned rhetoric of “not for selves” thus indicated the capacity of the visual experience of funeral processions, a prevalent practice, to create the collectivity of the fellow Shanghai citizens. Throughout the article, I have argued that funeral processions became the very locus where people of differing backgrounds encountered and gained mutual recognition by overcoming the boundaries of gender, race, class, religious orientations and native places. In this sense, the viewers were not just the consumers of Shanghai modernity, but also its active contributors and builders. Here, I argue against Yue Meng, who dismisses the Chinese as mere spectators rather than …show more content…
Indeed, average Shanghai citizens did not have to stay in a western-styled building or buy fashion dresses in a department store as an evidence of their worthiness in Shanghai modernity. Instead, to look was to partake, as the massive participation in Sheng Xuanhuai’s funeral procession demonstrated.
The highly spectacular funeral processions by the Sheng family and others certainly fell into the category of an “urban festivity” in Shanghai, which, according to Yue Meng, was “neither the embodiment of the dream-logic of commodification nor the byword of an out-of-date medieval energy.” The present research, nevertheless, shows that the energy, namely, the will to look and to be looked at in those funerals, was susceptible to