Figuring the (In)Visible in an Imperial Weltstadt: The Case of Benjamin's Moor

Cultural Consumption in Contemporary Society and Popular Aesthetics: The Interplay between Commodification and Abstract Thinking

“…Though frugality and resistance to excessive spending are inherent traits, they have ingeniously transformed "consumption" into a form of "performance" to accentuate their identity as "cultural elites." (Bartolovich, 1998) In Shanghai, it seems as though everyone lives under the scrutiny of the "Citizens' Fine Reading Law." Following being judged by others, they, in turn, become the judges, seamlessly weaving the concepts of social hierarchy and status into every action and breath of daily life.…”

Electric Lights and Clouds of Dust: A Reading and Translation of Nguyễn Trọng Hiệp’s Paris, capitale de la France / 大法國玻璃都城襍詠

“…Such reframing happens in cases like the doubling of Gustave Eiffel and Zhang Guolao (張果老), a figure of the Taoist immortal pantheon. The potential for expanding this threshold is infinite: "Paris is intertwined, unquestionably, with Berlin in Benjamin's account, but also, via Nguyễn, with Hanoi (and so on, through all its various material relations with the world)" (Bartolovich, 2002).…”

“…And more broadly, Nguyễn's project does indeed speak thematically to Benjamin's two massive, unfinished and overlapping targets: his work on the arcades or passages and his work on Baudelaire. The question of their inclusion at the head of the 1935 exposé is complicated by their subsequent removal from not only his 1939 exposé, but from his Arcades archive entirely, removing "one of the few non-European voices in Benjamin's work" (Bartolovich, 2002) and making it a less convincing proposition to "read the Arcades Project in its entirety from the perspective of the French colonialist enterprise" (Erber, 2019).…”