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In the Mood for Texture

The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City

The cover photograph depicts two people dressed simply in black and white seated at a metal table and chairs in the courtyard of a glass and concrete building. Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 220

Illustrations: 58 illustrations

Published: January 2026

Author: Arnika Fuhrmann

In the Mood for Texture considers the revival of Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity in contemporary Southeast Asian cultural production, both virtual and material. By analyzing how twentieth-century Shanghai and Hong Kong have been revived in modern Bangkok’s architecture, design, fashion, and nightlife, Arnika Fuhrmann shows how Chinese pasts are redeployed in contemporary film, literature, and hospitality venues to shape present visions of Asia. At the heart of this inquiry stand Shanghai and Hong Kong’s anomalous colonial temporalities and Thailand’s semi-colonial temporality of the “never” and “yet still” of colonization. Attending to the textures of built environments and agentive female subjects, Fuhrmann reconceptualizes the revival of Bangkok’s Chinese pasts and demonstrates how Southeast Asian imaginations can challenge both domestic and diasporic narratives of identity and collectivity beyond China.

Praise

“Grounded by Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film, Fuhrmann explores the linkages between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. This expansive study considers the different ways movies, social media, literary texts, and architecture engage in Chinese revivalism to create a site of fantasy that makes possible a variety of spatial-temporal experiments. In the Mood for Texture is an outstanding, tour-de-force of investigation into Chinese Thai history and visual culture.” - Nguyen Tan Hoang, author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation

“A book of stunning originality and eloquence that advances a radical reimaging of region, diaspora, and the postcolonial. In the Mood for Texture is a uniquely structured study that is ambitious in scope. It is a study of Chinese colonial modernity that breaks free of geographical limitations and national boundaries. Fuhrmann brings into focus a textured aesthetics of Chinese colonial modernity—in all its sumptuous detail and affective vibrancy.” - Jean Ma, author of Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Arnika Fuhrmann is Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is the author of Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong as well as Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema, which was published by Duke University Press.

Table Of Contents

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Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City  1
I. In the Mood for Texture
1. City Connectivities
2. In the Mood for Texture: Transmedia Revivals of Hong Kong’s, Bangkok’s, and Shanghai’s Chinese Pasts and Colonial Modernities
II. Bangkok: Originary Chinese City
3. Bangkok: Chinese City of Colonial Modernity
4. How to Dump: Radical Revitalization in Thai Cinema and Hospitality Venues
III. Thinking Region from Southeast Asia
5. Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat: Thai Literature as Contemporary Chinese Literature
6. Southeast Asia as Question: Thinking Region from Bangkok
Coda. Women in Asia and the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3299-1 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2954-0 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6174-8 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478061748