The collective subjectivity of Chinese intellectuals and their café culture in republican Shanghai 1.

Using a brief comment by Lu Xun regarding the thriving café culture in 1920s’ Shanghai as a point of departure, this paper investigates how the male intellectuals of the time constructed, affiliated with, and practiced the café culture in the 1920s and 1930s. The paper first provides a historical overview of Shanghai’s café scene, and it investigates the general relationship between coffee and colonialism. The main body of the paper explores how Shanghai’s café culture in the Republican period was constructed in connection with male subjectivity. The paper demonstrates that the café as a gathering site was attractive to the young and educated male urbanites because it provided them a strong sense of community, based on the mutually conditioning homosocial bonding and heterosexual impulses, where they could socialize among themselves and flirt with the waitresses. It was the maleness of the café that allowed the place to embrace the seemingly opposed discourses of consumerism and revolution – the two major components of China’s cultural modernity. The paper ends with Michel de Certeua’s analysis of the ‘habitable,’ and it demonstrates that the Shanghai café is habitable to male intellectuals because it both promises and rejects the consummation of the libido, in the same way as it promises and rejects modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]