During the ten years that have passed since the mediated terrorist attacks in the United States on 9.11, 2001, they have become—through instant historicization as well as endless repetitions—stable points of reference for transnational collective memory. Focalizing the anniversaries of September 11, 2002 and 2011, on Swedish television, this article pursues how the medium annually commemorates the tragedy. Fusing television research with memory studies, the argument is that we may approach the anniversaries as an electronic “lieu de mémorie”: a material-symbolic space reappropriated annually as media become vehicles for “working through” in commemoration, mourning, debate, and critique. Despite the fragmentation of both television and collective memory in the context of digitalization, on the anniversaries, Swedish television promotes itself as a central “nucleus” for connectivity offering viewers a return to the traumatic site—to the television set—while interpellating them as a “global we,” of media witnesses.

Visitors on sight-seeing tours in contemporary globalizing Shanghai observe the futuristic ambitions, exponential development and chaotic polyrhythmicity of New Shanghai. The nostalgia industry simultaneously ` teleports' the tourists on tours back to a time when Shanghai was a legendary world metropolis; the Golden Age of the inter-war era. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's critical rhythmanalysis, and by Jonathan Sterne's conceptualization of communication as organized movement and action, this paper explores bus tours by commission of the municipal government. Shanghai is the place where the movements of the buses, as well as the tourists on board, become part of communicating the place identity and multiple rhythms of the city. The buses are conceived as means of communication, in a twofold sense, and as both underscoring and binding together the many incommensurabilities of place: old and new, Western and Chinese, industrialism and post-industrialism, nationalism and globalism. The author argues that mobility, media modernity and a confounding mixture (reflexively manifested on the tour ` Confused and Mixed Shanghai') constitute a collective memory of the city, and that the buses in all their seeming banality, communicate Shanghai's particular rhythms of retromodernity.

Thriving on its long-term collective memory of possessing futurity, the mega city of Shanghai on the Eastern seaboard of China is once more jockeying for the position as Asia's foremost modern place. An essential part of the regeneration of contemporary Shanghai has been the return, not only of foreign direct investment, but of 'Westerners' to the city since the 1990s. Contributing to current debates about the globality and mediatization of memories, Lagerkvist critically interrogates Shanghai's spectacular resurrection into an emergent world center from the vantage point of how Western elites (tourists, expatriates and travel bloggers) partake in the production of New Shanghai. Through performances of memory, Westerners consume the regenerative nostalgia of the city. This book shows that these mediatized memory practices become essential for the city and tie in with how the municipal government (in tandem with international scriptings of the city in for example films and travel journalism) is currently theming Shanghai by situating memories of futures past and visions for the future in a coherent narrative and sensory-emotive realm of experience.

Expatriate spaces on the outskirts of New Shanghai constitute a new transnational social space inhabited by many different nationalities. Yet these areas are often understood as 'American' spaces, filled with virtualities of everyday Americana, and with franchises to cater to the transnational elites such as KFC, Diner's, Papa John's Pizza, etc. What meanings does the old 'New World' retain in the context of this hyper-modernizing Chinese megacity, with ambitions to become a world center? And how do Americans negotiate and appropriate these spaces? This article is based on three stints of fieldwork among Americans in Shanghai in 2007 and 2009, with a particular focus on white, female, corporate transfer expatriates living on Forest Manor, Rancho Santa Fe and the Racquet Club. Pitting these spaces against some of the most important theorizations of the virtual bearing on them, I propose that in order to analyze the human face of global mobility we need to move beyond postmodern notions of the simulacrum where people are stripped of agency. Through the voices of those who reside on 'Disneyland' I stress the sense of lived virtuality on the compounds, inclusive not only of the rhythms of the everyday in these virtual spaces, but also of the possible getaway from them.

Thriving on its long-term collective memory of possessing futurity, Shanghai resurges with large-scale ambitions of becoming the world center of trade and finance as well as the information and communication hub of the Asia-Pacific region with an Infoport advancing beyond the era of the Internet. This article ponders the relationship between memory and futurity in Shanghai, and suggests that in celebrating temporal coexistence, Shanghai offers the contours an alternate social ordering of retromodernity. In this media city, media forms constitute a backbone of the Shanghai imaginary, and the enthusiasm for new communication technologies in Shanghai today is reminiscent of the role that media forms played in modernizing Shanghai in the past. Probing how memories of media futures past may trigger digitalization, the author argues that temporal anchoring in Shanghai does not represent a refusal to partake in the fast-paced world; instead, it pursues a memory of modernity and anchors in a “Bergsonian terrain” where mobility is, in effect, its “natural tradition.”

In this article, we show how the abstract city — media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance — is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze . Through analysing two cities — Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai — we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban panoramas sustains a sense of futurity through two (overlapping) forms: the conjunctional and the hyper-representational. We argue that together these panoramas invite an emotive future gaze which, through the combination of practical enactment, haptic movement in the city and political vision, constitutes an ideological force of modern urbanism. By introducing the conceptual framework of encapsulation/decapsulation, we propose a way of deepening the understanding of the symbolic and emotional negotiations involved in the production of spectacular city landscapes.