ROCKING CHINA: ROCK MUSIC SCENES IN BEIJING，SHANGHAI & BEYOND (2023)
SHANGHAI NIGHTSCAPES: A NOCTURNAL BIOGRAPHY OF A GLOBAL CITY (2015)
“In Shanghai Nightscapes, Farrer and Field use historical and ethnographic methods to shed new light on a question that has intrigued many scholars, novelists, journalists, and travel writers. Namely, to what extent have patterns from Shanghai’s celebrated and notorious jazz age past reemerged in the contemporary era, as the protean city has become once again a hub for flows into China of foreign ideas, fashions, and lifestyles.” (Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of Global Shanghai and China in the 21st Century)
“Farrer and Field, two long-time observers of Shanghai’s cultural scene, have written a compelling new book on the history of the nightlife in Shanghai from the Jazz Age to the market reform. With intimate knowledge on Shanghai’s clubbing scenes, the book tells a story of both continuity and change in the sexual culture and nightlife of China’s most cosmopolitan city.” (Xuefei Ren, author of Building Globalization and Urban China)
“A unique exploration of Shanghai’s clubs, bars, and dance halls that explains how and why Shanghai has once again become an epicenter of cosmopolitan nightlife. Drawing on a rich array of magazines, films, and many nights interviewing Shanghai entrepreneurs, performers, and club hoppers , Farrer and Field expertly ground their brilliant introduction to contemporary night life in a superb social history of Shanghai in the Jazz Age.” (Deborah Davis, Yale University, coeditor, Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China)
“The authors recognize that nightlife in Shanghai, as elsewhere, did not and does not serve as a haven immune to the power politics of day life. Nuanced discussions on the hierarchies and norms that nightlife challenges, perpetuates, and produces will interest students of urban China, sexuality, cultural studies, and globalization. Recommended.” (Choice)
"After reading Shanghai Nightscapes , written by an ideal combination of an historian and sociologist, I understand why Shanghai’s nightlife is now so accessible and familiar to newcomers such as my students. Bars and especially nightclubs, which cost much more to operate than bars, have evolved in ways similar to so many other industries in urban China…Along the way, the authors reveal, vestiges of socialist equality have given way to status that is more closely linked to class and wealth. And the delight in elevating one’s self-perception through the consumption of expensive alcohol and a reserved table at the right club transcends nationality." (Karl Gerth, University of California, San Diego, in Frontiers of History in China, 2016, 11 (4): 628-630)
For a radio interview with the authors and a tour of Shanghai nightscapes with Frank Langfitt of NPR, click here.
MU SHIYING: CHINA'S LOST MODERNIST (2014)
"Better than that of any other writer, Mu Shiying's fiction encapsulates the cosmopolitan life of 1930s Shanghai (with its foreign concessions, cinemas, cafés and cabarets) that underlay modernist Chinese writing. Andrew Field's book is exciting not only because it is a new appreciation of this writer but because, through its translations of Mu's stories, it reveals the extent to which Shanghai-based writing was inspired by the styles of international modernism." (Lynn Pan, author of Shanghai Style and Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise)
"A much-needed volume that will help considerably in making Mu's writing more widely accessible." (Christopher Rosenmeier H-Asia)
"Andrew David Field's Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist is an excellent book for a first-time encounter with this often ignored yet extremely talented Chinese modernist. The book offers translations of six of Mu's most representative stories from his artistic peak (1932–1934), and provides a spectrum of his versions of metropolitan love. Field's concise translations are accompanied by a substantial introduction and appreciation of Mu's life and works, as well as of the inter-war social and intellectual climate. An historian of Shanghai culture, Field delivers an astute and discerning investigation into Mu which will further the discourse on Shanghai modernism established by scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and Shu-mei Shih." (Huiwen Shi, asiancha.com)
"Field’s volume is a most welcome contribution to the canon of Republican-era literature in translation. It will not only heighten our appreciation of Mu Shiying, but add new layers of complexity to this intriguing literary figure of Shanghai’s golden age..." (Frederic Green, MCLC)
SHANGHAI'S DANCING WORLD: CABARET CULTURES AND URBAN POLITICS, 1919-1954 (2010)
"This is a refreshingly well-written and richly detailed account of the world of cabarets, nightclubs and elite ballrooms in Shanghai during its jazz-inspired "golden age" from 1919 to 1954, as well as a wider social history of this important city during an extraordinary period of political upheaval in China. It intertwines its stories about nightlife adeptly with critical episodes in modern Chinese history, and is therefore also a story about China itself, as well as about its most hedonist city…Andrew David Field, an independent scholar-historian, is to be congratulated and deserves to be recognized for his accomplishment." (Roman Cybriwsky, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, Pacific Affairs, Volume 84, Number 3, September 2011, pp. 562-564(3))
"Andrew David Field has done a fine job in assembling a large body of Chinese and Western sources (including novels, news media reports, magazine articles, memoirs, police records, interviews) and deploying such sources effectively within an engag- ing analytical framework...In sum, this book adds fine-grained social, cultural, and material texture to the history of modern Shanghai and helps broaden our inquiry into what constituted modernity and what it meant in early twentieth-century China." (Xiaoqun Xu, Christopher Newport University, in American Historical Review, Feb. 2011, p. 156)
"Overall, this book is an impressive and stimulating historical work that successfully recreates for the reader a sense of what life was like in the cabarets and dance halls of Shanghai in the early to mid-20th century. The book effectively links the intimate details of the era to broader social and political events that shook China at the time. Moreover, it provides an important historical backdrop to the ongoing mystique of Shanghai as China’s most modern and cosmopolitan city today. There is enough in this book to titillate readers with a historical interest in a wide range of fields, including Chinese state–society relations, gender, class, architecture, city identities, nightlife, dance, music, and the media." (Lauren Gorfinkel, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, China Information, March 20, 2012)
Articles by Andrew David Field published in journals and edited volumes:
"The Shanghai Lady, 1880s-1990s: A Fictional Figure Adrift in the Maelstrom of Chinese Modernity," in Lisa Bernstein, ed., Cultural Representations of Shanghai (SUNY Press, 2019)
“Building Shanghai’s Dreamworld: Architects and Elite Ballroom Designs of the 1920s and 1930s” in Built Heritage Issue 11 no. 3 vol. 3 (2019)
“An Irish Policeman in Shanghai: From Constable to Commissioner of the SMP, 1904-1939” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Nov. 2018) 71-100
"China's Party Kings: Shanghai Club Cultures and Status Consumption, 1920s-2010s," in Dorothy Solinger, ed., Polarized Cities: Portraits of the Rich and Poor in Urban China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) 127-147. (co-authored with James Farrer)
“Beijing is Rock, Shanghai is Jazz: Musical Identity Formations and Shifts in the Big City Soundscapes of China” in Brett Lashua and Stephen Wagg, eds., Sounds and The City, Volume 2 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 151-172
“Shanghai Nightscapes and Ethnosexual Contact Zones,” in Xuefei Ren and Roger Keil, The Globalizing Cities Reader 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2017) (Co-authored with James Farrer)
“From Interzone to Transzone: Race and Sex in the Contact Zones of Shanghai’s Global Nightlife” in Intersections Issue 31 (Dec. 2012) (co-authored with James Farrer)
“Dancing in the Maelstrom of Chinese Modernity: Jazz-Age Shanghai Cabarets as Sexual Contact Zones in Fact and Fiction,” Intersections Issue 31 (Dec. 2012)
“Fumee D’Opium et Jazz En Folie,” in Nicholas Idier, ed., Shanghai: Histoire, Promenades,Anthologie et Dictionnaire pp. 415-442 (Bouquins: Paris, 2010)
“Explosive Acts: Punk Rock in China, 2007” in Berliner China Hefte Special Issue on Postmodern China, 2008 (co-authored with Jeroen Groenewegen)
“From D.D’s to Y.Y. to Park 97 to Muse: Dance Club Spaces and the Construction of Class in Shanghai, 1997-2007,” in China: an International Journal (March 2008)
“Selling Souls in Sin City: Shanghai Singing and Dancing Hostesses in Print, Film, and Politics, 1920-1949,” in Zhang Yingjin, ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 (Stanford University Press, 1999): 99-127.