Van Troi Tran

Lecturer in Ethnology at Laval University and Coordinator of the Laboratory for Ethnological and Multimedia Inquiry.

Passports, pins, plushies and peddlers: the material life of the Shanghai World Expo   
For the whole duration of the 2010 Expo the city of Shanghai was flooded with all sorts of branded Expo 2010 products, official or counterfeit, that were sold in Expo official stores or by street peddlers on the Bund, the Yu Garden, Nanjing Road, Huaihai Road or the People’s Square. These souvenirs and collectibles at the effigy of the Expo account in a way for the development of a new urban consumer culture in contemporary China. But the uncontrolled overflow of counterfeit objects during the World Expo that lead to a number of police crackdowns, also points to the complex and sometimes strained relationship that a market can develop with its own commodities. In this talk, I will examine this sprawling material culture of consumer goods during the Shanghai World Expo and show how these tensions played out during the event.

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Bio

Van Troi Tran is Lecturer in Ethnology at Laval University and Coordinator of the Laboratory for Ethnological and Multimedia Inquiry. He has published Manger et Boire aux Expositions universelles de Paris 1889, 1900 (Eating and Drinking at the Paris Universal Exhibitions: 1889, 1900) in 2012, and has been President of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada in 2015-16.