Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners' City, 1853-98

ISBN-13: 9780415569132 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 230 str.

Samuel Y. Liang

Opis

This book argues that modernity first arrived in late nineteenth-century Shanghai via a new spatial configuration. This city's colonial capitalist development ruptured the traditional configuration of self-contained households, towns, and natural landscapes in a continuous spread, producing a new set of fragmented as well as fluid spaces. In this process, Chinese sojourners actively appropriated new concepts and technology rather than passively responding to Western influences. Liang maps the spatial and material existence of these transient people and reconstructs a cultural geography that spreads from the interior to the neighbourhood and public spaces. In this book the author:

• discusses the courtesan house as a　 surrogate home and analyzes its business, gender, and material configurations;
• examines a new type of residential neighbourhood and shows how its innovative spatial arrangements transformed the traditional social order and hierarchy;
• surveys a range of public spaces and highlights the mythic perceptions of industrial marvels, the adaptations of colonial spatial types, the emergence of an urban public, and the spatial fluidity between elites and masses.

Through reading contemporaneous literary and visual sources, the book charts a hybrid modern development that stands in contrast to the positivist conception of modern progress. As such it will be a provocative read for scholars of Chinese cultural and architectural history.

This book reconstructs the spatial, material, and gender modernity of nineteenth-century Shanghai, covering roughly from the beginning of the "mixed residence of Chinese [sojourners] and foreigners" (huayangzaju) during the Small Sword rebellion and Taiping wars (1853-64) to the years around China’s humiliating defeat by Japan (1894) and the start of the imperial reforms (1898), which initiated the Shanghai-based construction of the national identity of modern China. By mapping the city’s native spaces of leisure and everyday life, Samuel Liang examines the implied paradoxes between, and the hybrid culture of, colonial modernity and indigenous innovation, reinventions of traditional ideals and adjustments to the new industrial culture.

 

Spis treści

Introduction  1. Fluid Tradition, Splintered Modernity  2. The Convergence of Writing and Commerce  3. Ephemeral Households, Marvelous Things  4. The Meeting of Courtyard and Street  5. Ultimate Ingenuity, Amorphous Crowds  6. The Mingling of Magnates and Masses  Conclusion

O autorze

Samuel Y. Liang is Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Utah Valley University, USA