1st Edition

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

By Samuel Y. Liang Copyright 2010
240 Pages
by Routledge

240 Pages
by Routledge

240 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

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

Biography

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

"The great strength of this book is its focus on the spatial rather than the temporal; Shanghai’s urban spaces are brought vividly to life. The book contributes greatly to our understanding of what modernity really meant to the Chinese residents of Shanghai." - Jonathan Howlett: The China Quarterly, December 2011

"Studies of modern Shanghai have disproportionately focused on the city in the early twentieth century, particularly in the Republican era. Liang’s work is a welcome remedy to this obvious imbalance in the field. For its glimpse of life in late nineteenth-century Shanghai and for its rethinking of issues related to city, gender, and modernity, it will be a useful handbook for historians and students of cultural studies." - HANCHAO LU, Georgia Institute of Technology; The Journal of Asian Studies