Description
Book SynopsisElizabeth LaCouture considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city.
Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new lenses on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology.
Trade ReviewIn this powerfully argued, deeply researched book, LaCouture helps us come to terms with how house and home in China generated new forms of status, domesticity, and modernity—and to appreciate the costs for Euro-American women’s history of failing to countenance these histories. -- Antoinette Burton, author of
Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial IndiaDwelling in the World shows how private homes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Tianjin functioned as ‘contact zones’ in which the new middle class encountered and consumed the world. It opens up a previously unexplored archive that allows us to go well beyond the limitations of the written record. -- Jacob Eyferth, University of Chicago
Dwelling in the World brilliantly presents Tianjin as a place where Chinese modernity was invented through daily life. LaCouture urges us to rethink
jiating not as a repressive social institution, but as a material, financial, and affective space where Chinese men and women shaped their individual identities—an idea with important implications for the burgeoning middle class of today’s China. -- Ruth Rogaski, author of
Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port ChinaAnalyzing house plans and domestic advice columns, divorce suits and municipal disputes over water quality, this wide-ranging, original study reveals the ways that Chinese residents in the treaty port of Tianjin composed cosmopolitan conceptions of home. LaCouture recasts both the social space of treaty-port colonialism and Chinese modernity itself. -- Jordan Sand, author of
Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found ObjectsPresents a comprehensive analysis of a thriving middle class in cosmopolitan Tianjin that places women in a role they’ve rarely occupied in historical narratives. * Asian Review of Books *
LaCouture’s broad-ranging study has set a new high standard for urban historians... -- Taoyu Yang * Urban History *
A refreshing and thoughtful study on the changing ideas and practices of the family, house, and home through the analytical lenses of everyday experience and materiality. * Pacific Affairs *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Domestic Empires1. Unraveling the Chinese Empire
2. Family in Ideology and Practice
3. Property, Power, and Identity in a Colonial-Capitalist City
Part II. At Home in the World4. Choosing a House
5. Designing House and Home
6. Living at Home
Part III. Chinese Social Spaces7. Engendering the Chinese City
8. The Chinese Bourgeois Home in the Socialist World
Epilogue: Historical Erasures and China’s New Middle Class
Notes
Bibliography
Index
