Dwelling in the World - (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia Un) by Elizabeth Lacouture (Paperback)

About the Book

Elizabeth 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.

Book Synopsis

By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world's most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German café and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house.

Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin's urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today's middle-class real estate boom.

Drawing on diverse sources from municipal archives, women's magazines, and architectural field work to social surveys and colonial records, Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology and everyday life.

Review Quotes

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 China

In 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 India

Analyzing 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 Objects

Dwelling 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

About the Author

Elizabeth LaCouture is the founding director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Hong Kong, where she is an assistant professor of gender studies and history.