Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in Shanghai: 1853-98
Posted: October 24th, 2010 | No Comments »This sounds like it might be interesting – this Tuesday in Shanghai if you happen to be there and organised by the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai
Tuesday 26th October, 2010 at 7:00 p.m.
Mesa-Manifesto 748 Julu Road, Shanghai
Samuel Y. Liang
Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners’ City, 1853-98
Samuel Liang’s 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 neighborhood and public spaces. The author discusses: the courtesan house as a surrogate home and analyzes its business, gender, and material configurations; examines a new type of residential neighborhood 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.
Samuel Y. Liang was born in Anhui and was educated in Anhui, Shanghai, and New York, where he received a PhD in art history in 2006. For the last two decades, He has taught architectural history and Chinese art and culture in China, the United States, and Great Britain, most recently as a lecturer in Chinese cultural studies at the University of Manchester. In an addition to his first book titled Mapping Modernity in China (Routledge, 2010), he published dozens of articles (in Chinese and English) on modern architecture and Chinese culture in professional and academic journals.
Entrance: RMB 30 (RAS members) and RMB 80 (non-members) those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Studio. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
RSVP: to RAS Enquiry desk enquiry@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai
Email: enquiry@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
Website: http://www.royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
A Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
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