New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. ix, 364 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780231181792.
Elizabeth LaCouture’s work urges us to look beyond the historiographies that have interpreted the family as the prime site for social reform and nationalist ideology in modern China and instead proposes to reconstruct “a history of home life” through “the materiality of everyday life” (9). Using Tianjin, a colonized treaty-port city from 1860 to 1947, as a central locus to examine the changing meanings of the family from the late imperial jia (household) to the modern jiating (home), LaCouture aims to restore the important and yet unrecognized history of the everyday experiences of the city’s urban elites as they inhabited their modern homes. Unlike in the United States, Europe, and Japan where developments of gender and class identities and domestic spaces were two divergent processes, LaCouture argues that in China these two processes were convergent in that “Chinese people simultaneously invented the modern home as they invented new status identities” (6). Through consuming global modern objects and tastes, Tianjin’s urban elites lived and envisioned new ideas of the family home as well as forged new gendered and classed subjectivities.
The book is organized chronologically into three parts, consisting of eight body chapters. Utilizing Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, LaCouture identifies Tianjin’s urban home spaces as “conceived” social relations and spatial design by different historical actors, “lived” spaces of cosmopolitanism as experienced by Tianjin’s urbanites, and “conceived” social spaces of representation in transition across the 1949 divide (217). Chapter 1 describes how multiple colonial occupations severely reconfigured Tianjin’s urban landscape and its associated Confucian socio-spatial prescriptions. Chapter 2 discusses how a variety of actors such as planners, urbanists, and social theorists envisioned and advocated a new ideology of a small family (xiao jiating), aiming to disconnect the social and political connotations that had been central to the imperial family ideology from the social spaces of the modern house. Chapter 3 demonstrates how gender politics played a significant role in the legal understandings of property rights in the early twentieth century. While property ownership became a marker of elite Chinese women’s political status and rights, female property rights still largely existed on paper. LaCouture also notes that new legal rights on property in the early Republican era enabled individual elite men to replace the imperial jia as political participants.
Chapter 4 turns to the concrete architectural technologies and designs involved in Tianjin urban elites’ choosing of modern homes and houses, be it a traditional Chinese courtyard house or a Western-style house, in foreign concessions. In chapter 5, LaCouture shows how gender figures prominently once again in the designing and mastering of the knowledge of the modern home space. Whereas in imperial times Chinese literati men prescribed the tastes and designs of the house and produced knowledge on household management, knowledge about the interior home was feminized in the early twentieth century, owing to the flourishing of the commercial women’s periodical press. These gendered publications instructed women to consume globally circulated goods and designs for their modern homes and encouraged them to “partake in a global vision of middle-class domesticity” (187). Chapter 6 continues the exploration of how these women’s periodicals have shaped Tianjin urban elite women’s everyday experiences and visions of modern home life.
The last part of the book examines the shifting narratives and representations of domestic spaces across different critical historical moments. Chapter 7 describes how the cosmologies of the sociopolitical space of the home shifted from the inner-outer continuum in imperial China to a new social-spatial distinction of public and private modelled on the West. Specifically, LaCouture delineates the emergence of a female-gendered social space jiaoji, namely, the socializing space, enjoyed by urban socialites. Employing urban women’s own accounts of shifting from extended families to small families, this chapter also reveals how jiating was represented as “both a public space of social reform and as a private sphere of intimate experience and affect” (237). Chapter 8 examines the intertwined relationship between family, house, home, and state ideology in postcolonial Tianjin. The Chinese socialist state transformed the republican idea of the bourgeois home into the socialist single-family house ideal, exemplified by the danwei system, which linked “everyday life at home to the state” (260). Furthermore, the socialist danwei system consolidated the link between housing, political legitimacy, and social status that had been established in the early republican era. The book’s conclusion reconsiders the ever-changing housing problems and their contemporary implications for China’s bourgeoning middle class.
Dwelling in the World offers 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. It complements the fields of urban and historical studies on modern China which have almost solely focused on Shanghai by devoting scholarly attention to Tianjin, a “peripherally modern city” (219) that was characterized by “the chimeric modern,” an indigenous modern style of both foreign and Chinese influences to challenge the imperial aesthetic authority (183). Like any other good book, this study raises more questions than answers. For instance, while much about the tastes, styles, and designs of the modern home/house is discussed throughout the book, readers will know very little about how households were managed by their inhabitants, how domestic labour was divided, what daily activities took place, and what roles men and women played in these physical and affective spaces. Similarly, if more historical data about the editorship, authorship, and readership of the women’s periodicals and magazines—a primary source that this study has heavily drawn upon—could be retrieved, readers would gain a more comprehensive picture of the materiality and everydayness of home life in modern China.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong