Culturing Modernity

Download or read book Culturing Modernity written by Qin Shao and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a multidimensional study of a simulation of modernity that transformed Nantong, a provincial town, from a rural backwater to a model of progress in early twentieth-century China. The author analyzes this transformation by depicting the new institutional and cultural phenomena used by the elite to exhibit the modern: a museum, theater, cinema, sports arenas, parks, photographs, name cards, paper money, clocks, architecture, investigative tourism, and public speaking. In focusing on this exhibitory modernity and its role in reconstructing this local community and in promoting “the Nantong model” nationwide, the book sheds intriguing new light on the connections between local and national politics and rural and urban experience.