ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the constitutive relationship between the cosmopolitan (yang) and the provincial (tu) in the fashioning of a modern Chinese urbanity. It understands fashion change as “communicative” and “institutional” (Barthes 2006), thus intimately and broadly social: located in sartorial and other material details as well as changing ideas and practices of cultural urbanity. It examines these changes as they are fi gured in modern and contemporary Chinese city narratives in terms of the multidirectional
dynamics of the cosmopolitan and the provincial, and demonstrates that a place-specifi c narrative is needed to account for the making of a grounded modern Chinese urbanity. Conventional time-centered stories tend to obliterate the spatial specifi city and thus the very make-up of such urbanity because of their emphases on the coming-into-being of a modern urbanity as a monodirectional progress. Here, a place-specifi c consideration is used as a revisionist aesthetic and historical parameter within which to understand anew the cultural history of a fashionable Chinese modernity as well as modern Chinese narrative practices.
