Opera and the City analyzes court-city (and state-society) tensions surrounding gender, class, and ethnicity during the Qing dynasty through the prism of opera performance in the capital city of Beijing.
In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values.
It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.
"Tightly anchored on historical and literary sources, and informed by gender and cultural studies, Goldman's erudite social history of opera takes us on an exciting walk in the capital city, from the height of the empire to the foreign occupation in 1900 that disrupted the state the society, and the practice of opera. Augmented by fascinating illustrations, the text unravels the evolving opera culture as it tracks turning points where politics, society, and war shaped the urbanite community of a million people."
