Remains of the Everyday traces the changing material culture and industrial ecology of China through the lens of recycling. Over the last century, waste recovery and secondhand goods markets have been integral to Beijing's economic functioning and cultural identity, and acts of recycling have figured centrally in the ideological imagination of modernity and citizenship. On the one hand, the Chinese state has repeatedly promoted acts of voluntary recycling as exemplary of conscientious citizenship. On the other, informal recycling networks-from the night soil carriers of the Republican era to the collectors of plastic and cardboard in Beijing's neighborhoods today-have been represented as undisciplined, polluting, and technologically primitive due to the municipal government's failure to control them. The result, Joshua Goldstein argues, is the repeatedly re-inscribed exclusion of waste workers from formations of modern urban citizenship as well as the intrinsic liminality of recycling itself as an economic process.

About the Author
Joshua Goldstein is Associate Professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Southern California and the author of Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870-1937.

Reviews
"This is a highly engaging and important book. It provides a rich introduction to a subject that has received only scant attention in historical scholarship. . . . The book is a great achievement. It is sure to reward readers with its astute analysis of recycling at a time when finding solutions to our global environmental crisis could not be more urgent." * Technology and Culture *
"Remains of the Everyday significantly contributes to the state of research on Beijing's modern history, urban governance, environmental policy, formal-informal economic dynamics and resource recovery." * China Quarterly *



Book Information
ISBN 9780520299818
Author Joshua Goldstein
Format Paperback
Page Count 338
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 499g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm