Travis Zhu L&S Arts & Humanities
Phenomenology of Home: Imagining Domesticity in Contemporary China
This study poses a simple question: how can we read a “home,” if we follow French phenomenologists Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, not merely as an abstracted sociological object in dominant scholarship, but as an intimate space that we live in? Situated in post-socialist China, where the commodification and privatization of housing have displaced older forms of state-allocated housing and collective dwelling, this study examines how new residential forms such as gated communities (xiaoqu) have transformed not only the material organization of inhabitation, but also people’s intimate experience of living within the newly privatized “home.”
As an interdisciplinary project that incorporates phenomenology, film theory, psychoanalysis, and ethnography, this study turns to a constellation of contemporary Chinese fiction and documentary films to investigate how filmmakers register, represent, and reconstruct the profilmic space of home. In doing so, it argues that contemporary Chinese cinema offers a privileged site for rethinking home as a perceptual and historically entangled space, one that helps us better understand the larger social transformations of China.
Message To Sponsor
I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to seriously investigate the question of the “Chinese home,” a topic that is so personal to me. However, I do believe that by scrutinizing what is often regarded as merely personal, we can begin to reveal the structural, historical, and political forces embedded within. For this reason, I deeply appreciate your generous support for this challenging project!