Envisioning Taiwan

In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island - with its complex history of colonization - presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a 'nation' in an increasingly post-national world. While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, on the island government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of consumer culture have made the island a truly global space. "Envisioning Taiwan" sorts through these complexities, skilfully weaving together history and cultural analysis to give both a picture of Taiwanese identity and a lesson on the usefulness and the limits of contemporary cultural theory. Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-a-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island's most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t'u (or 'nativist') literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsian-t'u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan's assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray the richness and complexity of daily life on the island. Through Chun-ming's and Hou's work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores 'the imagining of a nation' on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity towards a more fluid, postmodern hybridity - an evolution that reflects both Taiwan's peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.

ISBN 0822333678   Pages 400 ISBN13 9780822333678 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Duke University Press   Weight (grammes) 522 Imprint Duke University Press   Published in North Carolina Format Paperback   Series title Asia-Pacific Publication date 11 Nov 2004   Height (mm) 229 Library of Congress HM621.Y56   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 306.0951249   Spine width (mm) 19 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

		Introduction : envisioning Taiwan in a changing world		1
1		Confronting the other, defining a self : Hsiang-t'u literature and the emergence of a Taiwanese nationalism		12
2		Toward the postmodern : Taiwanese new cinema and alternative visions of nation		49
3		Remembering and forgetting, part I : history, memory, and the autobiographical impulse		69
4		Remembering and forgetting, part II : Hou Hsiao-hsien's Taiwan trilogy		85
5		Language and nationhood : culture as social contestation		131
6		The country and the city : modernization and changing apprehensions of space and time		181
7		Exile, displacement, and shifting identities : globalization and the frontiers of cultural hybridity		211
		Conclusion : from nation to dissemi-nation : postmodern hybridization and changing conditions for the representation of identity		230

"A magnificent book on Taiwan, its culture, and its unique situation in the world." Frederic Jameson, Duke University "June Yip forcefully argues why and how modern Taiwanese literature and cinema matter for our understanding of an array of modern and postmodern issues ranging from national identity to cultural politics and from an indigenous search for roots to global circulation of cultural and economic capital."oDavid Der-wei Wang, author of The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China

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