1st Edition
Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context Being and Becoming
Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context examines modern Taiwanese culture through the prism of global cultural interactions. Challenging the view of Taiwan as a product of transience and displacement, it highlights Taiwan’s subjectivity, viewing the island as a site of a global development that epitomizes both resistance and negotiation in the process of cultural flows.
The fourteen contributions by an international team of scholars investigate the multi-layered and multidirectional interplays between the island and the outside world, exploring the impact of complex cultural encounters on the construction, writing and rewriting of Taiwan in a global context. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the topics covered range from Taiwanese literature, cinema, food culture and tourism to cultural geography, colonial history, and folk religion, with comparisons made with Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the West.
Focusing on continuous cross-cultural interplays, this book affords readers a deeper understanding of identity politics and a better insight into the fluidity, changeability, and constructionist nature of culture. As such, it will be will be of great interest to students and scholars of Taiwan Studies and Cultural Studies, as well as Asian film, literature and popular culture.
Introduction, Bi-yu Chang and Pei-yin Lin
Part 1: Repositioning Taiwan
1. Positioning ‘Taiwanese Literature’ to the World: Taiwan as Represented and Perceived in English Translation, Pei-yin Lin
2. Translating Taiwan Southward, Adam Lifshey
3. It All Starts in Hualien: Pangcah Woman, Rose, Rose, I Love You, and The Man with the Compound Eyes, Bert Scruggs
4. The Making of Taiwanese Martial Arts Fiction: The Case of Gu Long, Iris Ma
5. Indiginizing Queer Fiction and Queer Theories: A Study on Chi Ta-wei’s Sci-Fi Novels, Gwennaël Gaffric
Part 2: Cultural Flows and Becoming
6. From ‘Free China’ to Sunny Paradise: The Worlding Process in the Magazine Tourism in Taiwan (1966~1974), Bi-yu Chang
7. The Paradise of Gourmets: Representing Taiwanese Cuisine in Japanese Tourist Media (1964~), Lillian Tsay
8. Savage World, Immortal Island: The Colonial Gaze and Colonial Taste of Penglai Rice, Shao-li Lu
9. Let’s Talk About Love: Hong Kong’s Geopolitical Narratives of Emotion and Stories of Lifestyle Migration in Taiwan, Tsung-yi Michelle Huang
10. Getting to Know Taiwan: Borrowed Gaze, Direct Involvement and Everyday Life, Adina Zemanek
Part 3: Production and Contestation of Indigeneity
11 Localizing the Japanese Manga System and Making Folk Religion Manga-esque: Wei Zongcheng’s Ming Zhan-lu: Final Destiny of the Formosan Gods, Teri Silvio
12. Charting the Transnational within the National: The Case of Contemporary Taiwan Popular Cinema, Ting-ying Lin
13 Countervisions: Exotic Voyages in the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Carsten Storm
14 Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples and Cinema: From Mascot to Fourth Cinema? Chris Berry
Biography
Bi-yu Chang is Deputy Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include identity politics, nation-building, cultural politics, and cultural geography. Her book Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan was published by Routledge.
Pei-yin Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on Sinophone literature and film. She is the author of Colonial Taiwan: Negotiating Identities and Modernity through Literature (2017) and co-editor of East Asian Transwar Popular Culture (2019).
"Showing how Taiwan is imagined in and outside Taiwan, this book covers topics ranging from food culture, tourist media, manga, migration life stories, to Taiwanese literature and cinema. An interesting book about the multi-facets of Taiwan as a site of contesting discourses."
Kuei-fen Chiu, Distinguished Professor of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan