Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
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
Notes 249
Bibliography 325
Index 345

Promotional Information

Traces the growth and evolution of a Taiwan's sense of itself as a separate and distinct entity by examining the diverse ways a discourse of nation has been produced in the Taiwanese cultural imagination.

About the Author

June Yip is an independent scholar living in Los Angeles. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an M.A. in Cinema Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has taught Chinese film.

Reviews

"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."--David Der-wei Wang, author of The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China