"As Taiwan's community grows more diverse, Taiwan literature is enriched by a series of locally based writings that draw attention to a specific space and/or to the division between places. In the twentieth century, more and more Taiwanese writers are no longer content with a singular place or dual comparison in their literary creations. Rather, they have started to recognize the plurality of Taiwaneseness and thus re-create an ambiguous form of the Taiwanese subjectivity in response to the conflict and compromise between political beliefs and ethnic groups in a cross-cultural light. To further engage with the multifaceted cultural expressions of Taiwan, this book speaks to the current framework of Sinophone studies by focusing on modern Taiwan and its entanglement with cultural China, Chinese diasporas, nativist trend, and Aboriginal consciousness. Recognizing the unresolved ethnic issues of Taiwan, this study explores different dimensions of ethnoscape in response to the cross-cultural landscape of Taiwan and beyond, while at the same time taking into account the intertwining of the official history and the individual, or ethnic, memory of Taiwan"--

Drawing on a wide range of Chinese historical and contemporary texts, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism addresses diverse subjects including nationalist literature; language ideology; the crafting of a national history; the impact of Japanese colonialism and the increasingly strained relationship between China and Taiwan. This book is essential reading for all scholars of the history, culture and politics of Taiwan.

This volume analyzes what is arguably the single most important aspect of cultural and political change in Taiwan over the past quarter-century: the trend toward 'indigenization' (bentuhua). Focusing on the indigenization of politics and culture and its close connection with the identity politics of ethnicity and nationalism, this volume is an attempt to map prominent contours of the indigenization paradigm as it has unfolded in Taiwan. The opening chapters concern the origin and nature of the trend toward indigenization with its roots in the unique historical trajectory of politics and culture in Taiwan. Subsequent chapters deal with responses and reactions to indigenization in a variety of social, cultural and intellectual domains.

In the past two decades, a uniform representation of cutified femininity prevails in the Taiwanese media, evidenced by the shift of Taiwan’s popular cultural taste from a Chinese-centered tradition to a mixed absorption from neighboring cultural capitals in the global market. This book argues that the native term “sajiao” is the key to understand the phenomenon. Originally referring to a set of persuasive tactics through imitating a spoiled child’s gestures and ways of speaking to get attention or material goods, sajiao is commonly understood to be women’s weapon to manipulate men in the Mandarin-speaking communities. By re-interpreting sajiao as a “feminine” tactic, or the tactic of the weak, the book aims to propose a “feminine framework” in exploring identity politics in the following three aspects: the rising obsession with the immature female image in Taiwan’s popular culture, the adoption of the feminine communication style in native speakers’ everyday language and interactions, and the competing discourses between dominant/subordinate, central/peripheral, global/local, and Chinese/Taiwanese in shaping the identity politics in current Taiwanese society. The micro-analysis of everyday language politics leads the reader to examine layers of discourse about gender, identity, and communication, and finally to inquire how to situate or categorize “Taiwan” in area studies. The “feminine framework” is a useful theoretical tool that not only deconstructs everyday communication practice but also provides a bottom-up, alternative angle in analyzing Taiwan’s role in political, economic, and cultural flows in East Asia. The massive imports of popular cultural products in the late 80s, mainly from Japan, fermented the kawaii (Japanese cute) type of femininity in regulating everyday communication and the perception of gender roles in Taiwan. The popularity of the baby-like female image is concurrent with the simmering debate on Taiwanese identity. Taiwan offers a unique perspective for observing identity politics because it still holds an undetermined status in the international community. The collective uncertainty about the island’s future and the diminishing voice in the international society become the backdrop for the growth of defining, interpreting, and appropriating sajiao elements in the popular culture. This book offers an in-depth examination of the interplay among local historical contexts, cross-border capitalist exchange, and everyday communication that shapes the dialogism of Taiwanese identity.

In recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt.

During the mid-1990s, Taiwan witnessed a remarkable proliferation of historical writings and cultural movements pertaining to 'the local'. 'Place (difang)' and 'community (shequ)' became two ubiquitous terms in the lexicon of being Taiwanese. This book is a critical examination of the socio-historical condition in which the discourse of local diversity emerged and gradually permeated Taiwan's public culture. Interweaving ethnographic sensibility and theoretical insights across disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies and cultural geography the study elucidates the complex relationships between localism, nationalism and globalism. Not only is it a rare type of ethnography in Taiwan studies, this book also enriches our understanding of the increasingly significant field of East Asia (post)modernity.

This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.

This novel and important book brings together insights from cultural studies and critical discourse analysis to examine the fruitful links between the two. Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis shows that critical discourse analysis is able to provide the analytic context, skills and tools by which we can study how language constructs, constitutes and shapes the social world and demonstrates in detail how the methodological approach of critical discourse analysis can enhance cultural studies. In a richly argued discussion, the authors show how marrying the methodology of critical discourse analysis with cultural studies enlarges our understanding of gender and ethnicity.

Centering his analysis in the dynamic forces of modern East Asian history, Kuan-Hsing Chen recasts cultural studies as a politically urgent global endeavor. He argues that the intellectual and subjective work of decolonization begun across East Asia after the Second World War was stalled by the cold war. At the same time, the work of deimperialization became impossible to imagine in imperial centers such as Japan and the United States. Chen contends that it is now necessary to resume those tasks, and that decolonization, deimperialization, and an intellectual undoing of the cold war must proceed simultaneously. Combining postcolonial studies, globalization studies, and the emerging field of “Asian studies in Asia,” he insists that those on both sides of the imperial divide must assess the conduct, motives, and consequences of imperial histories. Chen is one of the most important intellectuals working in East Asia today; his writing has been influential in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and mainland China for the past fifteen years. As a founding member of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society and its journal, he has helped to initiate change in the dynamics and intellectual orientation of the region, building a network that has facilitated inter-Asian connections. Asia as Method encapsulates Chen’s vision and activities within the increasingly “inter-referencing” East Asian intellectual community and charts necessary new directions for cultural studies.