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NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE TO COME: NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN POST-87 TAIWANESE LITERATURE AND CINEMA
by
Chialan Sharon Wang
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Chialan Sharon Wang
Object Description
| Title | Nostalgia for the future to come: National consciousness in post-87 Taiwanese literature and cinema |
| Author | Wang, Chialan Sharon |
| Author email | chialanw@usc.edu; sharonclwang@yahoo.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Comparative Literature |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2010-12-09 |
| Date submitted | 2011 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2011-03-22 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Lippit, Akira Mizuta |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Nguyen, Viet Thanh Cheng, Dominic |
| Abstract | My dissertation, “Nostalgia for the future to come: National consciousness in post-87 Taiwanese literature and cinema,” discusses the trope of nationhood in Taiwanese literary and cinematic works published since the 1980s. It reflects on the way internationalism and regionalism intersect on the post-Cold war island. I contend that situated within the Asian-Pacific economic structure and the Chinese diasporic communities in the postnational era of globalization, there is a nostalgic tendency to imagine an organic community unique to the Taiwanese experience in literary and cinematic production. My corpus consists of Zhu Tianxin’s works produced since the 1970s through the present, with a focus on her frequently discussed novella, The Old Capital, two locally-invested Taiwanese blockbusters: Wei Desheng’s Cape No. 7 (2008), Niu Cheng-ze’s Monga (2010), and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (1999) and Lust, Caution (2008).; The project builds on the scholarship both in Taiwan and abroad that has been conducted on Taiwan’s postcoloniality and the vexed problems regarding its hybridized native culture. Informed by my research on Taiwan’s self-definition within the flux of globalization and its economically symbiotic and politically ambivalent relationship with China and the U.S., I contextualize a selection of film and literary texts. I examine the way recent Taiwanese cinema and literature manifest an interest in re-defining “native-ness,” as a negotiation with, rather than as a resistance against, the way the island is (mis)represented internationally. This project departs from current studies of Taiwanese literature and cinema that emphasize the way the end of the Cold-War era and the onset of late capitalism gave rise to a wave of cultural production thematized by alienation, disorientation, and the collapse of traditional values. I read in these selected works and their reception a re-invention of Taiwanese community consolidated by romanticizing colonial experience and historical trauma as well as reconstructing pre-modern national myth. Such is a community that, nonetheless, is “new” and projects a global vision in its desire to keep up with international trends. This nostalgia recasts the island’s imaginary relationship with Republican China, turns the Japanese colonial legacy into cultural consumption, and aspires to a global visibility, which in turn shapes the island’s self-ethnographization.; The dissertation not only introduces a different aspect of postcolonial studies by foregrounding the singularity of Taiwan’s postcoloniality after Japanese colonization and KMT rule under martial law. It also participates in the discussion of transnationality specifically attributed by scholarship on Chinese-language films to Taiwanese cinema after entries of Taiwan New Cinema garnered prizes in international film festivals since the late 80s and began attracting worldwide consumer and academic attention to the island as a separate entity from China. In this project’s investigation into the way the island’s cultural production interacts with the its political restructuration and economical development in the Asian Pacific context, it not only addresses the way recent Taiwanese literature and cinema reinterpret the historical trauma and ideological shifts the island experiences. By also taking into consideration the coevalness of postcoloniality and postmodernity that shapes the island’s national consciousness and transnational vision, this dissertation turns its attention from Taiwan’s much-discussed diasporic experience, entrenchment in late capitalism, and ambivalent political relationship with China toward a new localist tendency by cultural agents that rose in the past decade to reconceptualize “Taiwanese-ness” in a global context. In other words, by contributing to East Asian studies a specific example of the “peripheral” countries as opposed to the First World countries, this project makes the claim that a new form of nativism distinct from the 1970s “native-soil” movement begins to shape Taiwan’s national consciousness, especially as seen in recent literary and cinematic production on the island,.; The authors selected in my dissertation exemplify Taiwan’s literary and artistic adaptations and responses to the current domestic and global context the island is situated in. Zhu Tianxin’s prolific works span from pre-and post-martial law era. The underlying ideological bent in her writings demonstrates shifts between her subscription to Sino-centricism that celebrates premodern cultural China, to relevatory reflections on political propaganda and a dystopic vision of urbanized Taiwan. In 2008 and 2010, Wei Desheng and Niu Chengze each directed a locally-invested blockbuster commercial films that re-imagine Taiwanese-ness distinct from that of their Taiwan New Cinema predecessors. Considered new talents for a potential renaissance of Taiwan cinema, Wei and Niu reinvented Taiwan’s colonial and postcolonial myths by envisioning organic native communities. Ang Lee’s last two Chinese-language films, regarded by film critics and scholars alike as an epitome of transnational collaboration, indeed re-cultivate the island’s aesthetic taste. Not only does the director’s patriarchal status in the Chinese communities as a maestro whose successful foray into the North American box office markets lend credentials to his global visions. But the reception of these films in Taiwan reconfigures the island’s national consciousness.; In the first chapter, I examine the trajectory of Zhu Tianxin’s literary career since the late 60s through the 90s. This chapter explores the national imageries conjured up in her works and examines the way they are inflected by her ideological transformation before and after the lifting of martial law in 1987. In studying Zhu’s works, I take into consideration the thematic and stylistic continuities and breaks in the trajectory of her career, and the cultural habitus which her canonical works interact with. By doing so, I re-contextualize her novella published in 1997, The Old Capital, and argue that the dystopia presented in the text, which has been critically lauded as a postmodern piece, reveals the writer’s on-going identificatory dilemmas vis-a-vis the questionable notion of “cultural China” and the post-martial-law nativist nationalism.; The second chapter studies what has been considered a revival of Taiwanese cinema that rose two decades after the demise of Taiwan New Cinema. I look into two locally-produced blockbusters, Cape No.7 (2008) and Monga (2010), and discuss the way an organic Taiwanese-ness is imagined in these native films through a coevalness of modernity and postmodernity. I argue that the island’s culture, now subsumed under the dictates of globalization, envisions a new, reconciliatory “new Taiwanese,” which comes into being by re-interpreting the island’s colonial past and embracing modernity. In both films, nostalgia, instead of locating and re-presenting a historical incident in the past, projects a futuristic, utopian community by revisiting and reinventing a particular point in time in the Taiwanese history.; In its investigation of two of Ang Lee’s Chinese-language films, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) and Lust Caution (2007), the third chapter continues to delve into the notion of cultural China, now revived in cinematic language and circulated around the globe. Thinking through the “translatability,” a double-movement of signification, in Ang Lee’s works, I argue that the Taiwanese audience, interpellated into a “Chinese” subject position in the self-conscious viewing experience of Lee’s “international” representation of “Chinese-ness,” is seduced into identifying with the female protagonists in both films. These women depicted in his films embody and suture the aporia, an untranslatable gap between Eastern and Western cultures. I argue that the viewer’s on-going fluctuation between the awareness of the global and re-formation of the local foregrounds the island’s ambivalent relationships with such an internationalized “Chinese-ness” and the Euro-American cultural hegemony. |
| Keyword | national identity; Taiwanese literature; Taiwanese Cinema; postcolonial studies; Cape No. 7; Monga; Lust caution; Croughing tiger hidden dragon; The old capital; Ang Lee; Wei Desheng; Niu Chengze; Zhu Tianxin |
| Geographic subject (country) | Taiwan |
| Coverage date | 1988/2011 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3691 |
| Rights | Wang, Chialan Sharon |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Wang-4359 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume48/etd-Wang-4359.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE TO COME: NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN POST-87 TAIWANESE LITERATURE AND CINEMA by Chialan Sharon Wang A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Chialan Sharon Wang |
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