Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context is a collection of chapters by 14 authors on a wide range of topics related to Taiwan, including literature, migration, food, travel and cinema.
The two female editors are Lin Pei-yin (林姵吟), associate professor in the School of Chinese in the University of Hong Kong, and Chang Bi-yu (張必瑜), deputy director of the Center of Chinese Studies at SOAS in the University of London.
The former is the author of Colonial Taiwan: Negotiating Identities and Modernity through Literature, while the latter wrote Place, Identity and National Imagination in Post-war Taiwan.
Each editor contributes an item to this book, Lin on the topic as a whole (the introductory chapter), Chang on tourism to Taiwan in a chapter called “From ‘free China’ to sunny paradise.”
The book takes its place in Routledge’s Research on Taiwan series. By and large it’s an academic book of an easily-recognizable kind, characterized by plentiful references to intellectuals such as Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault.
There’s no doubt that university libraries will be tempted to buy this volume. The only set-back for the individual consumer — as with Routledge’s Victorian Contagion (reviewed in the Taipei Times, June 18, 2020) — is the inordinately high price. This new book is, on amazon.com, priced at US$107.68 (hardback) and US$49.10 (Kindle).
In a piece on Japanese tourism to Taiwan by Lillian Tsay, the writer opines that this tourism is often food-based, while noting that the Japanese were not allowed to travel abroad for pleasure between 1946 and 1964. In the 1930s they had often come to Taiwan under the influence of their government’s encouragement of visits to Japan’s East Asian colonies, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan.
Another chapter, “Getting to Know Taiwan” by Adina Zemanek, looks at the processes by which Taiwan was offered to visitors as a place in its own right rather than some sort of extension of China, however disputed. The writer does this largely via the study of postcards and maps from different periods.
A chapter “Let’s Talk about Love” by Tsung-yi Michelle Huang (黃宗儀) isn’t about sex-tourism but the fascination Hong Kongers have for Taiwan. This is partly, of course, an envy of its political freedoms, but the title refers to the language of courtship in which this affection is couched. In this context Taiwan is seen as the female being approached by a hard-bitten Hong Kong male. This is one of the most interesting chapters in the book.
Teri Silvio’s “Localizing the Japanese manga system and making folk religion manga-esque” examines a Taiwanese manga series called Ming Zhan-lu: Final Destiny of the Formosan Gods, (with its echo of Wagner’s opera Gotterdammerung, or “The Twilight of the Gods”).
Taiwan essentially reproduced Japanese and (mostly) Chinese manga, though with local elements. Notable were the four series of cute vinyl figurines produced by FamilyMart as prizes for customers between 2007 and 2010. Though considered slightly blasphemous by some people, these proved immensely popular and collectible.
Cinema is naturally an important item in a scenario such as this book’s, and in Carsten Storm’s “Exotic Voyages” in the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Edward Yang (楊德昌) the writer argues that, whereas postcolonial theory has it that colonizers romanticize their colonies, these two film-makers reverse the trend and romanticize Japan. Japan, it’s argued, is the barely disguised destination in a series of films featuring “exotic voyages.”
Hou’s film A City of Sadness (1989) broke the taboo against speaking of the 228 Incident and presented the Japanese colonial era in Taiwan as greatly superior to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-era that followed it. Actual trips to Japan feature in Hou’s Millennium Mambo (千禧曼波, 2001).
And in A One and a Two (一一, 2000), Yang situates a protagonist’s bid to escape a globalized modernity into an “inner life” in Tokyo, making the film another example of Japan as seen as an exotic and potentially redeeming “other place.”
After saying that Taiwanese culture is impossible to pin down because new arrivals are always introducing new and different elements, Bert Scruggs opts to look at three novels set in the Hualien area, Rose, Rose, I Love You (玫瑰玫瑰我愛你, 1984) by Wang Chen-ho (王禎和), The Man with the Compound Eyes (複眼人, 2011) by Wu Ming-yi (吳明益), and The Pangcah Girl (邦查女孩, 2015) by Gan Yao-ming (甘耀明). The name “Pangcah,” or “Bangcha,” is the term by which the aboriginal Amis, prominent in the Hualien area, call themselves.
In “Translating Taiwan southward” Adam Lifshey points to the largely neglected strait between Taiwan and the Philippines, and the relationship between Taiwan and its southern neighbor.
“The deepest social links of Taiwan and the Philippines,” Lifshey writes, “are Austronesian in nature and prehistoric in origin.”
The author points to the unsuccessful attempts in the 17th century of the Spanish in Manila to oppose the Dutch and conquer northern Taiwan, and the links to the Philippines in the famous Taiwanese novel Orphan of Asia (1945), written in secret during World War II.
There’s also an interesting chapter entitled “Indigenizing Queer Fiction and Queer Theories: A study of Chi Ta-wei’s Sci-Fi novels” which concludes that Taiwan can be seen as a “hybrid aggregate,” or a “queer of Asia.”
This, then, is a book that contains much interesting material. Its very high price, however, makes it unlikely to appear on many people’s must-read lists. This pricing strategy seems to me a mistake on the part of Routledge, and something that should be remedied.
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