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.
About the Author: 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).
