Since the 1990s the issue of identity has been one of the most prominent and hotly debated topics in Taiwan Studies. The book takes a fresh approach to this important topic, examining Taiwanese identity from a visual perspective and exploring the ways in which the island is presented and imagined. Covering a diverse range of topics, the book aims to capture the fluidity, changeability, fragmentation and dynamism of Taiwanese identity as an imaginary and encompassing whole.
Taiwan's quest for identity and international recognition have unequivocally been the most important issues in Taiwan over the past 40 years, and they continue to generate impassioned debate, nationally and internationally. This book explores the instrumental roles artists, curators and museums have played in Taiwan's nation-building process. It focuses on the post-martial law period, from 1987 until 2010, a transformative period when democratization gave rise to a heightened sense of Taiwanese nationalism, and when issues concerning Taiwan's identity vis-à-vis with China, peaked.
The Matsu archipelago between China and Taiwan, for long an isolated outpost off southeast China, was suddenly transformed into a military frontline in 1949 by the Cold War and the Communist-Nationalist conflict. The army occupied the islands, commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people were confronted with the question of how to move forward. This in-depth ethnography and social history of the islands focuses on how individual citizens redefined themselves and reimagined their society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Wei-Ping Lin shows how islanders used both traditional and new media to cope with the conflicts and trauma of harsh military rule. She discusses the formation of new social imaginaries through the appearance of 'imagining subjects', interrogating their subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies as they seek to answer existential questions. This title is Open Access.
DIVTraces 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./div
Taiwan has often been characterised as an isolated society in its search for sovereignty and security. Its contact with the world in an era of globalization and post-modernity, however, has increasingly led to Taiwanese actors successfully participating in many regional and global fields. In this book an international team of scholars presents cases studies and theoretical debates emphasising agency in coping with the effects of globalisation. In so doing, they contest the image of Taiwan’s marginalization and seek to understand it in terms of its connectedness, whether globally, regionally or trans-nationally. Taking a multi-disciplinary, comparative approach, it covers themes such as markets and trading, diplomacy and nation-branding, collective action, media, film and literature, and religious mission. It thus combines perspectives from several disciplines including media studies, sociology, political science, and studies in religion. Using Taiwan as an example of how to conceptualise connectivity and think differently about comparative studies, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Asian Politics and Cultural Studies, as well as of Taiwan Studies more specifically.
This book gathers peer-reviewed papers presented at the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination (IMG), held in Milano, Italy, in November 2021. Highlighting interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research concerning graphics science and education, the papers address theoretical research as well as applications, including education, in several fields of science, technology and art. Mainly focusing on graphics for communication, visualization, description and storytelling, and for learning and thought construction, the book provides architects, engineers, computer scientists, and designers with the latest advances in the field, particularly in the context of science, arts and education.
This book explores five cases of monument and public commemorative space related to World War II (WWII) in contemporary China (Mainland), Hong Kong and Taiwan, all of which were built either prior to or right after the end of the War and their physical existence still remains. Through the study on the monuments, the project illustrates past and ongoing controversies and contestations over Chinese nation, sovereignty, modernism and identity. Despite their historical affinities, the three societies in question, namely, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, vary in their own ways of telling, remembering and forgetting WWII. These divergences are not only rooted in their different political circumstances and social experiences, but also in their current competitions, confrontations and integrations. This book will be of great interest to historians, sinologists and analysts of new Asian nationalism.
Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.
This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”
This book gathers peer-reviewed papers presented at the 1st International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination (IMG 2019), held in Alghero, Italy, in July 2019. Highlighting interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research concerning graphics science and education, the papers address theoretical research as well as applications, including education, in several fields of science, technology and art. Mainly focusing on graphics for communication, visualization, description and storytelling, and for learning and thought construction, the book provides architects, engineers, computer scientists, and designers with the latest advances in the field, particularly in the context of science, arts and education.
