Nostalgia for the future to come: National consciousness in post-87 Taiwanese literature and cinema

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.;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. 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.;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.;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. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...