Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan

This dissertation examines the role that cinema played in imagining Hong Kong and Taiwan's place in the world during decades in which the idea of belonging and identity was under duress. In fan magazines with names like International Screen and in films with titles like Cosmopolitan Fantasy, the dissertation unearths two generations of discourses on cosmopolitanism, an ideal of being a citizen of the world, a provocative possibility of belonging for residents in islands turbulently on the peripheries of colonizers and nations. In direct response to state policy and socio-political upheaval, cinema proposed audio-visual possibilities that spectacularly imagined mobile figures who are flexible to the ways of the world, and in their often flamboyant worldliness, reworked ideas of the national in dynamic and pragmatic ways. In these cinemas, the cosmopolitan is an ideal type -- fashioned, beautified, and accented in urban, international styles -- that suggests a promise of belonging in an international space and time: mobility across national borders and coevality with the future-looking global market. This dissertation tracks the ideal across historical periods, specifically in the popular culture of the first generation born in Hong Kong and Taiwan after the massive demographic and political changes following the Civil War on the mainland, as well as the film, music, and television of their children's generation.;The dissertation also tracks discourses of cosmopolitanism as it is embedded across various kinds of cinematic pleasures and industrial practices such as beauty, fashion, music, genre, stardom, and advertising. Each chapter examines a different expression of the cosmopolitan ideal as it manifested in specific historical and geographic contexts: worldly dance and fashion in 1950s and 60s Hong Kong musicals produced by Shaw Brothers and MP&GI studios, proto-cosmopolitan heroism in the Shaolin Temple martial arts cycle of the 1970s and 80s, overseas students in love in the propagandistic family melodramas of 1970s Taiwan, the mixed-race and bicultural Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians who took the Hong Kong and Taiwan media industries by storm in the 1990s and 2000s, and the cosmopolitan self-fashioning of state bureaucrats and representatives in international film markets of the 21st century. In looking at these various phenomena, the dissertation argues that cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan played a critical role in helping navigate and make sense of the emotional challenges suggested by the seemingly imminent arrival of globalization.