Nation, history, and culture: A case study on Taiwanese primetime television (China)

This research examines a genre of Taiwanese primetime television, Hsiang Tu Hsi, or “local drama.” Situated within current Taiwanese social milieu, this research analyzes the television programs in Foucauldian historical perspectives, and the discursive formations within and without this popular television genre. The goal of this research is to uncover the power relations between the emerging nationalism as the social, and the television programs as the textual, from the standpoint of cultural studies. The overarching argument of the dissertation is that nationalism is a power-laden social discourse in which different social groups struggle to negotiate their interests. In the building process of the nation-state, marginal groups are made into vehicles for the writing of a national history, and are silenced for the unity of national culture.; This research explores the nationalist issue and the television genre in four aspects: post-colonial inquiries into the account of nation, debates on global and local cultures, the question of a unified history, and feminist critiques of state-controlled gender/sexuality. In the studied television genre, the discourses of nationalism articulate with other social and cultural agendas. These discourses manifest in terms of the imagination of the nation, the countering local force to cultural imperialism, the forceful act of writing a linear and fictional grand history, and/or the patriarchal language that depicts women as its material of nation-construction. The author concludes that nation is a question of representation, as well as an act of performance and practice. Nationalism is a failed promise that enforces the current hegemonic order and hierarchizes social and cultural issues, and in turn, further represses the already marginalized other, such as women and ethnic groups.