Emerging Appropriate Fuzziness: A Spatiotemporal Observation of Post-Martial Law Taiwan Literature and Cinema

Francis Chia-Hui Lin

doi:10.13189/saj.2014.020102

Abstract

Taiwan’s some four hundred years history, culturally and politically, is inscribed by relationships between rulers and the ruled that shape its social sophistication and gaps between forms of high culture and popular culture. Its built environment, inevitably, echoes this complexity as a representation. Examining Taiwan’s very recent built environment, most critically, this phenomenon is highlighted by the uncertainty that translates Taiwan society’s anxiety about connecting the yet passed authoritarian past and the seemingly democratic present when its post-war Martial Law period was officially terminated in 1987. This paper observes the immediate historicity today in Taiwan that represents this uncertainty, through scrutinising different cultural forms which the built environment has been identically (re)represented. As a central argument, this paper schematises a context which mediates different spatial objects that are derived from different cultural political origins, literature and cinema, where as texts in one context could be relevant, contradictory or even parallel, and suggests a form of appropriate fuzziness. This form, unlike the social conundrum driven by the awkward cultural and political status of Taiwan society, through ways of urbanisation, geo-identification and spatial idealisation, has pinpointed the possibility that directs Taiwan’s spatial evolution on the road ahead.

Highlights

High Culture and Popular CulturePost-war Taiwan, when read as a text in a quasi-colonial context, has been pinpointed as raising a series of questions in terms of its complexity both in the past and the present: What is post-war Taiwan’s de facto scenario after its Martial Law period? Is it related to the collective ideological issue of nationalism? Alternatively, is it related to another circumstance, a comparatively pragmatic concern, the issue of everyday life? Or, simultaneously, are both relevant? These questions are tied into Taiwan’s colonial past and its quasi-colonial presence
The so-called Chinese orthodoxy as a longstanding high culture in Taiwan is challenged by the emerging indigenous popular culture
A pragmatic consciousness about this island’s de facto scenario, which emerged as a distinct phenomenon and a historical turning point, is evident in modern Taiwan’s chief cultural forms such as literature and cinema

Summary

Introduction

Post-war Taiwan, when read as a text in a quasi-colonial context, has been pinpointed as raising a series of questions in terms of its complexity both in the past and the present: What is post-war Taiwan’s de facto scenario after its Martial Law period? Is it related to the collective ideological issue of nationalism? Alternatively, is it related to another circumstance, a comparatively pragmatic concern, the issue of everyday life? Or, simultaneously, are both relevant? These questions are tied into Taiwan’s colonial past and its quasi-colonial presence. This paper, intends to examine spatial reflection from the Martial Law period to the current time by analysing the representations of post-war Taiwan’s spatial identification This identification through space is largely reflected by the domestic political, economic and technological changes in Taiwan after 1987. In this analytical context, different “images” of the typical city and society at different post-war stages in Taiwan have been shown as a critical medium of experience in the discourse of post-war Taiwan’s leading cultural forms. Literature and Cinema environment struggling between its autocratic past and the seemingly democratic present

An Unsettled History

Towards Heteroglossia