Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. By June Yip. [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 356 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8223-33367-8.

Abstract

June Yip's Envisioning Taiwan considers Taiwan's emergent discourse on a national identity in light of its regionalist or nativist (hsiang-t'u) literary movement and the New Cinema which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. The book has seven chapters, largely devoted to the work of artists such as Hwang Chun-ming and Hou Hsiao-hsien. It gives a most sensible and nuanced account of the development of post-colonial global consciousness and of the indigenization processes in post-1987, Taiwan when martial law was lifted. It argues that language, literature and cinema have played a vital part in constructing cultural nationalism. To map the critical paths in which the Taiwanese have struggled to fashion a unique cultural identity, Yip reveals how “the complexities of Taiwanese literature and film have themselves necessitated a reassessment of conventional assumptions about the local, the national, and the global” (p. 11).Democratization, indigenization and the emergence of a vigorous native consciousness provided parameters that pushed forward local demands for “creative ways to assert the island's undeniable existence as an independent entity without actually declaring itself a nation” (p. 246). According to Yip, the ascendancy of Taiwanese national consciousness was indebted to the political liberation of the 1980s, but was in fact inspired by the hsiang-t'u literature of the 1960s and 1970s. She begins with the literary debates of 1977–78 and uses Hwang Chun-ming as a prime – albeit “curious” – example of someone who provided a voice of local colour in response to capitalist lifestyles, trendy Western ideas and American cultural goods.