North and South: Reflections on a Spring Migration to Taiwan

Abstract

In this paper I reflect on a six-week visit to Taiwan with a distinctively southern aspect and set of identifications. ”North and South” becomes a metaphor for splits, always psychically loaded, in the practice of Cultural Studies. I describe a hierarchically ordered assembly of oppositions that can be summed up as critical theory versus local research, ”universal” academic ambitions versus intellectual activity that serves a situated politics. These dichotomies-and a different North/South polarity-are familiar in my own experience in Britain, but were accentuated when I was obliged to take a southern perspective on cultural studies as itself a global cultural transaction. Two examples are explored in more detail: the circuit of abstraction (theory) and concretion (research and presentation) in the research process and the question of national identity in Taiwan. A case is made for the importance of democratic and egalitarian versions of the nation in opposing the global neo-liberal deformations and for a view of theory-and-research that is attentive to historical particularity and engages with contemporary political tasks.