Unrooted Otherness? A Postcolonial Interpretation of Contemporary Taiwanese Cityscape

Abstract

This paper attempts to interpret the hybrid feature of contemporary Taiwanese cityscape in relation to Taiwanese cultural identity through drawing on an analysis of postcolonialism. While the diasporic consciousness-taking account of a desire for distanced homeland and searching for new aesthetic and practical principles to govern the mode of cultural representation in Taiwan-is on the rise, this paper argues that the diasporic sentiment creates a set of objects on which our cultural identity is projected without the depth of meanings. This paper also argues that a pure Taiwanese regional character might not exist after all, since ”otherness” has always been an inseparable inheritance in the history of the development of this island. Following Homi Bhabha's elaboration on the term ”hybridity,” this paper points out that the representation of Taiwanese cultural identity has little to do with ”rediscovery” or ”invention” but rather with the ”imitation,” ”borrowing” or ”hybridisation” of identity and its representation in which ”otherness” is always employed to construct the identity of the self. By hybridisation, Taiwan's cityscape has taken a more eclectic form, as a style of speaking of otherness, that has increasingly become a point of entry for an approach to materialising Taiwanese cultural identity.