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The Last Isle

Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan

The Last Isle cover

The Last Isle

Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan

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Description

Taiwan is in danger of becoming the last isle, losing its sovereignty and identity. The Last Isle opens from where Taiwan film scholarship leaves off—the 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, focusing on relatively unknown contemporary films that are “unglobalizable,” such as Cape No. 7, Island Etude, Din Tao, and Seven Days in Heaven. It explores Taiwan films’ inextricability with trauma theory, the irony of loving and mourning Taiwan, multilingualism, local beliefs, and theatrical practices, including Ang Lee’s “white” films. The second half of the book analyzes Taiwan’s popular culture in Western-style food and drink, conditions over living and dying, and English education, concluding with the source of Taiwan’s anxiety—China.

This book distinguishes itself from Taiwan scholarship in its stylistic crazy quilt of the scholarly interwoven with the personal, evidenced right from the outset in the poetic title “The Last Isle,” coupled with the “dissertating” subtitle. This approach intertwines the helix of reason and affect, scholarship and emotion. The Last Isle accomplishes a look at globalization from the bottom up, from a global Taiwan whose very existence is in doubt.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments / Figures / Introduction / 1. Trauma and Taiwan’s Melodrama: Seven Orphans of Cape No. 7 / 2. Island’s Irony: Virtual Pilgrimage Circum-Taiwan in Search of the High Cs / 3. Mazu’s Touch, Taiwan Nezha and Crying / 4. Globalization’s Bottom: Subtitle and Switch in Wang Yu-Lin’s Taiwanese Dialect Films / 5. Wet Umbrella and The White Snake / 6. Hyde-and-Seek in Asian Diaspora: Deann Borshay Liem’s Negative and Ang Lee’s Ventriloquy / 7. Sold Mountain: Chinese-Language Films on Shangri-La / 8. Nestle in Shalu / 9. Taiwan’s English Education: A Fish with Three Heads / 10. The Fate of Accidental Taiwanese: 5 Ways to Leave Your Father / Coda: China Laying Golden Eggs / Bibliography / Index

Product details

Published Aug 21 2015
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 208
ISBN 9781783483389
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Illustrations 19 BW Illustrations
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Place, Memory, Affect
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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