| Due to the fact that Taiwan has been colonized by different political powers over the past four hundred years and has been influenced by globalization, a search for its identity has become a crucial mission. Because picturebooks as a cultural product have become an important means to transmit cultural traditions to young generations, they have together provided a myth which seeks to represent the national imagination. How these picturebooks tell their stories about Taiwanese culture offers a window to understand what ideologies are embedded in them.; This study investigates the representation of Taiwanese culture shown in three sets of picturebooks labeled "Taiwan" and containing 22 titles in total. They include the Firefly Picturebook Selection---Taiwanese Folktales, the Taiwanese Children's Picturebook Selection , and the Taiwanese Teenagers, produced by Taiwanese writers and illustrators and published in Taiwan during 2001∼2004. A post-colonial critique of this collective cultural representation based on Bhabha's "cultural hybridity" and Fanon's "national culture" is provided.; The methodology of this study is qualitative research and the methods used for textual analysis include the analysis of narrative structure based on six literary elements (setting, characterization, theme, plot, point of view, and style) as well as Barthes' semiotic approach (two orders of signification). Moreover, the text is situated in two particular contexts: first, the current discourse of localization in Taiwan, in which the development of Taiwanese consciousness is reviewed, and second, the related publishing context, including the objective of the picturebooks from the editors' perspective and the marketing strategies through the web promotions created by the publishing houses, is examined.; The data analysis shows thirty verbal and visual narrative patterns according to the six literary elements. The common cultural representation of the picturebooks, from the content aspect, illustrates a nostalgic aspect of an agricultural Taiwan, which represents a pure Taiwanese culture reflecting Han Chinese folkways without foreign cultural influences. In contrast, cultural hybridity is frequently shown in the format of the picturebooks. That is, a contemporary visual language is adopted in presenting local culture to attract today's young readers. This constructed representation can be seen as a strategy for recalling and reinstalling the local cultures that had been oppressed and missed in the Kuomintang era, which is in the second phase of the revolution of national literature within a post-colonial society, according to Fanon. This pure Taiwanese culture however may not be able to reflect current social reality.; According to Bhabha, culture is dynamic and hybrid; it is located in the site of struggles with conflicts and changes, which Bhabha calls the "Third Space." In this space, cultural difference is negotiated and on-going process, which is ambivalent and always "in-between" different cultures. His notion provides an alterative perspective for rethinking the definition of Taiwanese culture. That is, cultural purity, usually representing a romantic light on a culture, is not the only way to define what Taiwanese culture is. Cultural hybridity, seeing conflicts as a usual process of cultural formation, should be taken into consideration when editors, writers, and illustrators create stories. |
