Reflavored nostalgias: A history and ethnography of Taiwan's muted marginality, 1895--2004

This dissertation is an ethnographic study focused on the narrated memories of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan and the authoritarian violence of postwar Taiwanese history. It deliberates on how nostalgia is transformed into "sadness" for Taiwan's historical past and, simultaneously, beautification of people's colonial memories, thereby revealing transformations in cultural identification in contemporary Taiwanese society. Drawing on two neighboring gold-mining towns as settings for self-reflexivity and contemplation of historical and social change, the dissertation elaborates the diverse historical marginality and the consciousness of independent nationhood in modern Taiwan.;Taiwan's cultural identification has been traditionally oriented toward Chinese historical and cultural hegemony, but this changing as the Taiwanese grow more self-reflectively aware of historical reality. This dissertation analyzes the film Beiqing Chengshi (A City of Sadness) and postcolonial phenomena such as the nostalgic fever for ekiben (train boxed lunches), thereby eliciting the nature of colonialism's impact on the hybridized cultural identity of the colonized. "Nostalgia" in contemporary Taiwanese society not only represents a movement of social consciousness that is expressed through recalling memories for the romanticized past, but also exposes Taiwan's identity controversy by juxtaposing the fifty years of Japanese colonial assimilationist policies with the subsequent Han Chinese ideological indoctrination program of the KMT. Such ideological re-hybridization typifies the marginal relocation of Taiwanese culture.;This dissertation considers how the practice of traveling as a form of spatial mobility can probe a locale's colonized history and its people's feelings about their own past, and further reveals the contradiction inherent in searching for the vanished colonized past. The act of travel therefore represents not only the marginal history of Taiwan, but also the characteristic mobility by which the Taiwanese (re)localize themselves. The dissertation suggests that what travel and nostalgia refer to is not a specific historical period---Japanese colonization---but a free-floating past, for both shape the same images of authenticity and fictionality that are intertwined within people's remembrances. The Taiwanese have, therefore, come to a point of self-relocation at a moment poised between the repeated, marginalized past and an unknown, yet fervently imagined future.