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Constructing a Native Consciousness: Taiwan Literature in the 20th Century

Few notions in the contemporary world elicit such public demonstration and widespread passion as that of the nation. Even at the end of the 20th century, national conflagrations from Kosovo to East Timor still seize headlines from global treaties and space explorations. While scholars argue that the nation is intersubjectively imagined, discursively produced, and “narrated” and “performed” out of shreds and fragments, the notion, far from being an outmoded concept, shows every sign of gathering strength, intertwined with and supplanting deep-seated religious beliefs and social progress as a sanctified norm.For theoretical discussions of the nation, see especially Benedict Andersen, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Between the local, the national and the supranational whose demarcations are themselves contested, various discursive strands intersect and dispute, vying to redraw maps or rewrite histories. The terrifying devastation allegiance to different nations can unleash therefore weighs heavily on a retrospective on Taiwan, in a double bind of dispassion and engagement. The subject is a particularly sensitive one, for the very invocation of the name “Taiwan,” depending on its context, manner and intonation, implicates particular ideological stances.