CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

The Cultural Violence of Globalization in East Asia

Organiser: Chi-she Li

Chiu, Hanping (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan) THE EFFECT OF GLOBALIZATION ON TAIWAN'S CULTURAL IDENTITY
This paper studies the effect of growing globalization on Taiwan's cultural landscape. Taiwan entered World Trade Organization at the beginning of this year, thereby accelerating an on-going process of opening up to the world. To properly explore the significance of the added impetus, the increasing presence of China's interests in Taiwan within the framework of WTO cannot be ignored. The first instance of China's open presence, tom.com, catches attention because it occupies a position of cultural influence through the purchase of a major publishing company and an information magazine in Taiwan. The Hong Kong-based multinational corporation, itself a product of information society, can be cited as representing the forces of globalization and also as an instance of China's presence. With Taiwan's entry into WTO, which China also joined as a member, cases like this can be expected to increase rapidly, thus exerting a far-reaching influence on the rhizomic, even schizophrenic, nature of Taiwan's cultural identity. The sense of rootlessness is derived, on the one hand, from Taiwan's long separation from China, which claims to be its cultural matrix, and, on the other hand, from a long history of being colonized, from the Spanish, Dutch, Manchu, to Japanese colonization. With its entry into WTO, Taiwan can find itself again drawn into the sphere of China's cultural influence though further opening its border to the world. This paper uses theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Arjun Appadurai to study the paradoxical effect of globalization on Taiwan's cultural identity.

Huang, Tsung-yi (Michelle) (Tamkang University, Taiwan) SHANGHAI: THE PRODUCTION OF NEW URBAN SPACES AT THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
This paper attempts to elucidate how Shanghai’s rise as a global city in the 1990s brings to light the production of such a global space and its problems. Exploring the urban discourse and the actual development of Shanghai’s transformation into a global city, I argue that Shanghai is made in the image of existing global cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo. The process of remaking Shanghai into a global city shows how the capitalist space takes precedence and subjugates the lived space of local people’s everyday life. The second part of the paper uses Shanghai writer Wang Anyi’s works to see the gap between the dazzling new look of the city and the vanished old Shanghai represented by the minutia of daily life in the lilongs.  While the grand narrative of Shanghai encourages the city-dwellers to envision being (re)connected with the world, the strong sense of loss experienced by the walkers in Wang’s works narrate a different story of living in the global city.

Li, Chi-she (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan) THE COSMOPOLITAN GEOGRAPHIES IN EDWARD YANG'S A ONE AND A TWO AND MING-LIANG TSAI'S WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?
This paper will investigate the relationship between time-space compression, engendered by economic globalization, and cosmopolitan imaginations in Taiwan. The discussion will evolve around two recent films by Taiwanese directors, Edward Yang's A One and a Two (2000) and Ming-Liang Tsai's What Time Is It There? (2001). My research starts with a hypothesis that the fervent engagement in cosmopolitan explorations, as dramatized in both films, emerges as a displacement of frustrated attempts to narrate histories in a globalized context. While both films apparently treat everyday life of the characters in Taipei, Taiwan, with an existential flair, I will go against the grain of the modernist interpretation by arguing that these two works are allegories of everyday life under economic globalization. To be specific, the ennui, the sense of boredom, a dominant theme so familiar in existential arts, ceases to be a universal expression of the everyday life of secularized individuals in these two films but rather becomes a metaphor of historical depthlessness in a globalized age. I will then foreground the possibility of cosmopolitan quests as redemption as seen in these two films. In this research I will mainly relate Mikhail M. Bakhtin's reflections on everyday life in his Russian context to my discussion of globalization in Taiwan.

Liu, Chien-chi (National Chengchi University, Taiwan) DISCURSIVE VIOLENCE IN GLOBAL CULTURAL FLOWS: A STUDY OF ETHONOSCAPE AND IDEOSCAPE IN AMY TANG'S THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES
This paper comprises both theoretical and practical dimensions. The theoretical dimension will explore, firstly, modes of violence in cross-cultural discourse and their relevance to global cultural flows and, secondly, Arjuin Appadurai's concepts of "ethonoscape" and "ideoscape" and their relevance to ethnicity and identity in the Chinese American writing. The practical dimension will discuss the various forms of cultural violence represented in Amy Tang's The Hundred Secret Senses and examine the ethnic and ideological hybridity through Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of Same/Other, Totality/Infinity. Based on the theoretical and practical dimensions, this paper will point out that the discourse of violence can be significantly fruitful if it is displaced into another category of global cultural flows.