Search

This paper examines the work of the Taiwanese troupe Performance Workshop (Biaoyan gongzuofang) under director and playwright Stan Lai, specifically Peach Blossom Land, Strange Tales from Taiwan, and I Me He Him. These plays address the disjunction of space and time through a particular device, namely splitting the stage between 'here' and 'there', 'now' and 'then'. Characters and their alter-egos share the same stage, a situation that results in awkward and fragmented dialogs. The cohabitation of incompatible temporal dimensions gives rise to many comical situations, foregrounds the futility of the characters' search for stable identities, and demonstrates the existence of irreconcilable though mutually resonant temporal planes. The double play often becomes a metaphor for the mirroring existence on the two sides of the Taiwan Straits, as well as for the role of theater itself in teasing out and negotiating between these ambiguous similarities. Lai's plays give the lie to neat distinctions between local Taiwanese and pan-Chinese identities, and stress the heightened sense of dislocation in a globalizing society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the interplay between nationalism and foreign policy in China—but with a twist. It seeks to loosen up analytical categories to expand from cultural nationalism to see how civilization constructs identity in national and transnational ways. It examines the limits of Chinese trans/nationalism according to the main Chinese expression of inside/outside—‘civilization/barbarism’—as it constructs Chinese nationalism and Greater China. The purpose is to both critically examine Chinese nationalism and to trace what our focus on the nation-state obscures: namely, transnational politics. Rather than recounting one master narrative of Chinese nationalism, the essay argues that civilization and barbarian define Greater China according to four narratives—nativism, conquest, conversion and diaspora. Hence, the essay does not merely deconstruct the notion of Greater China and Chinese nationalism, but shows how these four grids of meaning can help us to understand identity politics and foreign policy debates in China. Nationalism thus turns from being the Answer about the true intent of China, to being a series of questions which define different terrains of political inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]