主講者(Speaker)： Tze-lan Sang (Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon)
講題(Topic)：殖民地摩登、鄉愁、性別：從《跳舞時代》談起(Colonial Modernity, Nostalgia, and Gender: The Case of Viva Tonal: The Dance Age)
時間(Date & Time)： 2010/10/15(五) 18:20~21:00
18:30~19:30 播放《跳舞時代》部份影片
19:30~21:00 演講
地點(Venue)： 中興大學綜合教學大樓9樓904室
演講摘要(Abstract)：
Taiwan’s documentary filmmakers have been actively participating in the revisionist narration of history since the lifting of martial law. A key area of representation and re-interpretation has been the Japanese colonial period. I argue that Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (Viva Tonal: Tiaowu shidai), a 2003 documentary that had relatively high box office receipts and generated considerable controversy because of its relatively positive portrayal of the colonial era, oscillates between two different interpretations of colonial modernity, one stressing the colonial government’s generative role, the other highlighting the interdependence and mutual influence between center and periphery, the colonial elite and the colonized. Ultimately, however, this documentary by women directors Chien Wei-ssu (簡偉斯) and Kuo Chen-ti (郭珍弟) refuses to settle on a simplistic narrative of dominance and resistance, choosing instead to present colonial modernity as constituted through circuitous and multi-directional cultural traffic rather than simply emanating from the imperialist metropole. In other words, underneath the film’s veneer of postcolonial nostalgia is a strong desire on the filmmakers’ part to discover a legacy of Taiwanese cultural ingenuity and agency. Moreover, through an examination of women’s performing roles in 1930s urban consumer culture, the film retrieves, intentionally or unintentionally, an image of the Taiwanese modern girl that is quite distinct from the highly educated elite modern woman, a figure that was previously made visible to some extent through the memoirs of and documentaries about upper-class Taiwanese professional women. The film reveals the non-elite’s participation in modern cultural formations and contributes to our understanding of the class formations and class mobility in colonial modernity. However, the film’s success is also its liability: the recuperation of the lower-middle-class modern girl is unfortunately accomplished at the risk of glorifying the commodification of the female body and eclipsing other possibilities of modern womanhood.
Recommended readings:
陳芳明。《殖民地摩登：現代性與台灣史觀》。 台北：麥田，2004。 [especially the first couple of chapters]
邱貴芬。〈‘日本’記憶與台灣新歷史想像〉。東亞現代中文文學國際學報：東亞文化與中文文學專號。香港：嶺南大學， 2006。 80-95。
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. [especially pp. 40-55]
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. [especially pp. 27-46]
Jones, Andrew F. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. [introduction]
Kuo, Li-hsin. “Sentimentalism and De-politicization: Some Problems of Documentary Culture in Contemporary Taiwan.” Documentary Box 25 (August 2005): 16-23.
Liao, Hsien-hao. “Tiaowu shidai de anying” (The dark shadows of The Dance Age). Fangying zhoubao (Funscreen).
Rosenstone, Robert A. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. [introduction & chapter 1]
The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, ed., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. [introduction]
