Born from the crisis of Eurocentric humanities and socialscience disciplines, the “desire” called Cultural Studies (CS) in the metropolitan academies has now become institutionalized and reconfigured safely. With its canonical archive (Stuart Hail, de Certeau, Lyotard, etc.) and regimes of semiotic reading, deconstructive aesthetics, and eclectic inventory, Western CS has failed to question the hegemonic relations of power between metropole and periphery, between subordinate and dominant nation-states. It has failed, more precisely, to critique the globalized commodification of cultural products (now labelled “intellectual property”) and practices. More seriously, it has failed to challenge the persistent domination of peripheral, neocolonized countries by hegemonic, advanced industrial nation-states. In my paper, I attempt to diagnose the causes of these failures. In general, I argue that it inheres in the postmodernist relativism and nominalism of CS, its rejection of the imperative to integrate theory and practice, its ethos of rhetorical mastery. These inadequacies are worsened by its pragmatic refusal to grasp the political economy operating in the globalization or transnationalization of cultures around the world. Lacking a framework of rendering intelligible the effects of the transnational market on culture (ideas, practices, products exchanged via multimedia communications technology), CS has in general become complicitous with the profound dynamics of reification that has undermined the emancipatory project of modernity (already elaborated by various thinkers, among them Habermas, Jameson, Said, and others). I propose a renewal of a historicist “cultural materialism” attuned to developments in Asia (particularly China), Latin America, and Africa that would recover the impulses of “national liberation struggles” in the last half of this century. This new framework would try to recover those oppositional and critical impulses embodied in the examples of Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Sun Yat-sen, C.L.R. James, Che Guevarra, Lu Hsun, Aimé Césaire, and others. I am speculating on the possibility of a program of cultural studies keyed to the cultural practices of subaltern people of color that will articulate selected elements of the Western Enlightenment tradition with the needs and projects of hitherto silenced, marginalized, and invisible “Others.”

This paper looks at the “Birmingham School” from an institutional perspective by designating four historical moments from the earliest CCCS, to DCS, and to the most recent DCSS. It addresses a number of important issues, some relating to the “Birmingham School” as an established institution in particular, others to cultural studies in general: the glory and/or burden of history, disciplinarity and/or interdisciplinarity, institutionalization and/or political commitment, as well as localization and/or internationalization. Despite different constructions of the histories of the “Birmingham School,” what remains common is that cultural studies has always been a site of contestation and an Open-ended, on-going process with high self-reflexivity, subject to change from time to time and, with its growing internationalization, from place to place. In other words, cultural studies has always been at the crossroads. Among all the cultural studies institutions, this might best be seen in the history of the “Birmingham School.” A better understanding of this history can help anchor it in its historical context, shed light on its current situation, and, hopefully, pave the way for the future.

Narrative unity is often taken for granted. Presumably it is derived from man’s desire to listen to a good and complete story. It is also to be expected of any respectable fiction writer. A novel, for instance, qualifies as such only insofar as it comes equipped with chronological and causal dimensions. It has also been argued at a theological and aesthetic level that narrative unity is related to man’s anxiety over the impending apocalypse, since both share in common “the sense of an ending.” For this reason, narrative unity has all along been regarded as essential in the realist tradition of the West. However, in an age of late capitalism, massive urbanization, and social fragmentation, this realist mode of representation seems to be undergoing a dramatic change. In place of temporal continuity, some sort of spatial transformation seems to be at work. This spatial trend seems to be intensifying as we begin a new millennium. Even the sense of purpose itself (in terms of chronological and causal relations, for example) seems suspect now. A different mode of investigation, therefore, is in order if we are to explore the overdetermined contemporary scene. Zhu Tian-xin’s 朱天心 Gudu 古都 (1997) is a good example of such a mode as it foregrounds man’s dilemma between tradition and modernity. At the turn of the millennium, the writer is forced to give up the conventional realist mode of representation in favor of spatial transformation. The strategy is necessary as the writer searches for an identity for her native city as well as for herself. Although essential as a means of self-understanding, the strategy also reflects the writer's will to order, to the point of subjecting the world to her own wish for a utopian state.

This paper proposes to trace the history of three generations of SF writing in Taiwan since the 60’s. In developing the thesis that, these writings form a corpus of fiction dealing with cityspace within a movement from Humanism to the post-human, this paper concentrates on themes and motifs such as Cyberian community, the hyperreal and virtual reality, the spectacle society (mediascape), the body and monstrosity in relation to gender politics, and so on. The ultimate purpose for bringing forward these categories for an analysis is to argue for a potentially positive process of identity formation for those Chinese who live in megacities in Asia, Taipei or Hong Kong being excellent examples. In this direction, the paper will also explore issues such as metropolis and metropolitanism set at the present juncture of a cultural globalism/localism paradigm.

While discontents with Taipei surface in a milieu of massive urban constructions, two cultural productions are noteworthy. One is Chu Tienhsin’s Gudu (Ancient Capital, 1997), a highly complex postmodern narrative about urban memory in Taipei, and the other is Taipei 100 (1998), literally the “one hundred reasons to live in Taipei,” a sort of underground guidebook of Taipei by a group of five authors, whom hereby I will refer to as “the Huangs.” Very different in form, the two texts simultaneously express their discontents with Taipei: Chu detests urbanization at the cost of historicity, and the Huangs abhor “unevenness” due to the fact of deficient modernization. Taken together, they offer interesting points of connection and disconnection that would amount to “fin-de-siècle” mappings of Taipei. By “mapping,” I have in mind specially the Jamesonian conception of “cognitive mapping,” that is, how “people make sense of their urban surroundings.” (MacCabe xiv) I would like to interrogate how Chu and the Huangs “make sense of the urban surroundings” of Taipei, and by doing so, to explore the dialectics of modernity and urbanity in Gudu and Taipei 100. Taking on Jameson’s “Re-mapping Taipei” (1992), I argue that the experiences of modernity and urbanity in Taipei do not and should not be regulated by the kinds of categories that Jameson employs. The sort of non-categorizability of Taipei discloses on the one hand the non-binaristic experiences of the modern and the postmodern in Taipei, and on the other the non-homogenizing trajectories of the temporal and the spatial aspects of modernity. My arguments will proceed from the temporal dimension of modernity by way of Marshall Berman (1982) and Hayden White (1978), to the spatial dimension as theorized by Arjun Appadurai (1996) and Edward Soja (1996). At the end, I will contrast Soja’s “Thirdspace” with Jameson’s “Third World” and conclude with recourse to Foucault.

This paper uses Elaine Showalter’s ideas of gender crossing and decadence in her book Sexual Anarchy and applies them to 1990s Taiwan and Taiwanese fiction. I trace the change in notions of gender in the past few decades in Taiwan in terms of globalization and localization and discuss how meanings of gender crossing and decaden-ce in 1990s Taiwan are different from those in England in the 1880s and 1890s. 1990s Taiwanese fiction is both agent and product of the phenomena of gender crossing and decadence in 1990s Taiwan. For my examples, I choose fictions by four female writers, whom I call “daughters of decadence.” While earlier Taiwanese fiction tends to condemn homosexuality and female desire and take such condemnations for granted, 1990s Taiwanese fiction, even when they continue to denigrate such desires, are more ambiguous and ambivalent in tone. Thus, Li Ang’s The Labyrinthine Garden and Cheng Ying-shu’s What Good Girls Don’t Do portray on the one hand how loose women become men’s playthings, and on the other how these women’s feminist consciousness emerges. Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man simultaneouly vilifies male homosexuality and implicitly criticizes mainstream heterosexual society by relishing homosexual practice. Chiu Miao-Jin’s Notes of a Crocodile apparently denigrates lesbianism and male homosexuality, but virtually uses it to express anger at and protest against mainstream heterosexual society. In addition, new, unconventional visions are presented, such as the feminine, narcissistic women, the Material Girls, and the Queen Bees in Chu Tien-wen’s Fin-de-Siècle Splendor, the sexually autonomous fat girls ugly women in What Good Girls Don’t Do, and the beautiful male-to-female transsexual in Cheng Ying-shu’s Humankind Should Not Fly. Queer gender notions are posited in Notes of a Desolate Man, where the male homosexual narrator directly overturns traditional disparagement of femininity and women, and in Notes of a Crocodile, where the lesbian narrator asserts violent masculinity. From a larger perspective, the fictional emphasis on female desire signifies that the meanings of female autonomy have extended to the sexual terrain, where women redefine their sexuality by themselves, thereby posing a great threat to men. Meanwhile, the various genders in 1990s Taiwan go well beyond the traditional gender divide: the sexiest woman may turn out to be a male transvestite, and the most masculine person may be a woman.