7 * 9 MARCH 2001
BOCHUM, GERMANY
Research Unit on Taiwanese Culture & Literature
Transformation! Innovation?
Taiwan in her Cultural Dimensions
Since the early
1980s, the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, has been one of the West's
main centres of academic research on Taiwan. The late Helmut Martin, in
addition to his great contributions as a professor and author and being
a dynamic and catalytic personality, did much to alert younger scholars
to the dangers of allowing Taiwan Studies to become 'marginalized'
that is, either ignored altogether or relegated to the status of being
a supposed mere footnote to Chinese Studies in general.
* By LLOYD HAFT
Professor Martin's unexpected death in June
1999 was a great blow to the Department of Chinese Language and Literature.
Thankfully, a new major project went into operation in Bochum in September
of the same year: the Research Unit on Taiwanese Culture and Literature,
which enjoys support from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International
Scholarly Exchange.
A recent description of the Research Unit and its activities
can be consulted on the web at the address below, which contains links
and Internet resources including bibliographies, databases, and relevant
institutions in Taiwan and other countries. The Research Unit is intended
not only to conserve and expand the documentation and bibliographic collections
available in or via Bochum, but also to serve as an international forum.
This past Spring, from 7 to 9 March 2001, a major international
workshop was convened under the title 'Transformation! Innovation?
Taiwan in Her Cultural Dimensions.' About twenty participants from Germany,
the UK, the Netherlands, the US, Australia, and Taiwan delivered papers
on various aspects of problems of self-image and cultural identity. These
days, of course, discussions of identity and supposed cultural identity
are so ubiquitous as often to shade off into modish banality, if not actually
into potentially dangerous ideological cannon fodder. However, the Bochum
papers went well beyond platitudes and probed further into specific and
often little-known persons and developments in literature, art, theater,
and film.
Literary authors such as Bo Yang, Yang Kui, Ch'iung Yao,
Wang Zhenhe, and Zhou Mengdie have been discussed. Papers on literature
in the broader sense featured a study of parallels between 'nativist'
literary slogans emphasizing 'Taiwan consciousness' and the eerily similar
mystique of 'Blut und Boden' during the Nazi period in Germany, a survey
of popular self-help books in present-day Taiwan, and an evaluation of
political motives in the shifting historiography on the early twentieth-century
political, social, and cultural activist Jiang Weishui. Another dimension
of historiography historical geography and the symbolic importance
attributed to historical sites was discussed in the context of
the Taiwanese port city of Kaohsiung now often being compared to ancient
cities of the Mediterranean world.
A presentation on drama focused on the relative status of
Peking opera vis-a-vis the native Taiwanese drama (gezaixi)
in the changed cultural climate following the abolition of martial law
in 1987; another discussed the popular but little-studied (budaixi
)or 'cloth bag drama,' i.e. puppet theater. Two other papers
analyzed aspects of homosexuality in recent Taiwan culture. A paper on
linguistics detailed curiously difficult problems involved in attempts
to popularize various transcription systems for Taiwanese. Notably, in
recent years, the Hokkien dialect, which is the native tongue of many
Taiwanese, has been experiencing a resurgence in popular use in the wake
of political relaxation.
Appropriately enough, in light of the potential ambivalence in the workshop's title, there was some discussion of the dimensions of transformation and innovation. Do todays apparent and widespread transformations really represent new elements in Taiwanese culture itself, or are they just local variants of what are essentially global trends? Definitive answers are elusive, but in focusing upon these issues, the participants discovered new areas worthy of future study.
For more
information please refer to:
Professor
Lloyd Haft is an associate professor of literature in the Department
of Chinese, Leiden University. He specializes in Chinese poetry, old and
new, and the problems involved in its translation.
E-mail:
l.l.haft@let.leidenuniv.nl