
Representing Atrocity in Taiwan
The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film
Sylvia Lin(Author)
Columbia University Press
Will be published approx. on 30. November 2007
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-231-14360-8 (ISBN)
Description
In 1945, Taiwan was placed under the administrative control of the Republic of China, and after two years, accusations of corruption and a failing economy sparked a local protest that was brutally quashed by the Kuomintang government. The February Twenty-Eighth (or 2/28) Incident led to four decades of martial law that became known as the White Terror. During this period, talk of 2/28 was forbidden and all dissent violently suppressed, but since the lifting of martial law in 1987, this long-buried history has been revisited through commemoration and narrative, cinema and remembrance. Drawing on a wealth of secondary theoretical material as well as her own original research, Sylvia Li-chun Lin conducts a close analysis of the political, narrative, and ideological structures involved in the fictional and cinematic representations of the 2/28 Incident and White Terror. She assesses the role of individual and collective memory and institutionalized forgetting, while underscoring the dangers of re-creating a historical past and the risks of trivialization.
She also compares her findings with scholarly works on the Holocaust and the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Japan, questioning the politics of forming public and personal memories and the political teleology of "closure." This is the first book to be published in English on the 2/28 Incident and White Terror and offers a valuable matrix of comparison for studying the portrayal of atrocity in a specific locale.
She also compares her findings with scholarly works on the Holocaust and the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Japan, questioning the politics of forming public and personal memories and the political teleology of "closure." This is the first book to be published in English on the 2/28 Incident and White Terror and offers a valuable matrix of comparison for studying the portrayal of atrocity in a specific locale.
Reviews / Votes
The result is a complicated and neglected topic managed economically and lucidly in a volume that will surely intervene in Chinese cultural studies but also will prove attractive to anyone concerned with the overarching issue of atrocity and the literary and cinematic representation of the 'disappeared.' The Rocky Mountain ReviewMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
482 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-231-14360-8 (9780231143608)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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E-Book
09/2015
1st Edition
De Gruyter
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€65.95
Available for download
Person
Sylvia Li-chun Lin is the Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include Republican culture and literary journals, language and identity in Taiwan, and commemoration of atrocity.
Content
Acknowledgments Note on Chinese Words and Names Prologue: Looking Backward Part I. Literary Representation 1. Ethnicity and Atrocity 2. Documenting the Past 3. Engendering Victimhood Part II. Cinematic Re-creation 4. Past Versus Present 5. Screening Atrocity 6. Memory as Redemption Epilogue: Looking Forward Notes Bibliography Index