Title: Taiwan’s Cold War Geopolitics in Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers
Abstract:In the Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson devotes an entire chapter called "Remapping Taipei" to Edward Yang's The Terrorizers as the postmodern film par excellence. In the New Left Review, Edward Yang t...In the Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson devotes an entire chapter called "Remapping Taipei" to Edward Yang's The Terrorizers as the postmodern film par excellence. In the New Left Review, Edward Yang talked about the internal rage and the external conformity that characterized the psychic life of his generation: he also described the extraordinary opportunities to see European films provided by Kuomintang (KMT) cultural initiatives meant to promote Taipei as a cosmopolitan global capital of the Cold War world. To the KMT, Taiwan was always a non-place, a tropical way station, a temporary garrison where the Nationalist Army would re-gather its strength to return to and reconquer the Mainland. Jameson's cultural Third Worldism created a prestige differential for difficult-to-see art films, but its polemics obscured the significance of Edward Yang's film while aestheticizing its basic preoccupations with class and place.Read More