學術資源整合系統-相關推薦

 
作者KUO, Yang-Yi
出版日期20180405
著作名稱Homelands Reinvented in Juancun: Identity Formation of the Chinese Diaspora in Taiwan through the prism of Material Culture, Memory, and Imagination =眷村中的家鄉重新發明:以物質文化、記憶與想像探究在臺離散華人的認同形塑
會議名稱永續臺灣
會議地點Zurich
會議日期20180405
主辦單位歐洲臺灣研究學會
國際性會議Y
主題民族;博物館學
關鍵字diaspora;home; homeland;Juancun;material culture
摘要How have Waishengren and their family survived political, social and cultural challenges? After the lifting of Martial Law in 1987, mainland China, a homeland previously inaccessible and frequently imagined became a real place for the Chinese diaspora to return to, which turned too real to go back. Many displaced KMT soldiers and their dependents unexpectedly found their new homeland in juancun, military dependents' villages built in the mid-20th century as provisional housing, and bewilderingly reluctant to move back to their original homeland after several homecoming visits. Their decision about returning home or staying in Taiwan depends not only on the opportunities and perspectives in their respective hometowns but also on the perception of belonging and identity.
Characterised by a multiplicity of different migration histories, Taiwan’s quest for identity remains the most contentious issue in both the domestic and international arena of politics. For diasporic communities living in the land of multiple and irreconcilable claims, and caught between competing identities, by creating a seemingly flattened, juxtaposed, and co-existent worlds through material culture, memory, and imagination between roots and routes, homelands are reinvented to mediate conflicting spaces of dwelling. These homelands are what Avtar Brah (1996) calls ‘diaspora space,’ which is inhabited not only by the diasporic and their descendants, but also by the indigenous.
Starting from the premise of postmodernist recognition of identity, this study addresses the impact of mundane life on identity. Three aspects of thought, material culture, memory and imagination, are considered to reveal the ways the Chinese diaspora and their family come to live with difficult context and contesting differences, and between them, develop compatible modes of taking roots and maintaining belongings. The memory of the past, the imagination about the future, and material culture of the present in Allegiance Village, a juancun (military dependents' village) in North Taiwan analysed in this article, negotiate disparate feelings and create diaspora space. Drawing on 40 home-based interviews and 14-month participant observation, the research applies phenomenological methods and concepts to explore the socio-sensory processes through which unique Chinese-Taiwanese identity is produced, and describes the intermesh between flesh and stone, flows and fixtures, as well as emotions and practices. It not only accounts for how home, homelands and identities are intertwined through movement, contingency and creativity, but also suggests that notions of belongings may crosscut that of belonging.

The study of the Chinese diaspora in Taiwan is crucial not only to academia but also to human life in the world, and the investigation into the representation of identity of the ageing and long-forgotten Juancun Waishengren is far from insignificant. In a life-world which is increasingly fragmented, plural and shifting, the individual is forced to search inwardly for some coherent sense of self (Basu 2007). If it is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality (Bachelard 1994), we now may say that we are all ‘Juancun Waishengren’, in our own diaspora archipelagos.
系統號NO000005621

May 10 2024 17:17:25
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