Imagining Chineseness-- A Study of Chinese-American Romance in Taiwanese Novels,1947-1987

• Main Authors: Yang,Chieh, 楊婕
• Other Authors: Cheng, Wen Huei
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/w6fqwg

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 中國文學系 === 104 === This study argues that the trans-national love and marriage among Mainlanders, Taiwanese and Americans in the Taiwanese novel during the Cold-War era is the response to the cold war structure and division system between Taiwan and China. Under the mask of love affair, the trans-national romance in those novels implies a national allegory of the historical crisis of the imagined Chineseness. Considering the Cold War system and the historical developments of Taiwan, this study constructs a genealogy of Chinese-American romance novel written during the period between 1947, the first year of the Cold War and the year of “The February 28 Incident”, and 1987, the end of “The Martial Law Era”. Also, through seeing the Chinese-American romance as a national allegory, this study intends to fix the commonly accepted point of view in Taiwan, that female writers barely participated in the construction of national discourses before 1990s. The Chinese-American romance novels were discussed from three perspectives：Sexual politics, exchange economy and historical narrative. Chapter two focused on the differences of sex-nation combination in the novels, further discussing the complex relations between the desire of the nation and the heterosexual patriarchal marriage. The narrative of the romance between American males and Chinese females in those novels suggests that the form of colony was transformed from the political colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s to the Neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism after the 1970s. On the other hand, the narrative of the romance between American females and Chinese males transforms the castrated subject in national discourses into the masculine subject in sexual relationship, which allows us to see the barrier of the identity of the authors. The orphan girl and the divorced people witness the absence and re-absence of father nation. The trans-national prostitute and castrated male, on the other hand, marks the intertwined relationship between the “Nationalized Body” and “National Spirit”. Chapter three adopted exchange economy theory to inquire the strategies for living of the characters, who were viewed as a collective group that represent the nation, in the novels：（1）The eastern imagination created by cheongsam, demonstrate by the female characters to approach colonial modernity,（2）the Green-Card-Marriage disciplined by biopolitics, and（3）the romance that involves Sinologists, who seek to use their Sinological knowledge to redeem the perished China. Chapter four explored the historical narratives. Through revealing the national allegory in the narrative of Chinese-American romance, the narrative reflects both a construction and re-construction of understanding of the nation-state. In conclusion, the transnational romance is a way of finding and enacting the national spirit and identity.