Kuan-hsings talk at Goldsmiths (University of London) explaining the social and historical circumstances in which Halls work entered Taiwan and why it was and continues to be so important and enabling. This is my quick transcription of a bit of it (apologies if there are errors): Taiwans cultural studies formation was directly connected with the popular cultural criticism movement in late 1980s and early 1990s, which was an integral part of larger democratic movement. And that (80s and 90s) wave of cultural criticism was a continuity of the late modern literary culture from the late 19th and early 20th century. And it was in the encounter with cultural studies that it began to enter the academic institution with a self-attempt to connect with the larger social and political movement. … There was an earlier moment of the neo-Marxist new left side of Stuart entering east Asia in the late 1980s when South Korea and Taiwan went through structural shifts from the dismantling of post authoritarianism, anti-communism, and state developmentalism to an ambiguous era now labeled as the neoliberal. In Taiwan this moment was marked by the lifting of martial law, the opening of political spaces, and the booming of the social and political movement. It was in this conjuncture, still in the last of the last years of the Cold War, that Stuarts work on authoritarian populism and the formation of the popular democratic struggle was brought in to analyze the local political configuration and break the nationalist hegemony-- and to energize [emphasis here] the nascent autonomous social movement on the left. It is as if one wing of leftist thought had to traverse what was in the UK to cross-fertilize thinking and action in post authoritarian Taiwan where all things left had almost been decimated. Empowered by Stuarts analysis, a local popular democracy grouping was slowly emerging in the process of confronting concrete political events such as the June 4 Tiananmen incident to open up a space for new social movements that has continued to operate for the past 25 years or so.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 02:37:54 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015