Popular Culture in Taiwan ─ Charismatic Modernity

The growing field of popular culture studies in Taiwan can be divided into two distinct academic trends; a different analytical framework is used to examine either locally oriented popular culture or transnational pop culture. This volume combine these two academic trends, firstly by revealing that localized popular culture in Taiwan is in many ways a merging of Chinese, Japanese, American, and indigenous cultures and therefore is a form of hybridity that arose long before the term became popular. Secondly, the chapters show that the transnational character of Taiwan’s pop culture is one of the more important ways that it distinguishes itself from mainland China. In other words, it is precisely Taiwan’s transnational hybrid character that helps to define it as a distinctive local space.

The contributors explore how traditional Chinese influences modern localized lives in Taiwan, localized identity, culture, and politics as a contested domain with Chinese and traditional Taiwanese identities and Taiwan’s localization process as contesting Taiwan’s gravitation towards globalized Western culture.

Including chapters on baseball, poetry, puppets and Harry Potter, Popular Culture in Taiwan is an accessible and stimulating read for those studying the culture and society of Taiwan and China as well as cultural studies more generally.

Marc L. Moskowitz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina and the Visual Anthropology Review Editor for the American Anthropologist.