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Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.
57Culture shock in China?: Adjustment pattern of western expatriate business managers
Culture shock in China?: Adjustment pattern of western expatriate business managers
2Rethinking the Ph.D. dissertation in botany: Widening the circle.
Rethinking the Ph.D. dissertation in botany: Widening the circle.
Quasi-Geoid Near Xisha Islands by the Geo-Potential Propagating Technique
Height datum is an important part of national geodetic network. Establishment of a unified national land and sea elevation benchmarks and implementation of height datum connection between the Chinese mainland and offshore islands are issues that need to be resolved in geomatics and marine sciences. Derived from basic definition of elevation datum and relationship between geo-potential and normal height, the scientific theory and algorithm for transferring height datum from mainland to islands with geo-potential are elaborated. The accuracy of geo-potential difference is discussed using a numerical analysis method. We also give criteria to choose virtual leveling routines and algorithm to give optimized results. One experiment in the China seas, among 26 tidal gauge stations in the sea coast of the mainland with known normal height, has confirmed the reliability and accuracy of the method developed in this paper. Further optimizations for improving accuracy of island elevation are also introduced. Distribution of quasi-geoid near Xisha Islands is also given with this method.
Read more16Precarious nostalgia in the tropical smart city: transmedia memory, urban informatics, and the Singapore Golden Jubilee
ABSTRACTThe memory of loss in Asia's leading global cities has been shaped by recurrent projects of urban renewal, which have sought to deliver economic prosperity and social order at the expense of longstanding spaces and practices. Singapore's Golden Jubilee in 2015, which commemorated its triumphant postcolonial development, was accompanied by the proliferation of public expressions of nostalgia across a variety of media platforms. Amid the rise of the participatory culture of media convergence, this article examines how nostalgic longing is no longer necessarily articulated as an antagonistic critique of the precarious present of neoliberal capitalism, which withdraws into a timeless image of a congenial past. Departing from this conventional understanding of nostalgia in the scholarship of Singapore, it explores how the ruling government since independence has reconfigured its dissemination of historical and cultural knowledge to manage its transition from a global city defined by rapid growth to a smart nation reliant on perpetual adjustment by cultivating a form of citizenship centred on entrepreneurship and innovation. Through immersive spatialization, commissioned mobile video games oblige players to internalize the protocols of knowledge and agency of the Singapore Story, the official narrative of economic success and national progress. Two other state-run interactive digital platforms, the National Library's online archive the Singapore Memory Project and the National Museum's art installation The Story of the Forest, are designed to cultivate a new openness to the inevitability of iterations in urban informatics. Helping to assuage popular anxiety over the constancy of change and the failure of risk-taking, the latter frames perpetual adjustment as a vital component of the cosmic cyclicality of deep time, in which vanished realities are recreated with different permutations.
Read moreTRACING CULTURAL MORPHING AND DIASPORIC IDENTICAL APPREHENSIONS: POST-PARTITIONED (1947) CONTEXTUAL IDEOLOGIES IN LIQUID MODERN ERA
This research explores the diasporic experiences of South Asian immigrants and cultural ambivalence in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). It highlights the conditions when East Pakistan had to adjust to an altogether new environment separated from their original culture after the Partition of this subcontinent in the year 1947. It reveals that the same historical, ideological, and thematic properties have been coming through generations and diasporic writers select these themes as their major subject of discussion. This research explores the varied nuances of family relationships in the writings of recent diaspora writers like Desai. The surge of globalization has washed away solitary identities. Theories presented by Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall help this study in finding the answers of the proposed research question. This research provides a chance to understand the impact of Post-Partitioned (1947) ideologies behind the theme selection in the writings of diasporic Anglophone writers.
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5The <i>skaz</i> narrative mode in short stories by W. C. Scully, Percy FitzPatrick, Perceval Gibbon and Herman Charles Bosman
While an overwhelming amount of cultural activity worldwide has been (and is being) conducted in societies which had (or have) very little or no knowledge at all of writing, and which can therefore be described as predominantly ‘oral’ cultures, very little attempt has been made in the field of South African literature to examine how oral modes of cultural exchange influence and interpenetrate the more recent written (literary) modes. South Africa is a region which has several rich oral traditions and it is therefore important to explore how aspects of these traditions are incorporated into (written) literature. This paper looks at the use of the fictional narrator and skaz (the Russian Formalist term meaning 'speech') in some South African short stories by Scully, FitzPatrick, Gibbon and Bosman. It is argued that whereas Scully and FitzPatrick produce only partially successful narratives in the skaz style, Gibbon and Bosman introduce greater artistic and ideological complexity to the form.
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