Provincializing the Cultural Field: Mediatized Genealogies and the “Scenaria” of 1980s Taiwan

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 14. East Asian Cinema & Visual Politics

Abstract

This paper proposes a new theoretical framework beyond Pierre Bourdieu to analyze the interpenetration of the Taiwanese literary and cinematic fields in the 1980s. Challenging Bourdieu’s assumption of homology between cultural fields, I argue that both fields in Taiwan have undergone distinct processes of mediatization since the Japanese colonial period. Literature evolved as a discursive space for modernity and intellectual enlightenment, while cinema emerged as a technological apparatus of imperial and colonial spectacle. The 1980s marked the historical moment at which these two distinct genealogies collided. By utilizing the triad of “scene,” “scenario,” and “scenaria,” this study examines how the collision of two differentiated fields produced a unique social ontology where fictional texts became saturated within socio-historical conditions and transformed the public sphere. Using the 1986 film Outcasts as a preliminary case study, I demonstrate how this situated methodology offers a way to bypass Euro-American-centric epistemologies, grounding cultural theory in the specific historical materiality and mediality of non-Western contexts.

Author

• Rex Tsung-wei Lin, National Taiwan University