Book Talk on Island Fantasia: Imagining Subjects on the Military Frontline between China and Taiwan

Wei-Ping Lin

This session will be held using Microsoft Teams .

*Please be aware that this session follows Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) .

Abstract

Mediating Individuals and Social Imagination: Media Technology and Online War Memory

Social Imaginary is the way in which the members of a community imagine their existence. It forms the common understanding of how to carry out the collective practices that constitute social life. However, in contemporary society, not just one but multiple social imaginations coexist. How can people forge and negotiate collective imaginaries to face an uncertain future? In this talk, Wei-Ping Lin will introduce her new book, Island Fantasia: Imagining Subjects on the Military Frontline between China and Taiwan. She takes Chapter 6, Online War Memory, as an example to discuss the process of transformation from individual imagination to social imaginary, and to discuss how it is imbued with hope, affect, and a fantasy of the future. The Matsu islands, for long an isolated outpost off southeast China, were suddenly transformed into a military frontline in 1949 by the Cold War and the Communist–Nationalist conflict. The Nationalist army occupied the islands, commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people of Matsu were confronted with the question of how to move forward. Lin analyzes how the Matsu islanders use new media to cope with the lasting trauma of harsh military rule. She discusses the formation of new social imaginaries through the appearance of “imagining subjects,” interrogating their subjectification processes and varied uses of mediating technologies as they seek to answer existential questions.

Speaker Bio

Wei-Ping Lin received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cambridge University. She is a Professor at National Taiwan University. She was affiliated with the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 2005-6 and 2017-8, and with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University in 2012-3. Her interests include religion (including topics related to material culture, spirit mediums, and urban religious transformation), kinship, and imagination. She is the author of Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), and Island Fantasia: Imagining Subjects on the Military Frontline between China and Taiwan (Cambridge University Press). She also edited Mediating Religion: Music, Image, Object and New Media (Taiwan University Press, 2018; in Chinese).

Organiser: Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: hl55@soas.ac.uk