Remapping Taipei for Jameson? Rediscovering the Indigenization, Modernity, and Postmodernity of Taipei

By offering his interpretation of local movies set in Taipei, Fredric Jameson sought to enrich his postmodern culture theory by further examples. Specifically, Jameson thought there is a major discrepancy between the narrative reflected in the movie Terrorizers filmed in 1986 and the original indigenous narrative about Taiwan, which led to the failure of interpreting the movie based on the indigenous narrative and introduced the postmodern context about the narratives of Taipei. However, his conclusions are not quite convincing, and his choice of interpretive parameters, i.e. mainland movies and western literature, are quite distant from the Taipei experience. To truly understand Taipei’s modernity, three discussions are put forward in this paper. First, the author follows Jameson’s logic of arguments and discovers that his conclusions were based on the texts of the west and mainland China. Second, the author remaps Taipei in the dual contexts of the globalization trend and the historical experiences of Taiwan itself. Third, after re-examining Jameson’s unique but incomplete and biased views of remapping Taipei, the author indicates that the movie Terrorizers is not merely a postmodern narrative about Taipei, but a special narrative based on a mixed context of Chineseness, indigenization, modernity, and postmodernity.