Intra-national becoming: contested sovereignty and cultural practice in Taiwan and Tibet

Thesis

This thesis presents a set of interrelated close readings of visual and literary artworks by and/or about Tibetans and Indigenous Taiwanese; it focuses on how these works participate in the (re)drawing of boundaries within what I call an ‘intra-national field of ethnic difference’. I begin by returning to an argument in the field of Chinese Studies that modern Chinese national identity emerged from a moment of self-consciousness, when encounters with imperialism led Chinese elites to see their country from the ‘outside-in’. Borrowing the idea of ‘diffraction’ from feminist science studies, I suggest that this moment of ‘self-consciousness’ was not one in which there was a clear optical division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, but one where the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, were in radical flux. This leads to the novel concept of an intra-national field of ethnic difference, the prefix ‘intra’ suggesting that the boundaries of nation-states are not pre-set but are constantly being (re)materialised.

I argue that focussing on cultural works from Tibet and Taiwan, as two areas of contested sovereignty where the boundaries of ethnic and national groups in relation to China remain live and important questions, can allow for an exploration of the way that those boundaries continue to be diffracted and transformed within literary and visual representation up to the present day. However, while I begin with the question of ‘China’, I do not set ‘China’ up as the central axis around which my entire investigation turns. Indeed, one key argument of the thesis is that moving from thinking in terms of oppositions of inside/outside, to instead thinking of boundaries as being about shifting relations of ‘internal’ difference, is the best way of pursuing research which allows for the full complexity, indeterminacy, and openness of identity to come to the fore. In Part 1, I focus on the way the boundaries of ethnic and national identities are materialised through the dynamics of looking and being looked at. In Part 2, I focus on the way boundaries are materialised through engagements with gendered discourses of kinship.

Authors: Beswick, W

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-orp0jvkmq
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: art; literature; nationalism; Sinophone; Tibet; China; diffraction; psychoanalysis; Taiwan; cultural studies; ethnicity; Indigenous studies; performance; kinship; film
• Subjects: Psychoanalytic theory; Comparative literature; Queer theory; Film studies; Feminist theory; Taiwan studies; Sinophone Tibetan studies; Chinese cultural studies; Art theory