Cross-border Imagination of Global City: Contemporary Narratives of Taipei

Appadurai (1990) indicates the core issue of nowadays globalized culture roots in a conflict. The fantasies of electronic propinquity, while at the same time, the alienation and psychological distance between individuals and groups. Accordingly, to realize the core conflicts of globalizing Taipei, the essential move is to explore the different cross-border imaginaries of globalizing Taipei and recognize the conflicts of different boundaries as well.
This study reveals the cross-border imagination emerging with globalizing Taipei by observation of the Taipei city writing phenomenon and following the literature approach. The recognized cross-border imagination implies the spatial concepts of Cosmopolitanism: the proximity between Taipei and the world, the imagination of new metropolitan Taipei in the economical reconstruction, and the imagination of new Taipei social culture. Three categories of Taipei city writing phenomenon are reviewed by this study to analyze different types of cross-border imagination among cosmopolitanism: Taipei fashion writing, migrant worker writing, and Taipei-Shanghai romance. Responding to the vacillation of borders and the multiplication of new borders by Balibar, this study indicates how different ideologies along with constraints on class, gender, and ethnic lies in the cross-borders imagination among cosmopolitanism while forming the new borders of Taipei. Furthermore, the approach proposed by this study could be a preliminary demonstration for future literary geographic researches.