Democratic Nationhood and Postmodernity
Date Issued
1998-07-31
Date
1998-07-31
Author(s)
DOI
872411H002037
Abstract
In “New Nationalism, or Old?” (1996),
Zhao Gang proposes the “democratic nation”
as a way to counter the “old” nationalism
claimed by him to be dominant in contemporary
Taiwan and criticized as reactionary.
This should be welcomed as an attempt to go
beyond the overwhelmingly anti-nationalist
(or “post-national”) discourse of cultural criticism
in Taiwan and to dialogically come to
terms with the local situation. Nevertheless,
Zhao’s sketchy account has not been very
helpful in explaining what a “democratic
nation” is and how such a conception of
nationhood is going to solve problems
unsolved by nationalism or defuse traps that
are said to have plagued nationalism, old and
new. In fact, Zhao’s article is squarely
positioned within a modernist insistence on
universal rationality (explicitly pitted against
“postmodern difference”). Although the final
appeal is to “radical democracy,” contradictions
are necessarily present in such an
uneasy amalgamation of modernity and
postmodernity. The present project proposes
to rethink the whole problematic through
further engagement with postmodernity,
hopefully to sort out the convoluted interrelatedness
between modernity and postmodernity
faced by any attempt to articulate
an analysis of nationhood with some conception
of democratic politics.
Subjects
Nationalism
Radical Democracy
Postmodernity
Cultural Identification
Publisher
臺北市：國立臺灣大學外國語文學系暨研究所
Type
report
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