Reconstructing Taiwanese National Identity in the Sports Film: Small Nation, Sports, and Cultural Heterogeneity

This chapter foregrounds the intersection of sports, national identity and heterogeneous cultures through the recent sports films in contemporary Taiwanese popular cinema from a non-Western-centred perspective. As a small nation in East Asia, Taiwan’s history can be viewed as a site of linear or serial colonialism by consecutive hegemonic powers, while more recently Taiwan has been confronted with the rising superpower of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the twenty-first century. Given the revival of Taiwanese popular cinema in 2008, Taiwanese filmmakers have employed cinema as a medium to reconstruct national awareness and to represent the unique cultural heterogeneity of contemporary Taiwan. Sports film, in particular, is a genre that can reinforce the cinematic construction of national identity. Accordingly, this chapter aims to explore how Taiwanese national identity and heterogeneous cultures can be reflected on and reinforced through three recent Taiwanese sports films. In doing so, this chapter argues that sports films in contemporary Taiwanese popular cinema can function as a pivotal space for the interaction of sports, national identity and heterogeneous Taiwanese cultures that relate to Taiwan’s complex serial colonial histories and current geopolitics.補正完