This book calls for a critical and expanded engagement between Taiwan studies and global Cold War studies, especially in cultural and historical terms. While Taiwan studies scholars have long challenged traditional Cold War frameworks for understanding Taiwan’s history and culture, sustained dialogues with global cultural Cold War studies remain relatively peripheral. By foregrounding Taiwan as a central site of inquiry, this book not only enables new dialogues with Cold War studies, but also demonstrates how Taiwan’s unique cultural and historical complexities are vital to rethinking the global cultural Cold War. Building on as well as further complicating the “Cold War–Decolonization Nexus” framework often used to study cultural productions from U.S. allies in Asia, this book argues that to “de-Cold War” Taiwan is to see Taiwan as a subject and to ask questions about Taiwanese subjectivity through sustained inquiry and analysis of cultural and historical situations. Through interdisciplinary interventions, this volume rereads Taiwan’s Cold War past beyond and beneath dominant narratives of authoritarianism, Confucianism, Americanism, ethnic stereotypes, and Indigeneity, foregrounding lived experience, complexity, and inventiveness across local, transpacific, and global contexts.
