Hsu,
Li-hsin

Abstract

The presentation proposes to examine the archipelagic representation of Taiwan as a space of critical nostalgia in the works of two Taiwanese contemporary poets Yu Guangzhong (1928-2017) and Chen Li (1954-). Their poems during the Martial Law period (1949-1987), while responding to the Cold War narrative of their time, demonstrate deep emotional ambivalence towards the island’s geo-political indeterminacy. I juxtapose two poems of nostalgia and melancholia by the two poets “Nostalgia” (1972) by Yu Guangzhong and “The Love Song of Buffet the Clown” (1978) by Chen Li, exploring the motif of romance within the Cold War context from the perspective of archipelagic thinking, in which the paradoxical longing for separation and connection between the ocean and the land, between the continent and the island co-exist and precariously so. While the two poems present diverging approaches towards the cross-strait geo-political tension of the time, they both showcase the emotional complexity embedded in the entrapment of what historian Penny M. Von Eschen calls Cold War Nostalgia. I examine how the land-water, machine-body, and human-nonhuman entanglement manifested in the works of the two poets manifests the island affect as a subtle critique of the geo-political colonial/imperial imposition of the Cold War triumphalist ethno-nationalist narrative of the time. By positioning the two poems in the archipelagic network of island interconnectedness, the presentation proposes to rethink the geo-political liminality of island aesthetics embedded in the nostalgic narrative of the poems, illuminating how the critical employment of nostalgia, or its absence, exemplified in the two island poems, presents an emerging island poetic potentiality amidst the pacific rim challenges of our time.