The Last Isle

Taiwan is in danger of becoming the last isle, losing its sovereignty and identity. The Last Isle opens from where Taiwan film scholarship leaves off-the 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, focusing on relatively unknown contemporary films that are "unglobalizable," such as Cape No. 7, Island Etude, Din Tao, and Seven Days in Heaven. It explores Taiwan films' inextricability with trauma theory, the irony of loving and mourning Taiwan, multilingualism, local beliefs, and theatrical practices, including Ang Lee's "white" films. The second half of the book analyzes Taiwan's popular culture in Western-style food and drink, conditions over living and dying, and English education, concluding with the source of Taiwan's anxiety-China.
This book distinguishes itself from Taiwan scholarship in its stylistic crazy quilt of the scholarly interwoven with the personal, evidenced right from the outset in the poetic title "The Last Isle," coupled with the "dissertating" subtitle. This approach intertwines the helix of reason and affect, scholarship and emotion. The Last Isle accomplishes a look at globalization from the bottom up, from a global Taiwan whose very existence is in doubt.

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (Bloomsbury, 2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (Bloomsbury, 2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016) among them, he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right.
Sheng-mei Ma is professor of English at Michigan State University.

Acknowledgments / Figures / Introduction / 1. Trauma and Taiwan's Melodrama: Seven Orphans of Cape No. 7 / 2. Island's Irony: Virtual Pilgrimage Circum-Taiwan in Search of the High Cs / 3. Mazu's Touch, Taiwan Nezha and Crying / 4. Globalization's Bottom: Subtitle and Switch in Wang Yu-Lin's Taiwanese Dialect Films / 5. Wet Umbrella and The White Snake / 6. Hyde-and-Seek in Asian Diaspora: Deann Borshay Liem's Negative and Ang Lee's Ventriloquy / 7. Sold Mountain: Chinese-Language Films on Shangri-La / 8. Nestle in Shalu / 9. Taiwan's English Education: A Fish with Three Heads / 10. The Fate of Accidental Taiwanese: 5 Ways to Leave Your Father / Coda: China Laying Golden Eggs / Bibliography / Index