Refashioning Pop Music in Asia

11 Pop music as postcolonial nostalgia in Taiwan

Jeremy E. Taylor

 

 

Taiwanese is trendy. Despite four decades of government policy designed to relegate the language to a position of cultural relic, Taiyu (‘Taiwanese’ — the local term for the Hokkien language in Taiwan) has become decidedly fashionable on the island since the early 1990s. The current trend has gone beyond a fad. County governments have introduced compulsory Taiwanese language courses into school curricula; government officials who once supported banning public broadcasting in Taiyu are now flocking to study it; and advertising companies are dubbing their commercials into it. In the space of just a few years, the Taiwanese language has shifted from a position of virtual invisibility ...