Description: Explores the affective toll of Taiwan's geographical and political proximity to China through a critical analysis of contemporary Taiwanese film and culture. It examines the complex, precarious relationship between the sovereign state of Taiwan and China in order to consider ...
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "Sheng-mei Ma's " The Last Isle" is an engaging look at Taiwan's never-ending trauma through the lens of film, trauma, and popular culture. Ma does a masterful job of bringing together voluminous amounts of scattered information, carefully analyzed with an abundance of allusions to historical and contemporary phenomena, and presented with poetic-like prose." --John A. Lent, International Journal of Comic Art