Ubiquitous Absence: Re-staging Cold War Taiwan in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day

Huei-Chu Chu illuminates Taiwan's Cold War condition in the entangling of prolonged Chinese civil war, the U.S. military security regime, and the postcolonial legacy of Japanese rule, attending to the dramaturgy in Edward Yang's 4-hour film that re-presents history as a palimpsest, itself a stage on which the body politics enacted in a contemporary environment are possessed by specters from the past.