Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4728-9839
Abstract
This essay examines the cinematic representation of Kinmen (also known as Quemoy or Jinmen), the frontier island of Taiwan, as a critical island space of nostalgia in the recent Oscar-nominated short film Island in Between (2023) by Taiwanese-American director S. Leo Chiang. By analyzing the depiction of Kinmen as a Cold War outpost, this essay rethinks the affective positionality of Chiang’s work. The first section integrates archipelagic thinking and critical nostalgia to explore the theoretical complexity of the film’s geo-techno-affective liminality, examining how the film’s archipelagic aesthetics are embedded within a cross-strait narrative and how Svetlana Boym’s typology of nostalgia is problematized by Kinmen’s hauntological conditions, diasporic histories, and Cold War legacies. The second part relocates one of the film’s central songs, “Tian Mimi” by Deng Lijun (Teresa Teng), within both the cross-strait Cold War context and a broader transoceanic network of music transmission and adaptation spanning China, Taiwan, Kinmen, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore, thereby accentuating the song’s affective elasticity and reflexivity. In the third section, I juxtapose the film with the canonical poem “Nostalgia” (1972) by contemporary Taiwanese poet Yu Guangzhong (1928-2017), analyzing how Chiang’s critical stance redirects one’s attention to the geo-political borderspace of Kinmen, an island site changed into “less examined” in change into “the Cold War imagination of the time”. In the final section, the essay emphasizes how Chiang’s hauntological melancholia functions as a productive epistemic method, returning to the film’s framing sections to investigate its critical employment of sonic and cinematic sentiments. I argue that Island in Between foregrounds an archipelagic reworking of nostalgia, allowing for the emergence of an affective island poetics amidst the increasingly militarized contestation of the Pacific Rim.
Recommended Citation
Hsu, Li-Hsin
(2026)
"“Tian Mimi” (Sweet Like Honey): Critical Nostalgia, Hauntological Melancholia, and Cold War Narratives in S. Leo Chiang’s Island in Between,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
50, Article 17.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2289
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss50/17
