The Affective Turn

This chapter aims to recast the historiography of post–World War II Taiwan cinema in affective terms and, in so doing, sets the stage for examining Taiwan filmmaking in the twenty-first century as a form of regional soft power anchored in a specific cultural imaginary known as little freshness. It argues that the imaginary of little freshness embodies an affective trait shared across the Taiwan Strait by youths whose engagement with a market of miniaturization as cultural producers and consumers is inflected by a sense of generational injustice in the face of neoliberal capitalism. This affective turn can be captured by the phenomenal box-office success of Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7 in 2008, which kick-started a rescaling of the market size and reorientation of audience from the global to the domestic in contemporary Taiwan cinema. By examining the popularity of Taiwan’s little freshness cultural imaginary in China and Hong Kong, this chapter reworks the notion of soft power into a form of citizen-to-citizen connectivity that is largely free from the intervention of the state and its agents whilst rescaling the operation of soft power from an international to a regional one. It concludes that the social, cultural, and political ramifications of the generational revolt by a sizable demographic of youths, and of the citizen-to-citizen soft power evinced by this affective cinema, may well be long-term and wide-ranging for us all.