Abstract
Abstract For the alienated modern being, who is manipulated by the unifying code of modernization, the experience of difference displaces the regular working schedule to be the (alternative) center. The value of a product is no more determined by the labor invested but its cultural meaning in contestation. Maximizing the cultivation of cultural meaning, the tourism industry grasps the modern manifestation of difference and makes itself the best representative activity of modernity. Armed with colonial resources, international guidebook industry outruns the local representing agents of postcolonial places with establishing in advance the systematical spatial database from worldwide extension while the latters are still occupied with the modernizing enterprise. As a continuum with that, they even extend their hegemony over people掇 spatial imagination via belating the local掇 transcriptive business of tourist discourse. With Lonely Planet Taiwan as our penetrating axis, my thesis plans to see through the transformations and flows of international/ local spatial information by studying the three turns of tourist gaze in Taiwan-- the gaze on Taiwan, the gaze from Taiwan, and the gaze on the local. Throughout the study, I would like to map out the trajectories of convergence of tourism discourse and localization discourse in the specific context of Taiwan as well as to disclose the mechanisms embezzling and redefining 涆aiwaneseness?in the current overflowing of space representation.