Abstract
This dissertation explores the formation process of a fractured identity composition in the arena of memory institutions in Taiwan, under two angles of state formation and identity construction, since the end of colonization to the end of dictatorship. The analysis distinguishes a whole range of collective imaginaries, constructed by the state apparatus and social actors, appeared successively and embedded in the museums and archives committees: an imaginary of resistance anti-Japanese to anticommunist, an imaginary of revolution formulated from provincial to municipal administrative level, a national imaginary of Chinese civilization legitimating the insular power in the name of a legitimate China, an imaginary of local traditions transferred from the lost homeland to the early immigrant settled on this island. The analysis for these diversified uses of the past shows the hegemony of the representations imposed by the dictatorship was congruent with the normalisation and the annexation of multiple imaginary facets of a heterogeneous society through a politico-cultural model corresponding to the last imperial period. The identity indetermination, which characterized the Taiwanese democracy, thus seems less like one absolute rupture, but more like the continuation of a long history punctuated by the modifications of the political scene.