Taiwan Studies: New Directions and Connections

Taiwan Studies: New Directions and Connections will focus on the challenges and potentialities of Taiwan studies. Sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the workshop will take place on April 7-8th 2017 (Friday-Saturday), at Harvard University.

With the workshop, we seek to provide a new forum in which young scholars from different disciplines can present their ongoing projects, challenge existing frameworks and methodologies, and explore possibilities of interdisciplinary cooperation.

Participants are invited to present concrete case studies from Taiwan which enable them to engage with current theoretical and methodological issues in the humanities and social sciences. They are encouraged to situate Taiwan within diverse cultural and geopolitical networks and historical trajectories. We look forward to innovative theories deriving from transcultural and interdisciplinary dialogue. The keywords of their presentations include:

  • Resistance politics: journalistic freedom, student activism, media connectivity
  • History and futurity: localism, modernism, post-colonialism, post-loyalism, sinicization and de-sinicization, East Asia and beyond
  • Cultural articulation: transculturaion and translation, mediality and visuality, lyricism and affect, Sinophone sphere

The schedule of the workshop appears below.

Taiwan Studies: New Directions and Connections:An International workshop
April 7-8th 2016
Sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
Organized by Professor David Der-wei Wang

April 7, Friday

13:30-15:00
Panel One: (Post-)Colonial Identities and Sentimentalities, 1934-1949
Chair: Michelle Yeh

Dingru Huang
Mapping a Strange Home: Weng Nao, the Kōenji Neighborhood of Tokyo, and Taiwanese literature in the 1930s

Chun-yu Lu
Lovable Foe: Sentimentalizing Morality in Wartime Taiwan, 1937-1945

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang
Trauma and Diaspora of 1949: History, Memory, and Literature in Taiwan’s Mainlander Studies

15:00-15:30 Coffee Break

15:30-17:00
Panel Two: Reinvention and Remembrance, 1950s-1970s
Chair: Melissa J. Brown

Yang Fu-min
When “Wen” becomes Knowledge: Bing-ing Hsieh’s How I Write

Cheng-chieh Chang
Remembering the Taiwan’s Activism in 1960s-70s

Lo Yichen
Of the Civil Law Family: The Troubling Concept for Legal Transplantation in Taiwan

April 8, Saturday

10:00-11:30
Panel Three: Politics and its Poetics, 1979-1980s
Chair: Chu Huei-Chu

Kevin Luo
Revisiting Authoritarianism and Democratization in Taiwan: Analyzing Legislative Priorities and Texts, 1979-1987

Chung Chih-wei
“Harbor Songs” between Men: The Perverse Lyricism in 1980s’ Taiwanese Nationalists

Po-hsi Chen
An Isle of Socialism Unwritten: The Pro-Unification Leftist Literary Historiography in Taiwan

11:30-13:00 Lunch

13:00-15:00
Panel Four: Contesting Voices and Networks, 1990s-2016
Chair: Michael Berry

Kyle Shernuk
Sinophone Tidalectics, or the Transculturation of Identity in the Age of Globalization

Lily Wong
Affective Labor and the Sinophonic Lens in The Fourth Portrait

Dalton Lin
Can-Kicking in International Disputes: Parallel Self-Interest, Behind-the-Scene Diplomacy, and Lessons for Rapprochement Attempts

Jaw-Nian Huang
Between State and Market: Institutional Origins of Media Self-censorship in Taiwan, 1949-2016

15:00-15:30 Coffee Break

15:30-17:30 Roundtable

Chair: Mei Chia-ling

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