Rethinking Cold War Culture and History in Taiwan
2024 UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative Conference
Friday, April 19, 2024 – Saturday, April 20, 2024
Image Credit: 作者 (Photographer)：余如季 (Yu Ru-ji)。《蚵女》拍攝現場採訪照 (Interview Photo from the filming of “Oyster Girl”)。典藏者：余立。數位物件典藏者：中央研究院數位文化中心、國家電影及視聽文化中心。創用CC 姓名標示-非商業性-相同方式分享 3.0台灣（CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 TW）。發佈於《開放博物館》[https://openmuseum.tw/muse/digi_object/6262314d95bf7f0b4f4528ae98bd1ec4#211035]（2024/02/06瀏覽）
Organized by Shu-mei Shih (Irving and Jean Stone Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA) and Faye Qiyu Lu (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA), the Rethinking Cold War Culture and History in Taiwan conference is presented as part of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative, a partnership of UCLA and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) that aims to create research synergies to promote cutting-edge research in Taiwan studies.
Over the past decades between the “old” and the “new” Cold Wars, the (in)significance of Taiwan in world culture and history has often been determined by ideological assumptions that are overly simplistic. Yet not only have approaches to Taiwan studies in Taiwan experienced drastic changes (from area studies to postcolonial to settler colonial critiques), the positionality of Taiwan has also demonstrated unique potential for relational comparisons with the world. This conference examines ways of rethinking Cold War culture and history in Taiwan as well as the implications of the global Cold War culture and history for Taiwan studies from interdisciplinary and transhistorical perspectives. How do philosophical thought, literary and cultural productions, and geopolitical relations intersect when we situate Taiwan in the global Cold War? What does “being human” mean in Cold War Taiwan, taking into consideration Sinophone and transpacific entanglements? How is Cold War cultural politics negotiated in the developments of literary, cinematic, and media genres? What does the practice of rethinking Cold War culture and history in Taiwan do to better our understanding of Taiwan, China, and the world at the current moment with the formation of what may be called the Second Cold War?
View the complete conference program.
Please note that the 2024 UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative Annual Conference will take place in-person only.
Day 1, Friday, April 19 (Charles E. Young Research Library, Room 11360 / Main Conference Room)
10-10:30am: Opening Remarks
Min Zhou, Director of Asia Pacific Center and Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies, UCLA
David Kim, Associate Vice Provost of International Institute and Professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, UCLA
Shu-mei Shih, Director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative and Professor of Asian Languages & Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, UCLA
Faye Qiyu Lu, Ph.D. Candidate, Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA
10:30am-12pm: Panel 1 Taiwan in Global Cold War
Moderator: Lin-chin Tsai (National Cheng Kung University)
James Lin (University of Washington), Centering Taiwan in Cold War Studies
Wendy Cheng (Scripps College), Interrupting Cold War Epistemologies of Taiwanese/American Activism
Ming-feng Liu (National Quemoy University), Within and Without the State System: The Struggle for Authenticity of the Two Chinas and Their Change for Huaqiao Policy
12-1pm: Lunch
1-2:30pm: Panel 2 Critical Approaches to “Chinese” Culture and Cold War Taiwan
Moderator: Wei-hsin Yu (UCLA)
William Ng (National Taiwan Normal University), New Confucianism and the Cultural Cold War in Taiwan: A Critical Analysis of the Spirit of Legein Monthly
Faye Qiyu Lu (University of California, Los Angeles), Visualizing “Authoritarian Humanism” in Cold War Taiwan: Healthy Realist Cinema and the Aesthetics of Unalienated Labor
Tsang-long Liu (National Taiwan Normal University), Taiwan’s Transcultural Agency: A Dialogue Between Zhuangzi and Arendt
2:30-3pm: Coffee Break
3-4:30pm: Panel 3 Cultural and Historical Memories of Cold War Taiwan
Moderator: Hui-shu Lee (UCLA)
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (University of Missouri-Columbia), The Trauma of Cold War Taiwan Reconsidered: History and Memory of the 1950s White Terror
Janet Chen (Princeton University), Medium or Message? The Politics of Language in Broadcasting, 1955-1975
Nicholas Kaldis (Binghamton University), Pyrrhic Casualty of the Cold War: The Sonny Side of Wang Wen-hsing’s Family Catastrophe
4:30-5:30pm: Reception
Day 2, Saturday, April 20 (Royce Hall, Room 314)
9:30-11:00am: Panel 4 Americanism in Taiwan
Moderator: Faye Qiyu Lu (UCLA)
Michael Berry (University of California, Los Angeles), “The American Spirit is Dead”: Imagining the United States Through Taiwan Cinema
Fang-mei Lin (National Taiwan Normal University), Taiwanese-Language Cinema and Its Cultural Poaching of Hollywood: Gender, Space, and Cold War Cosmopolitanism
Raymond Kun-xian Shen (University of California, Los Angeles), Taiwan, United States, and Videotapes: The Clash of Movie Piracy and Screening Right in Late Cold War
11:15am-12:15pm: Panel 5 Cold War Feelings of Taiwanese America
Moderator: Shu-mei Shih (UCLA)
Chih-ming Wang (Academia Sinica), Post/Cold War Sentimentalism: On Taiwanese American Films about Return
Christopher Fan (University of California, Irvine), Revanchism, Ressentiment, and the Human Geographies of the Taiwanese American Novel
12:15-1:45pm: Lunch
1:45-3:15pm: Panel 6 Critical Interventions in Cold War Studies
Moderator: Min Zhou (UCLA)
Erin Huang (University of Toronto), Phantom Ship: Geo-Aesthetics and Infrastructural Haunting in Late Cold War Taiwanese Island Art
Irmgard Schweiger (Stockholm University), Memory Activism as Critical Intervention in (Post-)Cold War Taiwan: Kao Jun-honn’s Great Leopard Project
Lin-chin Tsai (National Cheng Kung University), Frontier Studies, Ethnic Minority Discourses, and Han Settler Consciousness in Postwar Taiwan during the Cold War Era
3:15-3:45pm: Coffee Break
3:45-4:45pm: Concluding Discussion
All participants, moderated by Shu-mei Shih