As the site of crossings of colonizers, settlers, merchants, and goods, island nations such as Taiwan have seen a rich confluence of cultures, where peoples and languages were either forced to mix or did so voluntarily, due largely to colonial conquest and their crucial role in world economy. Through an examination of socio-cultural phenomena, Comparatizing Taiwan situates Taiwan globally, comparatively, and relationally to bring out the nation’s innate richness. This book examines Taiwan in relation to other islands, cultures, or nations in terms of culture, geography, history, politics, and economy. Comparisons include China, Korea, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, Ireland, Malaysia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and the Caribbean, and these comparisons present a number of different issues, alongside a range of sometimes divergent implications. By exploring Taiwan’s many relationalities, material as well as symbolic, over a significant historical and geographical span, the contributors move to expand the horizons of Taiwan studies and reveal the valuable insights that can be obtained by viewing nations, societies and cultures in comparison. Through this process, the book offers crucial reflections on how to compare and how to study small nations. This truly interdisciplinary book will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, comparative cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and literary studies.

In this second book of her trailblazing trilogy, Marsha Meskimmon proposes that decolonial, ecocritical, feminist art’s histories can unravel the anthropocentric legacies of Eurocentric universalism, to create transformative conversations between and across many and more-than-human worlds. Engaging with the ecologies and genealogies – worlds and stories – that constitute the plural knowledge projects of transnational feminisms and art’s transhemispheric histories, the book is written through two critical figurations: transcanons and trans-scalar ecologies. Materializing art’s histories as radical practices of disciplinary disobedience, the volume demonstrates how planetary feminisms can foster interdependent flourishing as they story pluriversal worlds, and world pluriversal stories, with art. This is essential reading for students and researchers in art history, theory and practice, visual culture studies, feminism and gender studies, environmental humanities and cultural geography. The Trilogy:Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art: Entanglements and Intersections Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies Transnational Feminisms and Posthuman Aesthetics: Resonance and Riffing Please see the first book in this series here.

Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context examines modern Taiwanese culture through the prism of global cultural interactions. Challenging the view of Taiwan as a product of transience and displacement, it highlights Taiwan’s subjectivity, viewing the island as a site of a global development that epitomizes both resistance and negotiation in the process of cultural flows. The fourteen contributions by an international team of scholars investigate the multi-layered and multidirectional interplays between the island and the outside world, exploring the impact of complex cultural encounters on the construction, writing and rewriting of Taiwan in a global context. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the topics covered range from Taiwanese literature, cinema, food culture and tourism to cultural geography, colonial history, and folk religion, with comparisons made with Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the West. Focusing on continuous cross-cultural interplays, this book affords readers a deeper understanding of identity politics and a better insight into the fluidity, changeability, and constructionist nature of culture. As such, it will be will be of great interest to students and scholars of Taiwan Studies and Cultural Studies, as well as Asian film, literature and popular culture.

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, American studies, black studies, and so forth.

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches argues that what appeared to be a "genesis" of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the "splendid isolation" within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which "Free China" lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of "pure literature" and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War.

This book examines cross-regional film collaboration within the Asia-Pacific region. Through a mixed methods approach of political economy, industry and market, as well as textual analysis, the book contributes to the understanding of the global fusion of cultural products and the reconfiguration of geographic, political, economic, and cultural relations. Issues covered include cultural globalization and Asian regionalization; identity, regionalism, and industry practices; and inter-Asian and transpacific co-production practices among the U.S.A., China, South Korea, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand.

This volume showcases a vibrant wave of scholarship that explores the intersection of queer theory and Sinophone studies, consolidating an interdisciplinary framework for furthering transnational research into non-conforming genders, sexualities and bodies. Engaging with contemporary debates and controversies, Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies presents a definitive collection of original contributions, which are both theoretically and empirically grounded and cross-disciplinary in nature. Individual chapters offer an in-depth study of new empirical data and case studies, covering keywords such as transpacific, viscerality, fandom, postcoloniality, ethnicity and activism. Imagining new conversations across several fields, including literature, film, communication, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, sociology and politics, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Queer Studies and Asian culture, literature and film, as well as gender and sexuality.

This issue of the journal Berliner China-Hefte / Chinese History and Society, themed 'Taiwan: Self vs. Other' brings together outstanding contributions from the 11th annual European Association of Taiwan (EATS) conference, which was held at the University of Portsmouth in 2014. The various papers included here examine how Taiwan perceives and projects itself to its domestic and international audiences by employing a wide variety of case studies. (Series: Chinese History and Society / Berliner China-Hefte, Vol. 47) [Subject: ?Asian Studies, Sociology

This book discusses the notion of “Hong Kong as Method” as it relates to the rise of China in the context of Asianization. It explores new Hong Kong imaginaries with regard to the complex relationship between the local, the national and the global. The major theoretical thrust of the book is to address the reconfiguration of Hong Kong’s culture and society in an age of global modernity from the standpoints of different disciplines, exploring the possibilities of approaching Hong Kong as a method. Through critical inquiries into different fields related to Hong Kong’s culture and society, including gender, resistance and minorities, various perspectives on the country’s culture and society can be re-assessed. New directions and guidelines related to Hong Kong are also presented, offering a unique resource for researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, postcolonial studies, globalization and Asian studies.

Presents an updated account of Hong Kong and its culture two decades after its reversion to China. In Found in Transition, Yiu-Wai Chu examines the fate of Hong Kong’s unique cultural identity in the contexts of both global capitalism and the increasing influence of China. Drawing on recent developments, especially with respect to language, movies, and popular songs as modes of resistance to “Mainlandization” and different forms of censorship, Chu explores the challenges facing Hong Kong twenty years after its reversion to China as a Special Administrative Region. Highlighting locality and hybridity along postcolonial lines of interpretation, he also attempts to imagine the future of Hong Kong by utilizing Hong Kong studies as a method. Chu argues that the study of Hong Kong—the place where the impact of the rise of China is most intensely felt—can shed light on emergent crises in different areas of the world. As such, this book represents a consequential follow-up to the author’s Lost in Transition and a valuable contribution to international, area, and cultural studies. “This is a wide-ranging and worthy sequel to Chu’s Lost in Transition. By juxtaposing a series of critical issues—urban development, self-writing, language education, and cultural production, among others—that have confounded those who care deeply about this former British colony, Chu offers his readers an intelligent and sensitive guide to connect and make sense of the various debates, and he places the conundrums Hong Kong faces in the contexts of both the limits of neoliberal capitalism and the ‘Age of China.’” — Leo K. Shin, author of The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands