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READINGS
Introduction
Mongols
Muslims
Tibet
Southwest
Ilha Formosa

ASSIGNMENTS
Mongols
Muslims
Tibet
Southwest
Taiwan

LINKS
Mongols
Xinjiang and Islam
Tibet
Taiwan

Readings for Unit 6: Taiwan

Well, Toto, we're not in China anymore, but we are in part of what can be conceived of as the Chinese World, and by looking at Taiwan we are able to see three levels of ethnicity and nationality questions operating at once: the Taiwan question--is it part of China?--which is something like the Tibet question, the intra-Han ethnic divisions within Taiwan, and the relationship between Han people and minorities, in this case, Austronesian indigenous peoples, also called aborigines.

Friday, March 2: Constructing a Provisional Nation
Probably the best account of the history of ethnic relations in Taiwan comes from Melissa J. Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese Read the first chapter, What's in a Name?, which lays out the history quite clearly up to about the year 2000. The final chapter, Theory and the Politics of Reunification presents a very useful contrast between the politics of ethnicity in Taiwan and in China.

We also need to consider the issue of multiculturalism, and one good example, is Hsin-yi Lu's Localizing the National Future from her The Politics of Locality: Making a Nation of Communities in Taiwan.

An important group in the new nation are the Hakka. Scott Wilson's Making Hakka Spaces, shows both how, in Taiwan at least, Han can also be ethnic minorities, and also how not all minorities necessarily embrace multiculturalism.

Finally, Taiwan is an electoral democracy, which means that ethnic politics are electoral politics in a way that would be inconceivable in China. To see how this works, read

Indigeneity and Society
Since the course is about minority peoples in particular, we finish with a consideration of the place of indigenous groups in present-day Taiwan. Begin with Scott Simon's Paths to autonomy from Storm and Harrison's The Margins of Becoming: Identity and Culture in Taiwan, and continue to Simon's The Hunter's Spirit which gives a detailed view of the relationship between identity, development, and tourism, something you might want to compare with similar phenomena in China.

For the first hour, we will hear from Chang Hsi-wen, an indigenous Paiwan scholar and a member of this class, who will talk about the position of indigenous elites in contemporary Taiwan society, and about her own experience as an indigenous person in that society.

For the second hour, which will be final presentation before my concluding remarks, I'm going to talk about native artists. You might want to look at an unpublished paper I wrote with Lin Yu-shih, Aesthetics and Politics in Aboriginal Contemporary Arts.