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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.
Monday, June 1: 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. Recently, the question of identity has led in a direction away from China, even as economic and cultural ties with China become closer. This is illustrated graphically in Da-Chi Liao et al.'s The Decline of "Chinese Identity" in Taiwan.
We also need to contrast Taiwan's multiculturalism with that of China. One good description 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.
Wednesday, June 3: 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 Rovaniyaw Lenglengman, an indigenous Paiwan scholar, who will talk about indigenous people and environmental injustice in Taiwan.
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 You might want to look at an unpublished paper I wrote with Lin Yu-shih, Aesthetics and Politics in Aboriginal Contemporary Arts.
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