King Lear

It’s been a very long time since any updates, not for want of material, but for want of time. A couple of weeks ago I was at St Antony’s College Oxford to present a paper in a Taiwan Studies workshop. I spoke about Chiang Kaishek, King Lear, Cape No.7 and the crisis of representation. Here is an excerpt. And an excerpt from the performance I am writing about is here .

One exemplary instance of contemporary Taiwanese culture is produced by the celebrated Taiwanese actor Wu Hsing-kuo 吳興國, who has since the 1980s developed a global reputation for his ambitious interpretations of Shakespeare through his own theatre company the Contemporary Legend Theatre. He began in 1986 with a version of Macbeth that transposed the play to an imperial Chinese setting. In 2001, he presented a radical version of King Lear, which he has performed throughout the 2000s, most recently in 2009 at the Ten Days On The Island international arts festival in Australia.1

Wu premise is to use the theatrical forms of Peking opera as a medium in which to read Shakespeare’s plays. However, he goes further as an artist and transforms King Lear into one-actor piece of performance art, taking on nine of the characters himself: Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund, the Fool and the Earl of Kent. At one level, it is a demonstration of theatrical virtuosity. He performs the roles of multiple characters from the play by relying on both his personal skills as a an actor as well as the formalism of Peking opera to present the roles in a lucid and involving theatrical experience. Its works in part through the aura of the virtuoso, in which the audience is allowed to suspend disbelief and experience a particular form of rarefied spectacle.

In his version of King Lear, Wu’s approach to Shakespeare is highly stylized and interpretative, as he adapts the themes and relationships from the play, rather than specific scenes, beginning with the character of Lear is his state of madness. He also appears as himself in moments in which he explores his own identity and his relationship to the tragic characters in the play and his life as an actor.

Wu Hsing-kuo is classically trained in Peking opera, and parallel to his adaptation of Shakespeare, his performance adapts and refracts the imposing conventions of that form. He plays with the archetypes of Peking opera, such as the 老生 “old man” or the 武生 “young warrior” or 青衣 roles of women, to transform the representation of the play’s analogous characters through the different performance motifs. The result is a layered and stylized piece that is accessible and entertaining while allowing an informed audience to explore Shakespeare’s characterization through Wu’s self-conscious deployment of the richness and formalized features of Peking opera.2

Dramatically, Wu’s project is to distil an essence from Shakespeare and recreate that essence in an entirely different cultural mode, so as to offer an audience new insights and a fresh understanding of Shakespeare’s work. If one were to offer a critique of Wu’s King Lear, it might be his failure to grasp the centrality of language in Shakespeare. The wordplays, meters and turns of phrase that characterize Shakespeare’s plays and poetry and his capacity to draw intense and complex characterizations and plots from stage dialogue are a key dimension of what has made him the foundational writer in the English language. Even in its Chinese, Wu’s text is relatively straightforward. Instead, his apprehension of Shakespeare is largely through the performative body, using the esoteric and overdrawn physical performance styles of Peking opera as his dramatic language rather than its textual possibilities, and he focusses on the interior life of characters and their inter-relationships rather than any of the social and political themes in the play. For Wu, his work aims to exteriorize the psycho-analytic interior of the characters through the body and its physical possibilities in performance.

In a broader theoretical sense, Wu’s Lear is a form of trans-cultural performance practice. He takes the two radically different canonical forms of Shakespeare and Peking opera and by bringing them together problematizes their position as bounded within civilizational or national cultures. Each is deconstructed by the encounter with the other, and through the acts of interpretation and translation, he decanonizes both forms, allowing a play and a performance orthopraxis steeped in history to be rethought as innovative or even radical and transgressive. Shakespeare, celebrated and beatified the the greatest English writer and writer in English, is taken apart and reworked through a recondite form of culture from a Chinese classical civilizational tradition. Peking opera, representing high late-imperial culture, is similarly transformed through its appropriation of an alternative, even oppositional, Western literary tradition. One might also note how in the context of global culture and performing King Lear outside of Taiwan, Wu is presenting a doubled translation from Shakespeare to Peking opera and back again into the Angophone performance world, so that western cultural tradition becomes mediated by classical Chinese culture and transformed into a contemporary global high culture. 3

However, Wu is not only deconstructing cultural traditions. In reworking King Lear through Peking opera, he is drawing out from them an appeal to a universal human experience, insisting that even as rarefied or esoteric artistic forms, Shakespeare and Peking opera are both capable of reaching across cultural divides and expressing universal human concerns. The humanism of the performance is accentuated in Wu’s personal intrusions on stage, breaking the barrier between actor and audience so as to include both in a shared experience of subjectivity. As a result, Wu’s appeal to the universalizing humanistic values of both Shakespeare and Peking opera re-canonizes them as cultural objects that transcend the boundaries that valorize them. They are not merely great within their respective cultural traditions, they are great across all human cultures and history. This is a bold move, as most global or transnational culture is popular and commercial, such as cinema or pop music, and Wu is appealing to nothing less than a form of “great” or “high” global culture.

In this context of global or transnational culture, Wu’s focus on embodied performance makes sense as a more fruitful technique for cultural translation, functioning visibly and viscerally as site of meaning that can make sense across cultural boundaries. The body becomes the most viable form of expression that can remain comprehensible across multiple translation acts across civilizational boundaries.

In the narrower context of Taiwan’s contemporary culture, however, such a deep engagement with a classical Chinese cultural form has an unavoidable politics. That Wu’s King Lear can be identified as “Chinese” is to position his work as inauthentic in the context of Taiwanese nationalism and the localist cultural movements that have driven much cultural expression in Taiwan since the 1970s. Peking opera is necessarily hegemonic, positioning its local equivalent of Taiwanese opera as a provincial subset of the imperial form, and marginalizing other traditional popular culture such as music and puppet theatre. This hegemony might be an intrinsic and unavoidable part of Wu’s project. His King Lear is, in a sociological sense, legitimized by the symbolic capital of Peking opera, which draws upon centuries of imperial history and active valorization by the KMT government on Taiwan. To engage with as dominant a cultural figure as Shakespeare from outside of the Western or Anglosphere might need an equally compelling interlocutor for the dialogue to be meaningful.

Therefore, a simple reading of Wu Kuo-hsing’s King Lear might be to link it to the same “crisis of representation” that could be said to shape the language of politics in Taiwan today: Peking opera is Chinese, and its presence on Taiwan expresses the failure of Taiwanese culture to define a uniquely and specifically “Taiwanese” cultural language as it continues to constrain the possibilities of Taiwanese culture. In terms of symbolic capital, perhaps one could so far as to say that high culture in Taiwan, such as theatre, might need to be Chinese culture to be legitimized.

However, this is a very crude reading of Wu’s work, equating his version of King Lear with Chinese culture, and indeed equating it with Peking opera, when in fact it is a richer and more complex form of transnational culture. The transformations of Peking opera effected by Wu are too profound for his work to be understood as simply a version of Peking opera transplanted to Taiwan.

Wu’s King Lear is self-reflexive and self-conscious, and ultimately ungrounded by its Chinese classical tradition. It deliberately and explicitly breaks the boundaries of Peking opera as a form of performance and takes on with a demonstrable confidence the most canonized writer in the English language. In other words, Wu Kuo-hsing is deliberately taking the cultural legacy of China on Taiwan, a pre-Republican legacy, and using to develop a transnational cultural form. What is being culturally represented in King Lear is not “China”, but a cultural legacy transformed in ways that might only be possible in Taiwan. Indeed, symbolically, in the third scene in his Lear, Wu wipes the opera make-up from his face, and explores in vernacular Chinese his own subjective relationship to aspects of Lear’s isolated and troubled character with which he identifies and with the difficulty of maintaining a life as a performer. He symbolically wipes the mask of Chinese high culture from his face and speaks outside of it in a very different linguistic register.

Wu, therefore, is offering a wholly self-reflexive engagement with the theatrical tradition with which he is working. He then goes further, taking an ungrounded and free approach to the performance of Peking opera to embrace not that tradition but Western tradition in the form of a canonical piece of English theatre. In other words, the logic of renewal or revitalization to which Chiang Kai-shek appealed in 1950s or the notion of “saving” Taiwan in the 2000s, is unravelled in Wu’s art. Renewal of classical Chinese culture means appropriating it from a position of mastery and re-deploying it knowingly in ways that enable cultural innovation, and especially cultural translation. Wu stands between both Chinese and Western traditions uses them to deliver a high cultural “mash-up”. The temporality of greatness-crisis-revitalization-and greatness again is rendered politically meaningless when the renewal is actually an act of creative translation that deconstructs the very boundaries of Chinese culture upon which Chiang and subsequent bearers of Chinese nationalist ideology rely.

1. “Lier zai ci (Lear is here),” DVD, Wu hsing-kuo, Contemporary Legend Theatre, (Tianxia 2005).

2. for a detailed description of Wu Hsing-kuo’s interpretation of King Lear, see Li Ruru, “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ / ‘Lear’s shadow’: A Taiwanese Actor’s Personal Response to King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly; Summer 2006; Vol. 57, No.2, p. 195-241.

3. ibid., 196.

Another book chapter

I have another chapter in a new book that just came out with HKU Press. The chapter is “How to Speak About Oneself: Theory and identity in Taiwan. Book blurb as follows.

What difference does a region make? Are the new regional cultures of Northeast Asia the product of individuals fighting to overcome national trade barriers, or are they driven by governments promoting national interests in new ways? Are they the result of economic pursuits alone, or do cultural and political forces play a role? Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia takes a Cultural Studies approach to the cultural industries in Northeast Asia. The volume opens with an innovative section considering the discipline itself as a kind of cultural industry, highlighting the challenges and possibilities that arise from the context of Northeast Asia. Other essays on specific cultural industries and their products range in coverage from labor in the Korean animation industry to anti-Korean manga in Japan, the emergence of an East Asian brandscape, Chinese consumption of Japanese animation, the Asian regional strategy of the Pusan International Film Festival, and more.

“The publication of Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia marks one of the first efforts to address the emergent shape and shaping of a distinctive Northeast Asian cultural sphere in our time and surely represents the best portrayal of the complex tapestry embracing the plural forces of nation, market and cultural industries that is currently constituting this new configuration. From ‘Cool Japan,’ regional ‘brandscapes’ to hybrid forms of animation, politicized cartoons, and regional pop music, these essays explore how cultural studies has expanded its disciplinary vocation to meet the demands of a cultural zone different from the usual suspects and expanded its reach to examine policy and the cultural industries implicated in figuring and producing this new cultural unity. Above all else, the collection authoritatively demonstrates the continuing tension between envisioning a Northeast Asian cultural imaginary as a displacement of older historical grievances capable of exceeding the nation and the more difficult labor of realizing political and economic cooperation among the region’s nations to actualize a new history.” – Harry Harootunian, New York University

“This timely and erudite intellectual interrogation of regionalism offers a potent counter-discourse to challenge nation-state boundaries and problematize the binary model of globalism/localism. There is no comparable book on the market.” – Ming-bao Yue, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Chris Berry is Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Nicola Liscutin is Head of the Japanese Department and Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Jonathan D. Mackintosh is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Book chapter

I have a chapter in a new book that just came out with Routledge. Blurb as follows.

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of ‘Taiwan Studies’, and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future.

As the study of Taiwan shifts from being a provincial back-water of sinology to an area in its own (albeit not sovereign) right, a combination of established and up and coming scholars working in the field of East Asian studies offer a re-reading and re-writing of culture in Taiwan. They show that sustained critical analysis of contemporary Taiwan using issues such as trauma, memory, history, tradition, modernity, post-modernity provides a useful point of departure for thinking through similar problematics and issues elsewhere in the world.

Re-writing Culture in Taiwan is a multidisciplinary book with its own distinctive collective voice which will appeal to anyone interested in Taiwan. With chapters on nationalism, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, religion and museum studies, the breadth of ground covered is truly comprehensive.

Australian Taiwan Studies Network

Something I have been working on now I have returned home Australia.

The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is a long-overdue attempt from Australia to bring together academics doing research about the island of Taiwan. It is based around a “wiki”, a closed interactive website. It is in its early days, but features internet generated content, such as news feeds, a forum, events calendar, and daily images of Taiwan. The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is based in Australia but open to scholars everywhere. The website requires registration and an “application” to join the network. Those interested can find it at:

http://atsn.wikidot.com

The role of the media in Taiwan’s democratic consolidation

This weekend I have been at St Antony’s College, Oxford, for a post-election workshop on democracy in Taiwan. My brief was the media, and among the political scientists and Washington hard-heads, I did my usual gesture at epistemological critique. We enjoyed “High Table” in the cafeteria … I mean, college dining hall, as well as St Antony’s very own range of undrinkable wines and sherry. The event was successful and enjoyable and concluded with a very pleasant dinner at a local Italian with academic luminaries and the sparkle of political celebrity in the form of Bi-khim Hsiao, “Taiwan’s Natasha Stott-Despoja“, who was literally and metaphorically on the road to recovery after the unimaginable physical and emotional demands of the presidential election campaign.* I finished the event off British style with an arduous journey back to London through a range of transport failures that took hours.

Here is approximately what I had to say at the conference.

The importance of the media in democracies has long been recognized by essayists, activists and theorists, from Thomas Carlyle to Jurgen Habermas to Samuel Huntington.

The media is part of democratic process, delimiting the power of states and empowering citizens by functioning to produce civil society or the public sphere by mediating between the state and the public.

In Lipsett’s early work, the media are a function of modernization or more properly modernity, which is a pre-condition of democratization – the theme of modernization or modernity is one which occurs again and again with respect to Taiwan, and even the title of this event – “consolidation” alludes to the temporality implicit in the notion of modernity.

Especially through Huntington, the media in Taiwan has been understood as part of a positivist explanatory mechanism of Taiwan’s democratization, what I have referred to an an equation of democratization, in which linguistic categories, like “media”, the “middle class”, the “economy” etc are lined up in logically causal relationships. So the emergence of a newspaper reading middle class in Taiwan through a booming economy in the post-WWII era is understood as a factor to have caused democratization.

In my own work I have been critical of this mode of social analysis. The objectification of socio-political life in this mode of political science implies a political and moral response to that life. Democracy was caused by the struggle by democracy activists, not objective social processes that do not demand a political engagement with that struggle by observers.

In the context of Taiwan, these views about the media present powerful and I would suggest over-determining narratives of Taiwan’s history, especially valorizing the date of 1949 and the start of the so-called “Taiwanese economic miracle” or the Tiger or Little Dragon narrative.

So when we talk about the role of the media in democracy in Taiwan we can be encoding some very strong narratives of history and history-writing which carry certain assumptions about the structure of Taiwan’s history, and the issues of who writes it and why.

These views about democratization and its causes, the role of the media, and the kinds of narratives and epistemologies that are the foundation of these ideas, have come in for some sustained criticism in recent years and it might be fair to say that the simple links between media, literacy, modernity, modernization, development and democracy are largely unsustainable nowadays.

In the last five to ten years, Taiwan’s transformation has come to be understood as very much over the whole 20th century, not merely over the post-WWII decades, in narratives which incorporate the different aspects of modernization under Japan and in the late Qing. Therefore, the links between media, literacy, economic development and so forth are harder to sustain.

Furthermore, the links between media and democracy in these forms of analysis incorporate too many normative definitions of what a “media” is (and indeed a democracy). The Habermassian ideal of the media as a public sphere of rational argumentation and critical discussion in the context of Taiwan becomes a powerful (and unsustainable) value judgement of the state of Taiwan society and the development of the Taiwanese as a people.

But these norms do take us forward into the criticisms of the Taiwanese media that have beset its democratic transition especially in the Chen era.

The key question is whether there is something “wrong” with the Taiwanese media which is preventing the full realization of democracy in Taiwan.

There are many ways we can come at these issues:

In the first instance, are the issues of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of Taiwan’s media.

Criticisms of Taiwan’s media are often around the question of biases or politicization and also its sensationalism – its lack of objectivity.

The Taiwanese media has been criticized for being wholly partisan, especially in the deeply divisive Chen era. The major newspapers are all identified as blue or green and their reporting has been accused of aligning with the political interests associated with each side. So the reporting of the so-called corruption scandals involving Chen Shui-bian and his wife, or the visit by Lien Chan to China to meet Hu Jintao in 2005, have been characterized by a split between the Blue and Green sides of the media that covers these stories very differently.

In this way, rather than reporting information and facts in an objective way, the Taiwanese media are understood as being either political actors themselves or functioning as mouthpieces for the Blues and Greens.

In that context, some of the features of Taiwan’s media can be understood as a failure of democratization and a failure of modernity. So the limits and failings of the Taiwanese media are part of a deeply self-critical socio-political discourse in Taiwan. These are predicated on certain assumptions about the way a media “should” be, which is found in an idealized West, which itself suggests a kind of Taiwan-centric alterity. The Taiwanese “other” themselves.

The problem of the bias or politicization, and also of sensationalism, of Taiwan’s news media assumes that there is a normative standard for democratic media in which the reporting is unbiased or more true, or expresses a greater commitment to truth and objectivity than Taiwan’s media.

This notion is at the heart of the notion of an idealized public sphere, one of “rational argumentation and critical discussion”.

This ideal media is the so-called Fourth Estate, which functions to freely criticize the sites of power – government and business – in order to protect or empower the people against the misuse of power. The media should be objective, reporting facts without bias or partisanship or emotion or in the interests of power.

Therefore, the Taiwanese are unable to draw “objective” apolitical knowledge from their media about their social, political and economic circumstances. They are unable to be rational and modern.

And perhaps, given the intense commercialization of media, one could argue that they do not want to be rational, but are driven by desire, emotion, a pursuit of sensation, rather than rational analysis.

This idealized understanding of the media can and indeed has been subjected to a wide-ranging critique in Western media studies over decades. It can be argued that the media produces ideology around notions like capitalism, patriarchy, ethnicity, etc. In Taiwan, the deep contestation of its politics simply makes the bias visible.

One could argue that in Taiwan it is simply that the divisiveness of the media makes the biases and politicization visible, whereas in more unified media we simply do not notice the biases.

The ideal media also functions on the basis of a crude notion of objective truth that has also been opened up for critique through post-structuralism and the linking of notions of truth with language, knowledge and power.

Furthermore, the norms of disinterested news media suggest a valorization of a certain kind of politics – rational, instrumental, objective, non-ideological, which might be hard to sustain as a credible basis for real politics, especially in Taiwan, where the very nature of the key political problems are in the realm of ideology i.e. the identity issue. An appeal to objective and disinterested media would produce an inadequate media for Taiwan’s political circumstances.

Therefore, the notion that Taiwan’s media fails to live up to an ideal, and that therefore its democracy is wanting can be argued against when the media has long been understood not to adhere to its own ideals.

Nevertheless, the well-known frustration that the Taiwanese electorate have for their media does point to a real issue, one that suggests a challenge to the legitimacy of Taiwan’s democratic system.

One way to explore what precisely the problem is is through the notion of the media as a mechanism for self-representation in Taiwan, as a mechanism through which the Taiwanese know themselves as Taiwanese.

We can recognize that the media are only one site of power within Taiwan and suggest disconnections between socio-political knowledge and politics – disconnections between how people know about themselves and their politics and whether and how that knowledge is expressed in the media.

Therefore, in a media in which notions of truth or meaningful representation are hard to sustain, the Taiwanese suffer from what, in other work of mine, I have referred to as Taiwan’s crisis of representation. The structural problems of the Taiwanese media make it hard to the Taiwanese to know themselves in it.

A dimension to this is the prevalence of opinion over reporting. The political talk-shows and opinion columns suggest a very politically-aware electorate but one in which the public sphere generated by the media, supposedly a site of rational and instrumental debate about the nation’s issues, has become instead a confused discursive space in which the truth of any assertion is impossible to determine because of the competing claims on legitimacy over knowledge.

For example, political opinion is expressed as objective opinion, and legitimized by academic credentials. There is a complex contestation going on in Taiwan over the legitimization of knowledge.

Another dimension might be the intense commercialization of Taiwan’s media, in which sensationalism becomes the currency of media truths, or similarly the ownership of Taiwan’s media, so that views and information conveyed by certain media is undermined by its links to political and state institutions.

Again, it has to be said that this might not be unique to Taiwan. The rise of cable news in the US shows a similar drift towards news as commentary and a failure to be able to determine what the truth might look like when it is presented in the media. Indeed, it has been said the the comedy news programs, such as The Daily Show, are where a kind of truth can now be found.

Another aspect might be the currency of “rumours”, which are extra-media forms of social and political knowledge, operating in parallel to the news media, and ones which are hard to quantify, control, and are operating without much in the way of institutional regulation, or legitimizing practices, unlike other sites of socio-political knowledge like academia, politics, the media.

In Taiwan this means layers of social and political meaning in which tacit knowledge emerges to fill the gaps left by public knowledge in the media.

This points to a certain form continuity between the martial law and democratic periods: the best example is the exhortations to fight communism and recover the mainland that featured as ritual acts of subjection before the power of the KMT party-state under martial law.

So there is a crisis of representation in the media which is what drives the level of anxiety that the Taiwanese have towards politics and civil society, but that crisis does not express and enact authoritarianism as it did in the martial law period.

The media is perhaps just as politicized, but is now pluralistic and deregulated, and yet still fails to represent a Taiwanese social life with which the Taiwanese people can identify.

The current state of the media suggests that the transformation of Taiwan is indeed profound and complete, but that the media continues to exhibit a different kind of representational crisis. The Taiwanese do not know themselves in their own media as a coherent national people and this creates an on-going sense of disquiet and unease about their politics.

 

Burma

I have a project on television news reportage of China that over the last month has captured a large amount of the coverage of the protests and crackdown in Burma. It has been difficult to see the coverage dry up just as the Burmese government’s action became most severe. The news media is critical to the viability of global campaigns like that fighting for change in Burma, and the news media clearly know this, but the mechanisms of daily and 24 hour news and its ultimate goal of delivering the news as a product, is adverse to its own political possibilities. By way of a response, I have started uploading all the material I have on Burma in chronological order to a video sharing website. It forms a kind of account of the protests and their suppression. The website is here.  

China Week

I have been in Melbourne at my alma mater, Monash University, for a series of events over the last couple of weeks. It included me giving an updated presentation of the BBC China Week seminar from the project I started in 2005. The BBC’s China Week is the gift that keeps on giving. Back then I edited a montage of the BBC’s version of China, which I have uploaded here. Requires Quicktime 7.

London Taiwan Workshop

This weekend was the London Taiwan Workshop, a now annual event held at the London School of Economics. I was tasked with making concluding comments, bringing the papers together and summarizing the day. This is what I came up with, more on the issues of method and some comparisons with Chinese and Japanese Studies. Meanwhile, I thought I would update here a bit more often with less formal items.  

 

This is the fifth London Taiwan Workshop, and I think I have been to all of them in one capacity or another. I certainly recall very warmly the first event at the end of 2002. For me that event marked the establishment of a sense of place for me both in Britain – this most displaced of places – and, very strikingly, at the same time also in Taiwan. It legitimized my knowledge of Taiwan and so gave me part of a sense of place, which is to know a place.

So I find myself now with the difficult but interesting task of trying to bring the day together.

Tremlett started with anthropology. He appealed, implicitly, to the claim of anthropology to be the primary social science discipline by virtue of its apprehension of the fundamental and universal human experiences – birth, marriage, death, etc. Tremlett showed how even these most basic of traditions – rituals inscribing the cosmological, political and social – rooted in their claim on immutability over generations, are mutable when subject to the forces of modernity, or post-modernity. Tremlett looked at urbanization – with all its associations with the effects of capital and the state – as a force of modernization in Taiwan and in the Philippines, which as it produces new ways for people live together spatially and in their social practices, also transforms the way people die. (Dr Tung raised the importance of religious revival). Tremlett shows how life’s fundamental traditions are then rather more improvised and contingent, opening many questions about the choices we make as to what is really “fundamental” in our traditions when their transformation becomes necessary, or possible, or efficacious, or desirable.

Thompson took these issues from a different point of view. He looked at the experience of modernity in Taiwan, this impetus of and for change, not as a cause of the transformation of tradition, but from the point of view of the renewal of its own self-representation by those who live it. Taiwanese filmmakers approach the transformation of their own lives in spatial, visual and emotional terms, visualizing and narrating change in Taiwan through a medium which is itself transformative of their experience. In a this way, Thompson’s paper broke down the distinction between theory, cultural representation and the represented object, which might be Taiwan or theory or film itself. The Taiwanese know themselves and are able to reflect critically upon themselves in their own self-representation. Thompson applied theorists to intersect with these representational transformations of place, highlighting the way Tsai Ming-liang’s films expose, like Tremlett on the practices of death, the contingency of place.

Bernath’s paper elaborated these issues further. She examined the transformative practices of architecture which are remaking urban spaces and creating its modernity through the spatial and aesthetic effects of architectural representation. Bernath introduced a new vector into the day’s analysis, that of the global. Global architectural practices have impacted upon Taiwan’s three-dimensional spaces through the introduction specific modes of representation, privileging the simulation of architectural space, and the affect of space over its objective reality. These are not critical, self-conscious reflections upon transformations, as Thompson outlined in cinema, but practices with specific transformative effects.

Lai’s paper also took in the vector of the global and offered a different take on spatiality in Taiwan, that of a media space. The physical presence of Eslite bookstores across Taipei and elsewhere in Taiwan intersect with the virtual geographical features of a media and consumer landscape, in her mapping the places of art in Taiwan, as art passes through this landscape through the expressways of consumption. For Lai, the transnational media and commerce in Eslite is another transformative force, this time for art practices which themselves have been self-consciously remade by the transformative forces of modernity. Art makes a certain self-conscious appeal to the universal or the transcendent in the human condition, and as Lai shows, is also self-consciously remade both willingly and perhaps sometimes not so, by the remaking of the media space and the intervention of commercialism in which it operates.

Chien elaborates these themes in her work. The interaction between the physical presence of an exhibition space, in Eslite, and a space of consumption, which Lai described, is now overtaken by the domination of new media. The physical spatial transformation of traditions by modernity has given way to transformative effects unbound by the physical world and freed to play out in the media technology space of the internet. This explosion of the constraints of real space has allowed new and impossible vectors of cultural movement through East Asia and internationally, and as Chien notes presents new dangers for old forms of hegemony. However unanchored to the physical world this media space might be, it remains structured by pre-existing global forces of power.

And finally to Lee’s paper on the transformation of education in contemporary Taiwan. She added the missing piece in this three dimensional jigsaw, that of the state. However much we can observe the multiple vectors of the transformative effects of modernity on Taiwan in art, architecture and traditional social rituals, the presence of the state can never be discounted and in Lee’s paper she highlighted precisely the place where the state intervenes most proactively in social and cultural life, education. She also showed how at the same time new interventions with new “yin and yang” strategies have occurred through social movements and new sites of power in a democratic and modern Taiwan . Lee’s paper focussed on a particular site of that power, that of gender.

Six papers on different topics, but with a narrative of approach to Taiwan running through them all. We have spent the day examining forces and vectors of transformation, of the cause and effect of one category of analysis affecting another.

“Modernity”, modernization, or “post-modernity” might be appealed to as a foundational category, but in the elaborations of the papers, what strikes me I think is the lack of a necessary ground or a base from which to project the features of the New Taiwan. The notion of modernity seems to mean little but “time’s arrow”.

I wonder then if we can start to think about method within Taiwan Studies and how the emergence of a method might be brought to bear upon other area studies.

In the first instance, the papers of the present event might be contrasted with other, related, fields of area studies.

Chinese Studies, in its contemporary form, does have a ground, and that is politics. In Chinese Studies, cultural, social and even economic changes are mapped over changes in politics, especially party politics, so than developments in these areas of Chinese life are explained as responses to or reflections of politics. May Fourth, Maoism, Hundred Flowers, Anti-rightist, Cultural Revolution, post-Mao, reform, Tiananmen, the Southern Tour, and so forth are political events which are used to structure or produce the explanations of the cultural and social in China.

Japanese Studies is, I think, a form of psychoanalysis. Contemporary Japan is characterized by neuroses, excesses of cultural disturbance and irrationality, which are explained by past traumas and the “national baggage” of its history. Contemporary Japan was as if born out of the Bomb, and from this original trauma has come the neurotic cultural expressions of the weight of its domineering history and traditions against which it struggles to grow out of.

Neither of these models apply fully to the study of Taiwan, although there are some interesting intersections. With the important exception of the date of the lifting of martial law, we do not map Taiwan’s cultural and social transformation against the political machinations of its ruling regimes. Neither have we seen Taiwan’s cultural and social life analyzed as a neurosis borne out of the trauma of the past, although such rhetoric is, of course, a feature of Taiwan’s political discourse, which often invokes the crisis of Taiwan’s politics as a result of the traumas of 2-28 and the White Terror.

In reviewing the papers today and other work on Taiwan, there seems to be no unifying approach to Taiwan Studies. So I would like to conclude the day with the question of what this thing called Taiwan Studies might be.

In the first instance, it is not enough to claim that the method of Taiwan Studies is to proclaim that there is no method, that it is unconstrained or open-ended. This is, I think, a lazy conceit.

Instead, we have an approach to the study of Taiwan structured around the notion of its change, of transformation often but not always through the experience of modernity or post-modernity. As the papers today have shown, it is possible to produce a narrative of change in Taiwan through a multiplicity of vectors, placing any number of categories of analysis against others showing multiple, countervailing, forces of change – forwards, backwards, up and down – media, politics, the state, social practices, architecture, art, urbanization, education, gender, consumerism. With each vector is its effect – cultural forms and social practices which are turned from one thing into another, erased, recreated, redeployed, recontextualized.

There is a kind of aesthetic to this narration and mapping of transformation. It has a ceaseless, turbulent quality. Nothing is unchangeable, everything is plastic, invented and inventible.

Reflecting on the papers today, I think there might be something here to self-consciously develop. The basis of Taiwan Studies might be a specific way of thinking about temporality and Taiwan, and the method might be to do what we have done today which is to self-reflexively describe the vectors of the forces of change in Taiwan. Contingency and indeterminacy of these vectors has been a crucial aspect of the day, in which no received social practice cannot be transformed and remade, and contingency is something which can work in a methodology if it is done knowingly and skillfully. At the end of today, I can see a form for Taiwan Studies which deliberately produces Taiwan as a multiplicity of temporal vectors of transformation.

In conclusion is the question of whether it possible to systematize any approach to deliver legitimized knowledge. Is it possible for forums such as this to articulate a Taiwan Studies which then moves towards its own naturalization, so that we know what it is we do when we study Taiwan. Is it plausible or credible to suggest that Taiwan Studies is narrating the transformations of the meaning of Taiwan through time. These are complex questions, and a major theme of my own work is the way the indeterminacy of Taiwan as a geopolity is expressed in the indeterminacy of the scholarship which occurs under the label “Taiwan Studies”.

I think, though, that after five years of this forum we can start to think about and propose an approach.

Responding to a review.

A friend and colleague wrote a review of my book, Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity, for a new journal of Taiwan Studies coming out of the LSE. He made some excellent and critical points and I was invited to respond.

The task of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is rather more improvised and contingent than scholars sometimes like to admit. The principles of objectivity, or at least of disinterest, and a commitment to the boundedness of linguistic terms of analysis can encourage us to operate on the assumption that clear scholarly boundaries exist, and within those that knowledge is securely produced through certain styles, set routines and “ways of doing”. Such a commitment, and its expression, is part of the establishment and maintenance of scholarly authority and legitimacy. Indeed, scholarly work can be devoted as much to defining its own boundaries as to producing new knowledge, to the elaborate process of including and excluding certain categories to demarcate one discipline from another, and rehearsing those “ways of doing” which themselves produce the coherence of a discipline.

In this way, scholarship generally does not acknowledge its own improvisations and contingency. The generation of scholarly authority is very often produced by the active masking of its mechanisms, as an art that conceals its art, for to expose them is to potentially undermine the basis of its epistemological legitimacy. And yet, some of the most productive and innovative scholarship is created by applying the approach of one discipline to another, by introducing new categories into a field so as to reveal hitherto unread aspects of a subject or problematic. In the shadow of the necessarily authoritative scholarly voice is both a profound uncertainty about the limits and possibilities of the knowledge it expresses and also, in the very instability of its boundaries, the possibility for creative scholarly innovation.

In Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity, a term I use to take in some of these issues is “the theatre of scholarship” and the performance of scholarly authority in the book is something of a commedia dell’arte. It improvises a methodology based on a range of scholarly techniques to produce legitimized knowledge. Drawing on cultural studies, it is suspended from some very serious post-structuralist and post-colonial theory, delivering a special density of writing as it tries to apprehend the elusive and dialectical ways in which identity is addressed. Operating within an area studies, it also rests on thorough archival research drawing out new empirical knowledge from primary sources in sections such as those on naming, the notion of the East Asian Little Dragons, and on the history of the Diaoyutai Islands protest movement in the early 1970s. My solution to reconciling these approaches and to accommodating the instability I found around the categories of the study of Taiwan was to self-consciously and self-reflexively move between the methodologies, making explicit reference right through the text to the nature and mechanisms of scholarly enquiry, to the “arch style of postcolonial theorizing” (163) as well as to academic “labor in libraries and archives” (163).

Tremlett says that Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity is not really about Taiwan, but rather about the study of identity itself. The deliberate revealing of the mechanisms of scholarly writing in the book indeed can lead to the question of how knowledge about identity is produced, as much as to any specific knowledge about Taiwanese identity. A reader as astute as Tremlett immediately then identifies the conceit of the book, which is its presumption to speak from position of a higher or greater truth. If scholarship itself becomes part of the research then I am presuming to write above scholarship. It is a risky and perhaps exhausting technique, with an appeal to a scholarly truth above scholarship which is potentially endlessly recursive. Even here, in this response to a review, is the risk of being drawn into an academic hall of mirrors as I speak from a position above even my own work. It is part of the reason why the book returns throughout to the ground of “labor in libraries and archives”, and as an author I note the pleasure and respite that such expositionary sections offered.

Tremlett is right about the book’s conceit when the scholarship in question is something called “Taiwan Studies”. Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity describes throughout the instability of the boundaries of Taiwan Studies and the role of scholarship, self-reflexively including the book itself, in stabilizing them. However, above its authorial subject position is still “theory” – Derrida, Bourdieu, Bhabha, Chow, Said, and implicitly, Foucault. The authority of theory is why Tremlett wonders if the book is really about just identity, but at the same time it is this multilevel scholarly subject position which leads Tremlett to question the way the text appears to face off some of the heaviest contemporary theorists against the existing literature on Taiwanese identity. As Tremlett suggests, opposing Derrida or Bourdieu could be the rigorous defense of empiricism of Popper or Austin, rather than the wholly untheorized assumptions of an empirical basis for Taiwanese identity found in Wachman or Corcuff.

In the first instance, one could insist that the current inchoate nature of Taiwan Studies, described in chapter one, permits or even demands the introduction of solid theorizing of its problematics and foundations. However possible it might be to deploy Popper or Austin to defend the empiricist basis of the existing literature on Taiwanese identity, the fact is that its authors do not do that themselves. Therefore, at this level, the book’s exposure of its own methodologies expresses the unevenness and quality of the literature. The study of Taiwan is full of gaps and elisions, and part of Tremlett’s reservations result from my attempt to frame a text within the incomplete architecture of a field of unstable area studies. As the book elaborates, identity is a key problematic in Taiwan Studies and most of the existing literature is hopelessly undertheorized, so the book is, I believe, right to take it down.

Yet at the same time, the fight is so oddly unequal that Tremlett’s unease must be taken seriously. The apparent contradictions make me wonder then if the specific nature of the topic is rather more central than Tremlett allows, both for my book and for all work on Taiwan.

Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity argues in a number of ways that the nature of studying Taiwan is an expression of the nature of Taiwan. That is, far from being a scholarly field which can maintain principles of objectivity, or at least of disinterest, Taiwan Studies (and any area studies) cannot be disentangled from the discursive production of the boundaries of the area itself. The scholarly elaboration of Taiwanese identity as a research problematic is itself a part of Taiwan’s own ideology of its identification, even as scholarship so often claims to speak from a distanciated authorial position. In the book this argument is made by theorizing identity as a form of knowing, and a key part of knowledge, especially of a nation, is found in scholarship. Scholarly writing on identity addresses it as an object at the same time as it functions to legitimize a subjectivity.

The book concludes on this basis with the point that scholars of “Taiwan Studies” are completely implicated in Taiwan’s legitimacy as a polity. The inverse of this is that it is the nascent, inchoate and contested nature of Taiwan’s identity formations in terms of its politics and culture, and also Taiwan’s real geo-political marginality in the international community with the ever-present threat (and attraction) of mainland China, that make a coherent and received Taiwan Studies so difficult. If an area studies elaborates and legitimizes the coherence of an area, then it struggles to generate its own coherence when faced with an area which can be named but still suffers from a geo-political indeterminacy. As a result, the book struggles, I believe inevitability but ultimately fruitfully, with the entanglements of its own arguments. Even as it argues that it itself is producing Taiwan’s identity, it must, to still be legitimate as scholarship, repeatedly try to extract itself from its implication in a nationalist ideology. This is where the improvised and self-reflexive methodology comes from, as well as the reaching up to hang off the authority of theory to avoid such epistemological quicksand.

What Tremlett does not acknowledge then is that Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity is, at its heart a radical critique of area studies. It breaks down the pretense of area studies to be an objective approach to a geo-political region and says that area studies is, in fact, part of the legitimization and elaboration of a geo-polity’s ideological, as well as geographical, boundaries. In particular, the book is a critique of the way the congruence of area studies with certain national boundaries implicates it nationalist ideologies all too easily. This is especially so in Chinese Studies.

This presents the Taiwan Studies scholar with an unusual choice in his or her approach to Taiwan, one which the contestations of Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity identified by Tremlett play out. Pursuing a “critical” form of scholarly writing to the conclusion that I did represents a particular response to the epistemological problems of area studies. It is indeed an attempt at a “greater truth” because however inevitably entangled it is with ideology and geo-political boundaries at least the book knows and it is. Uniquely it says openly and honestly.

Such a claim, including its presumption, leads Tremlett to wonder if it also expresses a profound resignation and impotence before Taiwan’s uncertain political and cultural future. He asks is it enough to merely note that Taiwan’s future is in our own scholarship? As academics we can recognize our implication in that future but we can do nothing but write books and present conference papers. Against one thousand Chinese missiles or 107 billion dollars of cross-straits trade, an academic’s words are just that.

In response and conclusion, I wonder again if the choice is rather more stark and perhaps then meaningful than Tremlett allows. Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity faces off post-structuralism against positivist political science, and it looks like a one-sided contest. However, implicit in the book’s conclusion that scholarship on Taiwan is part of Taiwan’s legitimacy is that it is so regardless of the approach one adopts. As such the book faces off two profoundly different responses to Taiwan’s future.

Academically, the political science on Taiwanese identity fails abjectly. Shelley Rigger’s lament that “operationalizing this concept [Taiwanese identity] as a measurable variable has proven difficult” (Rigger, 1999) is simply an absurd statement. Nevertheless, understood in terms of its implication in Taiwan’s future, it neatly expresses the objectification of the Taiwanese, explicitly excluding the political and moral dimensions of its own scholarship, which Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity then highlights. From this move academically it is a short step to being part of the discourse which really does objectify Taiwan, that of international policy-making and economic, governmental and military planning in China, the US and Europe, and sometimes in Taiwan itself. On a geopolitical faultline, Taiwan is a concentration of the power of politics, government, military and global capital, and the academic approach to its study is a part of a choice as to how an individual might navigate that power. Deploying Derrida or Bourdieu might effortlessly obliterate the existing scholarship, but right behind it the target is bigger than Tremlett concedes.

Do we choose to become participants in the empirical geo-political equation of Taiwan’s future between China, the US, Japan and Europe, pronouncing as academics on the values of “variables” for those with their hands on the levers the machinery of geo-politics, or do we stand within academic knowledge and offer via our own self-reflexive approach to our own work, a critique of the politics in which it operates. Against the real machinery of geo-politics, the strategy of deploying difficult post-structuralist theory looks far more feeble than Tremlett might think. The decision of how we stand before power is necessarily personal and delimited, even hopeless, but my book, despite its flaws and limitations, shows ultimately the choice I made.

Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the 228 Incident

This week two Democratic Progressive Party heavyweights, Lin Cho-shui and Yang Chang-cheng, have been in London and spoke at this event about the legacy of the 2-28 Incident and social divisions in Taiwan. As part of a program of dialogue between Taiwanese politics and academia, we were invited to respond to their speeches. This is what I had to say.

60 years after the 2-28 Incident, Mr Lin and Mr Yang have called for the continuing need for a resolution, a closure, an accounting, some kind of settlement of the history of 2-28 and social divisions in Taiwan in order to complete or make whole the Taiwanese nation.

For them, 2-28 is a great fracture in the heart of Taiwan which prevents the Taiwanese from fully realizing their identity as Taiwanese. In this way, 2-28 is a source of on-going frustration. From its bitter legacy and an inability to fully accommodate its remembrance, it is an event that many believe still stands in the way of Taiwan’s national development.

Except 2-28 is remembered. There is a veritable library of writing on it; there are public memorials, a national day of remembrance. The actual events are now well-known, and in substance, if not in detail, unequivocal. Yet, both Mr Lin and Mr Yang lament the division in Taiwanese society that 2-28 created, and are concerned that Taiwan remains a society divided from itself, divided from the possibility of its own unity and coherent identity. There is a sense with 2-28, therefore, that however much remembrance occurs it is never enough. 2-28 continues to have an urgent impetus that seems at odds with its presence in contemporary Taiwan.

The continuing concern over 2-28 raises the question then of what is it really about. Is the debate about 2-28 in 2007 merely a symptom of a larger crisis about the make up of a Taiwanese identity.

In 1987, the historian Yin Zhangyi wrote in China Tribune of an identity crisis in Taiwan, drawing on the work of Erik Erikson and his notion of a “complex”. So Taiwan had a “Taiwan complex” and a “China complex”, which was related to a failure of development in a psychoanalytic sense. Taiwan had not “matured” as a nation and resolved its neurotic complexes.

Between 1988 and the early 1990s, 2-28 itself became a mainstream issue. Newspaper editorials which dismissed 2-28 as “just the memory of old people” in 1988, by 1991 were calling, as now, for the event and its legacy to be written into Taiwanese history in order for Taiwan to become “normalized” as a nation. Similarly, in 1992 the sociologist Chang Mao-kuei called for zhengming, the rectification of the name of “Taiwan” to stabilize and normalize Taiwan’s political and social relations. Shortly before his inauguration in 2000, President Chen Shui-bian described an “identity confusion problem” (rentong cuoluan wenti) and called for its resolution as part of national development.

In 2007, the Taiwanese are still making the same appeals. Taiwanese identity has always been out of reach or unrealized, existing only as the promise of a wholly Taiwanese future.

I wonder then, if this is not the very nature of Taiwan’s identity itself. For twenty years, it has been constituted out of the appeals to the possibility of its future. The Taiwanese nation is in a state of being invoked, summoned, or conjured spectre-like by Taiwanese politicians, academics, commentators and cultural practitioners.

Even the driest political analysis in Taiwan becomes such an appeal. The surveys of identity, where people are asked to name themselves as “Taiwanese” or “Chinese” produces a narrative of the nation. The “Taiwanese” line goes up, and it seems as if the nation itself is closer to coming into being, it goes down and the nation seems to be dissolving before our eyes.

In Ackbar Abbas’s notion of a déja disparu he proposed that Hong Kong had an identity which became visible just at the moment of its disappearance at the Hong Kong handover to China in 1997. Hong Kong’s identity was expressed as nostalgia for an identity which Hong Kong never knew it had.

Taiwan’s history has its own dividing date – 1987, and the lifting of martial law. From then on, instead of nostalgia for an identity which had never been, Taiwan’s identity has become an appeal to the possibility of an identity which is yet to be – a singular, naturalized, unifying Taiwanese identity.

And yet, as Mr Lin and Mr Yang have shown, Taiwanese people are acutely aware of the problems of identity-making. In their comments, they are debating openly the very mechanisms with which their own identity might hope to be conjured. Therefore, even as the Taiwanese appeal to the need for an active cultural and political process for the creation of that singular identity, they are unravelling its very possibility in their self-conscious exposure of its political and ideological mechanisms. As a result, Taiwan has been addressed by the Taiwanese as an object in suspension, a self-conscious and self-reflexive act of (re-)writing of the possibility and imperative of identity itself.

Perhaps, then, the time has come for the Taiwanese to pause in their appeals, their impassioned statements of aspiration for unity and singularity which are needed to “save Taiwan”. Maybe the Taiwanese should let Taiwan be. Taiwan has always had an identity. It had an identity the moment there was a name for the island. Nowadays, when we foreigners visit “China”, everyone knows what we mean. We do not mean “Taiwan”, and maybe for now that is enough.

Names

Names have been in the news recently in Taiwan. The government has moved toward the “rectification” from “China” to “Taiwan” of the names of some state organizations, such as China Post, China Shipbuilding and China Petroleum, which had been left over from the rule of the refugee government of the Chinese Nationalists after 1949. The issue has generated plenty of political heat, both domestically and internationally, and that is not surprising. Names matter, and in the case of Taiwan the naming issue has been around for a very long time. Here is a section of my own work which deals with names and naming.

The identity of the island of Taiwan (Taiwan bendao) after Retrocession has been at one level a contest over names, both in Chinese and in English. The list of names and terms applied to the island is long: China, the Republic of China, Taiwan, Chinese Taipei, Formosa; or Zhongguo, Zhonghua Minguo or Taiwan; categories such as guojia (nation), sheng (province) and fu (prefecture); and evocative terms such as xiangtu or bentu (the native soil), and the Chinese translation of Ilha Formosa, Meilidao. And there are names now in disuse, such as Free China or Ziyou Zhongguo, and Nationalist China.  

All of these names indicate the multiple meanings which have been ascribed to the island of Taiwan. In each term particular historical trajectories are privileged or suppressed and certain social distinctions are valorized or erased. The name “Free China” suggests the global struggle against Communism and Cold War geo-politics, while it effaces the distinction between people who identify as natives of Taiwan, benshengren, and the post-1949 mainland refugees (waishengren). In doing so, the historical moments that created that distinction, Retrocession, the 2-28 Incident, and the Nationalist defeat in the Chinese civil war, are also erased. The Portuguese name “Formosa”, which dates from the early 16th century, locates the island’s identity in the West within the history of Western imperial expansion. Starting in the early seventeenth century with the reports by the Dutch colonial administrators of the island, the geographic and ethnographic studies of the island by many European naturalists, missionaries and fortune-seekers use the name “Formosa”, including oddities like the fictitious account of George Psalmanasaar.1 After Retrocession, the term Formosa retained a distinctiveness and an historical legitimacy as a political label. When early independence activists such as Ong Joktik elaborated a national history for the island in English, they did so under the name “Formosa”, and referred to the island’s people as “Formosans”.2

The names for the island have operated in different ways over time under specific categories of knowledge and within different institutional settings. As a political category under Qing administration, the Chinese name “Taiwan” had only a prefectural (fu) designation up until 1885, which covered the main island and the smaller island of Penghu. Within the prefecture were the county (xian) designations of Taiwan, Zhuluo and Fengshan. Adopting the Chinese designation, European visitors referred to the town that was administrative centre of Taiwan Prefecture as “Taiwan-foo”3. In 1885, the prefecture was elevated to provincial status, becoming Taiwan sheng. Ten years later, in the political confusion following the Sino-Japanese War and the cession of Taiwan to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, “Taiwan” briefly became the name of a nation-state as the Republic of Taiwan (Taiwan Minzhuguo), before being reduced to the level of Prefecture of the Governor of Taiwan Taiwan Sôtokufu under Japanese rule. After Retrocession in 1945, Taiwan again referred to a provincial-level political body under the Republican administrative structure. Then with the Nationalist defeat in 1949, the name “Republic of China” (ROC) was reduced in real political terms to mean almost the same territory as Taiwan, with only the addition of Penghu, Matsu and Kinmen.

In the 1950s, Taiwan’s complex political circumstances meant the names “Republic of China” or “Zhonghua Minguo”, “Taiwan” and “Formosa” were all able to refer to the island, with different but overlapping meanings. In strictly political terms, the ROC was the correct name, but while Formosa rapidly fell into disuse, Taiwan became the privileged label when referring to the island in a geographical sense. In the 1950s one could speak meaningfully of the distinct geography or fauna and flora of Taiwan, but the “geography of the Republic of China” or “Zhonghua Minguo dili” would not have made sense except in the political context of the Nationalist’s territorial claim over the mainland.4 

Politically, in the 1950s and 1960s, “Taiwan” as a province was a qualifier of the “Republic of China”, and often appeared as “Taiwan, Republic of China”. Because the two names referred to almost (but not exactly) the same geographic territory, however, there very soon began to be slippage between them. Since the 1950s, the scope of the name “Taiwan” has progressively broadened to occupy the primary position in the discourse of the island’s culture, social life and economy, gradually pushing out references to “China” and “Formosa”. “Formosa” had largely disappeared in English by the late 1960s, while “China” and “Taiwan” were still interchangeable in literary studies, politics and anthropology at that time. By the late 1970s “China” generally meant the People’s Republic of China: in 1968, the anthropologist Margery Wolf published The House of Lim: a study of a Chinese farm family5 but in 1972 followed up with Women and the family in rural Taiwan.6 In Chinese by the early 1980s, Taiwan had generally replaced Zhonghua Minguo in studies of the island’s economy. The proceedings of a conference in 1976 on the Taiwanese economy held at the Institute of Economics at Academia Sinica for example, used Taiwan, without any provincial qualification7. 

After the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan has begun to occupy the cultural realm, becoming the predominant name with which to refer to the island’s literature and cinema. Finally, through the 1990s, the name “Taiwan” has come back into the politics, literally intruding on to the existing designation when the state began using the “Republic of China on Taiwan” in the mid-1990s and in 2002 when the phrase “Issued in Taiwan” appeared on ROC passports.8. 

The supplanting of the name “Republic of China” by the name “Taiwan” is demonstrated by the slight mismatch in the geographic meanings of the names. In its limited geographical and strict political senses, “Taiwan” refers only to the main island, whereas the territory actually governed by the ROC also includes the islands of Penghu, Matsu and Kinmen. By the 1990s, the name “Taiwan” had become sufficiently dominant to efface that difference, and take on the political meanings of “Republic of China”, so that it became possible to refer unproblematically to Taiwan and also implicitly mean all the territories actually governed by the ROC. For example, the contemporary term “China-Taiwan relations” does not include any distinction between the main island and those territories. The importance of this process is one clearly understood by the mainland Chinese government, which has resisted the use of the name “Taiwan” in association with the idea of statehood at every opportunity, including some of the most unlikely arenas, such as art exhibitions and international service organizations. 

The overall trajectory of the rises and falls in the use of names for Taiwan has been the ascendance of the name “Taiwan” from one of a number of possibilities to become the most meaningful term for the island. Each name has represented particular histories and each has privileged ways of knowing about the island. Implicated in the ascendance of the name “Taiwan”, therefore, is the emergence of a specific and dominant meaning for the island.

The issue of naming is one way to approach the question of a Taiwanese identity. As Taiwan has become the most meaningful word to distinguish the geography, history, culture and polity on the island, it has become possible for someone to legitimately label him or herself as “Taiwanese” to invoke an identification with those things. To use other names is to invoke identification with different histories and cultures, ones that do not necessarily correspond to the island’s geographical space. The most obvious example is Chinese, but there is also Formosan, Hakka, or even the anachronistic names of intra-island groups such as Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.

Jacques Derrida has written a far-reaching critique of the act of naming in his work on Levi-Strauss, which links the act of naming to structures of power and, ultimately, violence. Derrida says, “the proper name was never possible except through its functioning within a classification: and therefore within a system of differences.”9 For Derrida, Saussure’s account of meaning, in structural linguistics terms, comes from the difference between signs; the act of writing, in Derrida’s very broad sense, is how difference is signified; and the inscription of difference by writing structures the world in terms of power: “To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute.”10 

Producing meaning in the world is an act of violence for Derrida: there is no possibility to return to a moment before the inscription of difference so there has never been and can never be a moment when meaning is not being inscribed and power is not being exercised. Therefore, in Derrida’s terms, when one sets out to write about Taiwan, one is inscribing its difference and creating its meaning even at the level of choosing what name to call it. And for Derrida, a kind of textual (and literal) violence is being exercised over the island: taking something and naming it is automatically to locate it within a system of classification that is the basis of the exercise of power over it. In Christopher Johnson’s reading of Derrida: “Writing, difference and violence are not something that happens to a previously pure and intact system, they are not something that supervenes from without. To use Derrida’s own formulation, writing, difference, violence are always already there, at the origin, from the origin, which means in effect that there is no (pure) origin.”11

Therefore, simply naming the island as Taiwan in English, Chinese or Japanese constitutes a Taiwanese identity. Each time the island is named as Taiwan and not Formosa or China, “Taiwan” as a legitimate object of meaning is being differentiated from other meanings which can encompass the island under other names. When one writes phrases such as “Taiwanese popular culture” or “Taiwan’s democratic transformation”, rather than using, say, “Formosa” or “Free China”, its meaning is being rehearsed, elaborated and contested at the boundaries of what “Taiwan” can mean. However, this is not a neutral and homogeneous discursive process that simply unfolds the truth about Taiwan in ever greater detail with each statement. Rather, it is structured in terms of power and replete with omissions, effacements and priorities that privilege certain events, themes and cultural practices: the 2-28 Incident, a migrant history, a cuisine, language and so forth. Its name locates it within a system of differences that are part of a structure of meaning organized around that name. For example, public debates in the 1990s have concerned the form of a 2-28 Memorial or a 2-28 National Commemorative Holiday to memorialize events in “Taiwanese” history. In these debates, what can legitimately be called Taiwanese is separated out from that which belongs under other names like Formosa or the Republic of China. 2-28 is an event in Taiwanese history, not Chinese history (although it can come under Formosan history) and to write about it is to demarcate the boundaries of the meaning of the name “Taiwan”. 

The Taiwan traced in this process is elusive and indeterminate. Despite the claims of nationalists, politicians and scholars to make definitive statements about Taiwan12, Taiwan-as-meaning is never fixed. Rather, as it is being continually named by the production of statements about it, Taiwan is always at the moment of coming into being. In his critique of the rhetorical strategies of temporality which create an imagined national narrative, Homi K. Bhabha writes: “the suddenness of the signifier is incessant, instantaneous rather than simultaneous. It introduces a signifying space of repetition rather than a progressive or linear seriality.”13 Bhabha’s work captures the tenuousness and urgency by which the nation of Taiwan is formed as a narrative by the stippled moments of the recitation of its name.

1. See George Psalmanazaar, Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa: An Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan (London: R. Holden, 1926).

2. Ong Joktik, “In the Beginning”, Formosan Quarterly, Vol.1, No.1 (July, 1962), 3.

3. see T.F. Hughes, “Visit to Tok-e-tok of the eighteen tribes, southern Formosa,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1872), 265-271.

4. see for example, Zhang Qiyun (ed.), Zhonghua min guo di tu ji [Maps of the Republic of China] (Yangmingshan: National War College, 1959).

5. Margery Wolf, The House of Lim : A Study of a Chinese Farm Family (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968).

6. Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972)

7. Taiwan jingji fazhan fangxiang ji ce lue yan tao hui [Proceedings of the Conference on the Direction of Taiwan’s Economic Development] (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jingji yanjiusuo, 1976).

8. “Huzhao jiazhu ‘TAIWAN’, feigenggai guohao (The passport gets the name ‘TAIWAN’, not the country)” Ziyou Shibao (The Liberty Times), 14 January 2001, 1.

9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975), 109.

10. ibid., 111.

11. Christopher Johnson, Derrida: The Scene of Writing (London: Phoenix, 1997), 41.

12. Ko Kiansing, “On the Definition of the Formosan,” Independent Formosa, Vol 4, No. 4 (August 1965): 10-14.

13. Homi K., Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modem nation,” in Nation and Narration Homi K. Bhabha (ed.). (London: Routledge, 1990): 310.

Shanghai and sci-fi

On Tuesday, I presented a lecture at Birkbeck College in London, which was followed by an appropriate amount of a rather nice rioja, and my book, Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity, was released in the US. Next week, a few days in Shanghai on my way home to Australia for Christmas. Here is the abstract of the lecture.

The discourse of China in cultural production, politics and scholarship can privilege an ahistorical past in its ideological projection of China’s classical civilization and timeless rural subjectivities. However, this discourse elides its highly temporalized nature, with a multiplicity of intersecting and countervailing narratives of China’s past and present transformations. The temporality of the discourse of China has been brought into relief by its current economic boom, which has produced expressions both within and outside of China not of Chinese “traditions” but of Chinese futures.

This seminar examines the material expression of China’s future in the Pudong development area in Shanghai. Via Jameson, it uses the metaphor of science fiction to argue that Pudong is a “technoscape” which displaces our understanding of contemporary China by operating, like sci-fi, as a temporal extrapolation from the present into a potential future. That projection remakes how we know China, on the basis of its possible future as Pudong.

However, the way of knowing China inferred from Pudong is structured in terms of power and replete with specific values and effacements. From its active erasure of earlier Communist imaginings, it presents a vision which looks, on the literal surfaces of its glass and steel structures, like a familiar globalized and corporatized instrumental future. Yet, in Pudong’s abstruse excess of space and scale are the politics of the party-state and an extravagant self-consciousness. The seminar suggests a Chinese future is being made in Pudong as a dissociative collage of the material of global modernization, expressing new forms of power relations in contemporary Chinese society.