Drafting a disciplinary linguistic landscape assignment (Was, Work on a new assignment for my summer interdisciplinary writing class

As I might have mentioned, I'm teaching a summer course in interdisciplinary writing, beginning in June. I've taught this course before, with what I'd consider to be mixed success. The course was inaugurated in the fall of 2014, and as I mentioned back then, in my experience it's ideally (though not necessarily in practice) populated by students from a variety of academic disciplines. At this point, though, it looks like I'm going to have a lot of engineering students in my section, which will make the "interdisciplinary" part of this a bit challenging. One thing that I've found, though, is that there are some interesting differences among the fields (sub-fields?) of industrial engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering, etc. (I see that I've mentioned this before.) So I might try to take advantage of those differences to have students look into the interdisciplinarity of engineering.

In the past, I've had students start out by reading up on discourse communities and thinking about the implications of seeing their own disciplines as discourse communities, perhaps stretching the common definitions. For this class, though, I'm going to try to start off with a specific focus on the writing that goes on in their disciplines, in particular by asking students to look at their departments as physical, institutional, and textual spaces. I'm going to ask them to work in pairs (I want to put them in groups comprising students from different disciplines, which will be a challenge) and preparing a PPT presentation in which they'll describe, compare, and analyze the spaces occupied by their departments. Depending on how their departments are physically situated in the school, part of this would involve observing (and photographing) the buildings/hallways in which their departments are located. The other areas might be classrooms, laboratories, lounges, etc., that "belong" to their departments. I want them to pay special attention to the kinds of written texts that are displayed around those spaces and what those texts might tell them about how the department is trying to represent itself to insiders and outsiders. By texts, I'm thinking about not only displays of scholarly work (books, papers, poster presentations), but also signs, postings on bulletin boards, postings on faculty members' office doors, etc. I'm asking students to think about what these texts (including images) might say about what their discipline is "about"--what kinds of activities are valued in the department and how these activities help distinguish the department from or connect it to other departments or parts of the university.

I showed a draft of the assignment to Neal Lerner and Laurie Edwards, the director of the Writing Program and the director of the Advanced Writing in the Disciplines (AWD) program at my school. They kindly provided advice on revising the assignment; in particular, they warned that I should make sure that the students' products don't end up simply listing features and similarities and differences, but that these observed features also need to be analyzed in a theoretical context. So I'm working on revising the assignment to put more emphasis on analysis, and I'm trying to bring in some theoretical perspectives that will be accessible to the students without overwhelming them in the first week of the course.

In writing up this assignment, I've been drawing on several different (and probably incompatible!) sources: the field of linguistic landscape studies, John Swales' concept of "textography" (here's a re-review of Swales' book) and Latour & Woolgar's discussion of the anthropology of the laboratory life, as presented in "An Anthropologist Visits the Laboratory." Most of this material is relatively new to me (thanks to Neal Lerner for introducing me to Latour & Woolgar), but I'm doing my best to cobble it together in a way that will be accessible to students (particularly second-language learners).

I've found the slide presentation below from Dave Malinowski to be useful to me in framing the assignment from a linguistic landscape perspective. In particular, slides 18-20, 22, and 25-33 have been helpful.

Linguistic Landscape for Language Study from Dave Malinowski

One interdisciplinary aspect of this assignment is, of course, that I am asking students to view their own disciplines (or departments--and I know I'm "problematically" equating the two) from the perspective of another discipline (or disciplines! I'm not even sure!). That is, I'm asking them to look at their disciplines from a linguistic perspective, with the values of a linguist (or social scientist, more generally). I'll probably include a question about that in the reflection assignment that goes along with the general assignment.

I'll add more to this post (or add another post) later as I refine the assignment...

George H. Kerr, Ryukyu: Kingdom and Province Before 1945 on Archive.org

In their introduction to Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa, editors Davinder L. Bhowmik and Steve Rabson argue that in the 1950s and 60s, Okinawans' preference for Japanese control over U.S. occupation "grew extremely popular, with greater than 70 percent of the Okinawan electorate supporting reunification with Japan at a time when, in one of history's repetitions, U.S. occupation forces encouraged the flourishing of Ryukyuan culture in an effort to distance Okinawans from their mainland cousins" (4).

George H. Kerr took some role in this U.S. effort. Kerr had conducted research with SIRI (The Scientific Investigations of the Ryukyu Islands), a joint academic-military effort. Kerr expressed concern about the Okinawan desire to "revert" to Japanese control. Hidekazu Sensui quotes from a 1952 SIRI progress report in which Kerr worries that this movement "constitutes a threat to our position in political warfare" (qtd in 40). As part of the U.S. occupiers' efforts to distance Okinawans from the Japanese, Kerr was asked to write a history of the Ryukyus that would be translated into Japanese.

The English book was written, as Kerr notes in a foreword, "at the request of Brigadier General James M. Lewis, Civil Administrator for the Ryukyu Islands, who desired a text suitable for translation into the Japanese language for use at the University of the Ryukyus" (ii). Kerr's 1953 book, Ryukyu: Kingdom and Province Before 1945 (available on archive.org) became the basis for Ryukyu no Rekishi.

In his short biographical essay about George H. Kerr (pdf), Tony Jenkins notes that

Okinawans of a certain generation variously celebrate or scorn George Kerr's Ryukyu no Rekishi (1956), which they were required or encouraged to read in their college days. It was, and still is, seen either as welcome international recognition of Okinawa's place in history, or as American propaganda, occasionally erroneous, that sought to divorce the 1950s Okinawan collective mentality from Japan. (3)

It would perhaps be understandable if the history of the Ryukyus that Kerr was writing was meant only for American civil administration. The fact that the U.S. Civil Administrator saw a need to have an American write a history of Ryukyu to be translated into Japanese was cause for suspicion among Okinawan academics, as Jenkins notes.

But Jenkins also argues that Kerr was at least somewhat aware of the complicated nature of Okinawan-Japanese relations--Kerr saw the Okinawans as needing to emphasize a more equal status with the Japanese mainland so that when Japan retook control of the islands, they wouldn't be treated as second-class citizens. This theme is also evident in the foreword to Ryukyu, where Kerr argues that "the people of Ryukyu are much more eager to be recognized and accepted as 'Japanese', than the people of Japan are ready or eager to claim them without reservation." He concludes,

Okinawa and its people have sometimes been likened to Texas and the Texans. They are proud of their tradition of former independence, and cherish special cultural characteristics which set them apart and give them self-respect. But like the Texans whose pride and patriotism as citizens of the United States should not be challenged, the people of Ryukyu consider themselves patriotic and true citizens of the larger unit, Japan. The attitude of the sophisticated Japanese of Tokyo toward the farmers and fishermen of Okinawa Province finds its parallel in the attitude of the native New Yorker toward the drawling, ranch-born cowhand on the most distant border ranges. With great reluctance the Okinawan will admit that the record shows Japan's discrimination in economics, politics, and social advantage. Nevertheless, the ties of race, common language, education, political and administrative institutions, and economy were and may be assumed to be permanent. (ii)

It would be interesting to know if any of these thoughts made it into the Japanese translation, though. Here's an interesting case where any changes between the English and Japanese versions would be a result of the U.S. civil administration's censors rather than "cultural" differences or censorship by the Japanese themselves.

[Update: Prof. Sensui noted on Facebook that the Japanese translation of the book included the foreword, which was "often quoted by Okinawan writers and politicians (Prof. Ota's was one of the earliest cases), though they usually skipped the part in which GHK drew comparison with Texans."]

In which my translingual aphasia leads me to explore the origins of the term 五金行

Earlier this evening (or yesterday evening, depending on when I finish this), I was talking with someone who mentioned a store on the corner of a main street in a nearby town. I thought I knew which store it was, but instead of saying the word "hardware," I said, "Is it a five..." before I stopped myself. I wasn't thinking "five and dime"--actually I was trying to say "五金行" in English. (A more-or-less literal translation of "五金行" would be "five metals store.")

About an hour ago, I started to reflect on this and got to wondering what was wrong with me the origins of the term 五金行 were. First I checked the Chinese Wikipedia, but that didn't tell me much, though it did cite an article that's no longer available but evidently discussed a Ye Chengzhong (葉澄衷), who was known as the "hardware king" in late Qing Shanghai.This discovery led me to an English Wikipedia entry about Ye Chengzhong (!). This article links to a 2011 Xinhua News story about Ye, which tells about how he became the hardware king:

According to the book "The Century-Old Famous Factories and Stores in Shanghai" (1987), an American business man once hired Ye's boat for a ride in 1862. But he left behind a briefcase full of cash and valuables.

Ye waited for a long time for the owner to return the briefcase. When he did, he was greatly touched by Ye's honest. The American businessman helped him open the city's first hardware shop on Daming Road in Hongkou District, selling much-needed tools and suppliers to sailors and military personnel at premium prices.

As the hardware business boomed, Ye expanded into many areas, including finance, commerce, industry, shipping and education, and made important contributions before he died in 1899.

But this story, inspiring as it might be, didn't bring me any closer to finding out the origins of the term 五金行. And interestingly, according to Sherman Cochran's book Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880-1937 (University of California P, 2000), Ye's hardware store was called "Shunji Imports" (順記洋貨號)--no five metals mentioned there.

I went on to find an entry in the Chinese Yahoo! Knowledge where someone had asked why "five metal stores" were called that ("為什麼賣五金的地方要叫五金行"). According to a somewhat lengthy response to the question, the five metals are gold, silver, copper, iron, and tin (金、銀、銅、鐵、錫). The respondent goes on to say that metals that were most resistant to oxidation were the earliest to be discovered by humans and used for weapons and tools. The writer goes on to suggest a relationship between the five metals and the five elements: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth (金、木、水、火、土). Those of you interested in reading more about the five elements (or five phases), can check out Wikipedia for an introduction to Wu Xing (though I make no guarantees about its accuracy or readability).

This was all getting a little too abstract for me, though (especially since it's after 1 a.m.!), but I'm at least temporarily satisfied that even if I don't have a date for the earliest usage of 五金行, at least I have a little information on the term, which seems to be using some ancient terminology for modern purposes. An article in a 1922 issue of The Scientific Monthly also notes this interesting, ummm... element:

And that's where we'll end for now. I've exhausted most my options, including my old copy of Endymion Wilkinson. But I'm open to suggestions!

Another addition to the former native speaker's library

Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, Michelle Yeh, and Ming-ju Fan, eds. The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. NY: Columbia UP, 2014.

It's important to note up front that this is not an anthology of Taiwanese literature; it's more like an anthology of Taiwanese literary theory and criticism. The book jacket lists a wide variety of texts that make up this volume's contents, including

seminal essays in literary debates, polemics, and other landmark events; interviews, diaries, and letters by major authors; critical and retrospective essays by influential writers, editors, and scholars; transcripts of historical speeches and conferences; literary-society manifestos and inaugural journal prefaces; and governmental policy pronouncements that have significantly influenced Taiwanese literature.

What the description that I've linked to above doesn't mention is that this book starts off with a 36-page introduction (including endnotes and bibliography) by Chang that lays out the historical background for the 160+ translated writings about Taiwan's developing literary scene. I'm looking forward to digging into this introduction--and into the anthology itself--in order to get a better understanding of the history of Taiwan's literary thought(s).

Author of The Jing Affair identified

A few years ago, I read a 1965 spy novel about Taiwan entitled The Jing Affair, after reading a scholarly article about it written by Chih-ming Wang. In The Jing Affair, a Taiwanese American pilot named Johnny Hsiao, along with what the book jacket describes as "a fistful of desperate men and women," engage in a secret mission to stop Free China's General Jing from secretly selling out Taiwan to the Reds for $30,000,000. The book gets praise from Mark Mancall, known for editing Formosa Today, a collection of essays on Taiwan published in 1964. Mancall writes,

Mr. Spencer has written a provocative and compelling novel, but The Jing Affair is more than a novel; it is a dramatization of unfolding history, as Spencer sees it. Whether or not the future will develop as Spencer describes it is not the question. His predictions might come true. What is important is that people who read this novel should beware; they may be forced to think.

As Wang points out, the novel also got a mention toward the end of  Douglas Mendel's The Politics of Formosan Nationalism (1970), where Mendel speculates on the future of Taiwan. Unlike Mancall, Mendel is skeptical of the possibility for Taiwanese revolution against the KMT, but he suggests that Spencer's idea that the US might intervene is more likely. "But," Mendel concludes, "if the mainland regime at that time were willing to deal with the United States, the latter might well accept the incorporation of Formosa as part of a larger arrangement ..." (231; Wang also quotes this sentence).

Mendel evidently had correspondence with Spencer, as he cites a letter from Spencer in which the novelist "admitted that 'in government circles mine is a rather lonely if no longer a dangerous point of view ... I can think of no other way [to defend the Formosan cause] ... in the framework of the U.S. national interest ... We would be better off with Formosa as the southermost [sic] province of Japan than as the easternmost province of China, and I believe even the Taiwanese would reluctantly concur'" (qtd. in Mendel 231). It's unclear whether Mendel knew Spencer's real identity or not.

Up until now, people who knew about this obscure novel probably didn't know much more about its author than what they got from The Jing Affair's book jacket, which describes the author as follows:

Mr. Spencer, who writes under a pseudonym, is presently with a U.S. government agency in a position concerned with Far Eastern affairs. He has spent more than twenty years in the Far East in various capacities, including stints as a newspaper correspondent. He has lived in Taiwan and knows the people and situations about which he writes.

Googling the novel's title today took me to a new memoir by Danielle Flood entitled The Unquiet Daughter (a clear and important reference to Graham Greene's The Quiet American). A newspaper article about Flood describes her story as "involv[ing] a real-life love triangle that became the basis of British novelist Graham Greene’s classic 'The Quiet American.' ... In real life, [the novel's three main characters] are Flood’s parents: her biological mother, of French and Vietnamese descent, her biological British father, whom she tracked for years, and the man she knew as her father, an American named Jim Flood." The article goes on to say, "In the early 1950s, Jim Flood worked as an American foreign officer in what would become the first U.S. Embassy in Saigon. She suspects, but cannot prove, that he worked for the C.I.A." After Danielle Flood found out from her mother that Jim Flood wasn't her biological father, she started a long search for her father.

I haven't read Flood's memoirs yet, but I came across a reference to The Jing Affair in the Google Books version of The Unquiet Daughter. Flood writes,

The first thing I read when I got back to New York from Washington [where she visited her father] is Dad's novel, The Jing Affair, published by Funk and Wagnalls three years earlier under the pseudonym, D.J. Spencer, Spencer being his mother's maiden name. 

...

It's a lot for me to follow. It would be decades before I could catch up to Dad's knowledge of: the intelligence community; how its members go about causing insurrection and mini-wars that can lead to big wars; the inner workings of the U.S. government in Washington and abroad; the history of Taiwan, China [sic]; and of Chinese curses even.

So now I know the real name of "D.J. Spencer": James Flood. And I also have another book to buy (and read, sooner or later!).

[Update] Ha! Turns out all I would have had to do is go to the 1965 Catalogue of Copyright Entries and looked up the novel's title! There it is, as plain as day. So much for getting protection through pseudonymity (pseudonymousness?)... Of course, I would have had no idea who James Flood actually was.

New writing project

It seems that I have added a new writing project to my list of things to do during the summer. I am going to be purposely vague about it at this point, but I can say it involves some people that I've worked pleasantly with before, a subject that I enjoy writing about, and a time frame that... well, it forces me to focus during the remaining moments of my vacation. (I start teaching my summer classes on July 3.)

I'm getting started on that, and still trying to get through the book about the three generations of Wu Bai's family (that's 吳拜, not 伍佰). I also have to get ready for that new fall course I'm teaching. So I'd better stay off Facebook for awhile!

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

This is a two-volume boxed set, published privately in 1966 by Felix Tardio while he was in Taiwan. The first volume, Mr. Tardio Sees Taiwan: A Critical Look at the Physical Environment of Taiwan, consists of essays, poems, and some drawings about Taiwan's architecture. Volume Two, Mr. Tardio Draws Taiwan: Sketches of Taiwan, consists of reproductions of drawings that he did of the physical environment. I went in search of this book when I saw it mentioned in A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights through international Networks, 1960-1980. According to the printing information inside Volume One, the print run was 600 copies, and mine is copy number 546. It's signed by the author.

Tardio's bio is printed at the end of Volume Two:

Mr. Felix Tardio has been in Taiwan since 1963. During that time he served as Assistant Professor at Tunghai University in 1963/64, Associate Professor of Architecture at Tunghai in 1964/65, and one semester each at Chung Yuan College and the Chinese Culture Institute in 1965/66.

The summers between school years were spent travelling in Asia, Europe, and the US.

He received his education at the Department of Architecture of the University of Notre Dame and at the Graduate Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Pennsylvania, Mr. Tardio worked for various Architects in New York for five years prior to coming to Taiwan, and now considers New York City his home.

There doesn't appear to be much else information about Tardio online, but from what I can find, he was born in 1934 and died in Pennsylvania in 2011.

These books have been mentioned in a book by 李志銘 entitled 舊書浪漫：讀閱趣與淘書樂. Joseph R. Allen also quoted from Tardio in his book, Taipei: A City of Displacements, calling his depiction of Taipei's architecture "scathing" (44).

More on this as I (gingerly) page through it...

Update (5/5/17): A Facebook friend pointed to me this (Chinese-language) discussion on Facebook. The poster has done me the favor of scanning the images from the second volume. Some of the discussion is about the locations of the buildings in the drawings, but there's also some discussion about Tardio, including a link to pictures of Tardio when he was in college. They're interested in finding out how they might get the rights to translate and publish the book, but Tardio is dead and apparently didn't have any descendants.

Here is Lynn Miles on Tardio (from A Borrowed Voice, pp. 22-24):

... Felix Tardio ... was bringing his teaching stint at Tunghai to a close so that he could devote full time to the writing of a book on Taiwan's architecture, which he found fascinating, delightful, ridiculous and dreadful. By early spring 1966 Tardio had moved to Taipei, where he burned the midnight oil, putting the last touch to his drawings, soon to become the book-length companion to a volume of drawings that had been accepted for publication by some Taipei printing house which probably had no idea what it was getting into. Both of them were to be a critique--serious in the prose but riotous in the Art--of Taiwan's Architecture (both A-words capitalized throughout). ...

... Felix was holed up in a funky Japanese-era hotel, the Fukuo, at 13 Hsinyang Street, just off Kuanchien Road, in the old Japanese-built section of Taipei between New Park and the railway section. I still have a vivid mental picture of the morning sun glancing off the huge waxy leaves of some tropical tree just outside his window. Tardio had his windows thrown wide open to catch the early spring air, but leftover winter chill still called for multiple layers of clothing. Big of build, he wore a turtleneck sweater under a corduroy jacket, elbows sporting patches, pocket full of pens. His trademark was a full, handlebar mustache and dark curly hair, reminding some of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and others of the American comedian and popular talk-show host, Groucho Marx.

But when it came to humor, he was squarely in the Groucho Marx camp. He kept Jack [Cooper] in stitches with his tales of ongoing battles with Government Information Office censors over the deletion or "correction" of every last word. He showed us some of the passages which the GIO deemed impermissible. Naturally, all of them were criticisms of the ruling powers--these "misunderstandings" of his that in their eyes needed "correcting" before the book could go to press.

The discussion of Tardio continues on page 24, but I want to encourage you to get a copy of the book--it's fascinating reading overall. Contact Dr. Linda Gail Arrigo if you're interested.

Thoughts and Questions on the use of Chinese-language scholarship by historians of Taiwan writing in English

(Terrible title, I know.)

In Michael Turton's [no longer] recent post about questions historians have neglected to ask about Chiang Kai-shek's prior knowledge of the situation in colonial Taiwan, he attaches a long reader comment that begins, "Actually quite some research has been done on the [KMT's] preparation committee [for governing Taiwan after the war] you mention (especially by Taiwanese historians and published in Chinese)." In a parenthetical response, Turton implies that because of the language of that historical research, "its influence on the construction of the discourse on KMT entry into Taiwan is limited." This comment set me a-thinking (always a dangerous thing).

Turton's post starts out with George Kerr's Formosa Betrayed, which seems appropriate considering the book's influence both on English-language writing about modern Taiwan and on the Taiwanese independence movement itself. (For instance, in 一個家族。三個時代:吳拜和子女們, author 吳宏仁 describes Kerr's book as having given momentum to the Taiwan independence movement, particularly among overseas Taiwanese: ｢該書的出版對台獨運動的興盛，特別是在美國的台獨運動，有推波助瀾的作用。｣) As I wrote in an earlier post. the translation of Formosa Betrayed into Chinese provided the book with a new audience not only for Kerr's perspectives, but also for a new perspective on Kerr's narrative--the justification for why Taiwanese had to save themselves (｢人不先自救，誰會救我？｣). One thing that I didn't say was that when Kerr was corresponding with his editors at Houghton Mifflin about possible audiences for the book, he mentioned the potential for a Japanese translation, but the idea of a Chinese translation is conspicuously absent.

There are, of course, historical reasons for the influence of English and Japanese on historical writing about Taiwan. Many Taiwanese exiles settled in the United States and Japan, for one thing. In the case of Japanese, for instance, in addition to all of the colonial-era writings in Japanese about Taiwan, Japanese is the first language in which important books about Taiwan like Su Beng's Taiwan's 400-Year History and Ong Iok-tek's  Taiwan: A History of Agonies were published. In addition, there are the strong historical ties between the United States government and Taiwan (especially during the Cold War), etc.

Moving up to the present, however, and getting back to the "itch" that I got as a result of reading about the "limited" influence of Chinese-language historical research on "the construction of the discourse on KMT entry into Taiwan," I've been turning this idea over in my mind for the past couple of months, and I'm led to a couple of questions regarding 1) the use of Chinese-language sources (particularly scholarly sources) in English-language historical work on post-WWII Taiwan, and 2) the whole issue of whose "discourse on KMT entry into Taiwan" counts, and for what.* How much do historians of Taiwan who are writing in English cite other academic sources (particularly ones in Chinese)? (By "academic sources," I mean recent academic research rather than primary sources.) And whose research counts?

To take a stab at starting to answer the first question, I did some amateur (emphasis mine) citation analysis of two English-language books about Taiwanese history to see how much they cite Chinese-language scholarship. For the sake of using sources more closely related to the topic being discussed in Michael Turton's post (quoted at the top), I looked at a couple of relatively recent books I had handy: Steven E. Phillips (2003) Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945-1950 (Stanford) and  Hsiao-ting Lin (2016) Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (Harvard). My method: simply count the sources in the bibliographies.

Since these are academic histories, they rely primarily on archival sources, but I ignored these to focus on their use of published English- and Chinese-language sources. Both books' bibliographies helpfully separate Chinese- and English-languages sources, making counting easier. Here are my rough counts:

Book	Phillips (2003)	Lin (2016)
Published Chinese sources	205	69
Published English sources	188	152
Post-1987 Chinese	100 (49%)	53 (77%)
Post-1987 English	64 (34%)	103 (68%)
Post-1987 “Scholarly” Chinese	88 (43%)	45 (65%) (including some collections of data, etc.)
Post-1987 “Scholarly” English	54 (29%)	98 (64%)

A few points about my counts:

• They're rough counts (in other words, they might not be perfect).
• I chose 1987 as the cut-off date somewhat randomly; I originally thought of focusing on sources published up to 10 years before the publication dates of the books I was looking at, but I decided to go with the the official end of martial law as a cut-off date instead. (Maybe if I get the energy, I'll go back and do the 10 years thing.)
• I realize there's an implied comparison of these two books, but I don't mean to say anything about the quality of these books; as I mentioned earlier, they are both relying heavily on archival resources.
• It looks like more of the published sources that Lin is using--in both languages--are relatively new (post-1987), though in raw numbers, Phillips uses more post-1987 Chinese-language sources. 
• Phillips' Chinese sources (narrowly) outnumber his English sources. This is in line with a comment in his preface expressing his hope that the book would "help alert historians in the United States to the efforts of scholars on Taiwan" (x). He seems to have anticipated the question of how to help make Chinese-language scholarship more visible to US scholars. (What that means about how influential they might be on "the discourse" about the KMT's entry into Taiwan is still an open question, however, for the very reason that we haven't yet answered the question of whose discourse is the discourse.)
• I'm not saying anything about the quality of the sources they're using. Elsewhere, I've critiqued Lin's choice of sources for discussing the White Terror, but I'm not going to evaluate their sources here. That's perhaps material for another post. (Interestingly, Lin doesn't cite Phillips, even though they're writing on related topics.)

Another related question to this issue of citation and recent Taiwan history: How much do historians of Taiwan who are writing in Chinese cite other academic sources (particularly ones in English)? I haven't yet gotten into this side of the issue, but I found two articles by Mu-Hsuan Huang that discuss citation practices in historical journals published in Taiwan:

• Mu-Hsuan Huang's 2010 article, "The Evaluation of History Journals and Historians in Taiwan Based on the Citation Analysis of the First-Class History Journals." (Journal of Library and Information Science Research, vol. 4, no. 2). This is a much more general study of citations by historians based in Taiwan, however, and doesn't get into the actual content of articles, so it's not specifically applicable to Taiwanese history.
• Also by Huang, "A Citation Analysis of Western Journals Cited in Taiwan's Library and Information Science and History Research Journals: From a Research Evaluation Perspective," "examines citations of Western journals in eight LIS journals and six history journals published in Taiwan. The findings show that both the Western journals' impact factor values and whether they are included in JCR may not necessarily indicate their real use in Taiwan's LIS and history research—especially in history research. Again, it doesn't appear to be focused on Taiwanese history.

No conclusions here. Just half-formed thoughts. I don't really have the tools at hand to do a large-scale analysis of recent scholarship on Taiwan history, but perhaps this post will inspire someone else to do more detailed research on this topic.

As far as the second question above--about whose discourse, or rather whose research counts in developing a discourse about postwar Taiwan, that will have to be the subject of another post.

-----------------
* I started writing this shortly after Turton published his post. Now thinking about it again, I'm wondering if his comment about "the discourse on KMT entry into Taiwan" is referring to gap between academic historical research and popular/political discourse. That might be another way of reading it. (Though I suppose I could just ask him!)