Stephen J. Hartnett, et al., "Postcolonial Remembering in Taiwan: 228 and Transitional Justice as 'The End of Fear'"

Number six in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

Hartnett, S. J., Dodge, P. S.-W., & Keränen, L. B. (2020). Postcolonial remembering in Taiwan: 228 and transitional justice as “the end of fear.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 13(3), 238-256, DOI: 10.1080/17513057.2019.1614206

I just saw that Hartnett has a book coming out next July taking a communications perspective on the US-China-Taiwan relationship, which reminded me that I had this article in my files, waiting to be summarized. I'm interested in this article also because although it's found in an intercultural communication journal, it's one of the few published works about Taiwan in rhetorical studies.

The authors begin with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen's 2017 Facebook post addressing China on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre and China's response to that, arguing that the way both sides marshaled arguments about the June 4 and February 28, 1947 massacres demonstrates that "public memories about China’s TSM and Taiwan’s 228 serve as sites of bitter contestation about historical events, their political legacies, their resulting communicative patterns, and what they foreshadow for both Taiwan’s emerging democratic life and China’s rise to global power" (p. 239). The authors want to add to the scholarly conversation about 228 by "examin[ing] the rhetorical work of postcolonial remembering, an anti-authoritarian reclamation project wherein confronting the damage caused by past atrocities fuels Taiwan’s emerging discourse of democracy, multiculturalism, and national autonomy" (p. 239).

Readers might feel this kind of topic isn't typical of an article in a journal focused on intercultural communication, and the authors acknowledge this by pointing to prior research that calls for more postcolonial perspectives in intercultural communication. They argue that their study can also "extend a line of research asking how postcolonial remembering in Asia can help drive both contemporary politics and collective imaginings of possible futures" (p. 240).

The authors also raise a few points that I have been thinking about lately: one has to do with the delicate balance between demonstrating allyship and participating in what Teju Cole has called "the white savior industrial complex." Part of my own worry about writing about Taiwan, besides "getting it wrong" (though to be honest, if you write anything about Taiwan's place in the world, someone is going to say you're wrong), is that my motivations will be questioned in terms of my identity as a white American male. (And perhaps rightly so.) Hartnett, et al. (I'm not sure how all of the authors identify racially, ethnically, and otherwise) deal with this by briefly referencing Linda Alcott's famous article, "The Problem of Speaking for Others," then referencing A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights through International Networks, 1960-1980, by Linda Arrigo and Lynn Miles. Folks familiar with the history of Taiwan's democratization probably know of Arrigo (艾琳達) and Miles (梅心怡), who used their international connections to advocate for Taiwanese political prisoners and more generally for human rights in Taiwan. Their book, which depicts the work of Arrigo, Miles, and other international advocates for Taiwan, lends to Hartnett, et al., the idea of "lending a voice." As the authors put it, "Our work, then, is offered in the spirit of solidarity with our local collaborators--not speaking 'for' but 'with' and 'alongside' them--and with the hope of supporting the ongoing process of transitional justice in Taiwan" (p. 242).

That last quote alludes to another issue I've been thinking about and have asked some people in Taiwan Studies about--the relationship between academics and advocacy. Different disciplines, of course, treat this question differently. When I asked about this during an online session with some senior Taiwan Studies scholars (part of the 2020 Taiwan Studies Summer School), though, the response was generally to the effect that doing rigorous scholarship was the best way to advocate for Taiwan (my memory might be faulty on this, so if you were there and remember differently, let me know!). The quote at the end of the above paragraph takes a more activist stance that, if I'm not mistaken, is more typical of rhetorical studies--it implies that scholarship can (should?) consciously be a social justice project. 

A third issue, then, concerns the disciplinary perspective. In addition to the activist stance I have suggested above, where the authors align themselves both with advocates like Arrigo and Miles and with their own "local collaborators," the article takes on what is to people who study Taiwan a familiar story, telling it partially in the language of rhetorical studies so as to introduce Taiwan's history to a new audience. There's a need for this, I think: what I call the "shaped roughly like a tobacco leaf" approach to writing about Taiwan for people who don't have much idea about the place. Kerim Friedman wrote about this on the Anthro(dendum) blog. While it can be annoying to have to explain KMT governance of postwar Taiwan (how many synonyms can you find for "incompetent and corrupt"?), Kerim notes that

the real problem is that nobody would demand these histories if it wasn’t for the fact that Taiwan’s own government (until the end of Martial Law in 1987) and the government of the People’s Republic of China both had a shared interest in sowing confusion about the history of Taiwan in order to portray Taiwan as part of China.

So a lot of this article is necessarily pretty obvious to anyone knowledgable about Taiwan: there's the narrative of 228 and the White Terror, the story of the rise of the dangwai that led to establishment of the DPP and the end to martial law, and descriptions of the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum and the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park. These familiar/unfamiliar elements are made relevant to communication studies scholars by reference to transitional justice, postcolonial remembering, public memory work, and other concepts often used in the field of rhetoric (and, to be honest, other fields of study). If I have the opportunity, I would like to show this article to a colleague who doesn't know much about Taiwan and see what they think of it. Does it give a new perspective on those topics that I mentioned above? Does it give a new perspective on Taiwan, which, thanks to the news media, I'm guessing a lot of people think "split with the mainland in 1949?" This could be the value of this article: if it can begin to bring Taiwan on its own terms into the orbit of rhetorical studies, if it can begin to make Taiwan's fascinating history a relevant part of the field on its own, then it will be serving a valuable purpose even if its content might be "old hat" to those in Taiwan Studies. (And selfishly, I look forward to citing it in my own work rather than having to repeat the whole "shaped roughly like a tobacco leaf" narrative!)

Well, I haven't summarized this article as much as I have analyzed (possibly critiqued) it. I recommend it, though, and if you are not a Taiwan Studies person, let me know what you think of it!