Well, April is almost over and I see I haven't written anything here. Apologies to my reader(s). Classes are over now, and grades are due May 3 (I keep writing March 3 for some reason). After that, I have a bit of a break because I won't be teaching the first summer session. I have a research project I want to make some progress on and a few other things, so hopefully I won't spend the entire month of May lying on the couch watching old movies.
I also want to read some books that I've acquired in the last few weeks (with the help of professional development money). These will figure at least indirectly into that project I mentioned.
- Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, by Evan N. Dawley (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019). I'm going to start with this one. Dawley discusses the book here. I always love to hear authors talk about their writing process--how they came up with their topics, etc.
- The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (Cambridge, 2021). I heard Yang talk about this book at a Wilson Center virtual event--his talk is available here. I was already going to buy the book, but Yang's talk excited me even more about the subject.
I ordered several Routledge books on Taiwan, something I wouldn't normally do
without professional development money. (Also they're having a 20% off sale on
everything!) There were some that I felt I needed for this project, though,
and I didn't just want to order ebooks for the library. (Sometimes they take a
while to become available. Anyway...)
- Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan, by Bi-yu Chang (Routledge, 2015). No link to any book talk here, though she did talk at the the SOAS Taiwan Studies Summer School I attended last year (!). (Anyone know if they're doing one this year?)
- Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China, by Hui-Ching Chang and Richard Holt (Routledge, 2015). I mentioned this book in a previous post, but I didn't have a copy yet.
- Comparatizing Taiwan, ed. Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao (Routledge, 2015). I'm not sure how much of this book I'll be reading--some of the chapters appear to be out of my area (whatever that is), but the introduction and first chapter could be useful.
- The Colonisation and Settlement of Taiwan, 1684-1945: Land Tenure, Law and Qing and Japanese Policies, by Ruiping Ye (Routledge, 2019). This is probably even further out of my area, but the title interested me.
- Taiwan: Manipulation of Ideology and Struggle for Identity, ed. Chris Shei (Routledge, 2021). This new book is part of the Routledge Studies in Chinese Discourse Analysis series. This would appear to be more closer to my area, and there are some interesting chapters (judging from the titles) that I'll want to dip into, like Hsin-Yi Yeh's on "Remembered Chinese-ness and its Dynamics: Analysing the National-Remembering in Taiwan after 1949."
This is probably my longest list of new books ever! Hope I actually get
around to reading some of them, or I will truly live up to that poem I
quoted long ago,
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books are a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
--Arnold Lobel [But I'm still annoyed by the grammatical error in the third line...]
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