Summer writing project (Day Ten)

I didn't write much of anything today, but I finished reading Evan Dawley's book, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s to 1950s. I learned quite a bit from it, and I like how his focus on the development of one city through the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist periods is tied to the formation of a Taiwanese ethnic identity and also to other trends and related histories, such as the disparate histories of social work in Japan, China, and Taiwan and the various stances toward and uses of religion in these three places. Social work and religion have been two areas of Taiwanese culture that I've never given enough attention to, but this book helped me to see that I need to explore them more. 

My main reason for reading the book was to see if it could help me in my current writing project, and I think it will. I'm not going to go into detail about it at this point, but I think I can draw from this book some examples that pertain to rhetoric, so I think I will work them into my paper. We'll see how it goes. 

I'm trying to decide now which book I should read next. I think I'll read Bi-yu Chang's Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan next, though I will have to see if I should read through the whole book or just focus on some of the chapters. I might also dip more into Faye Yuan Kleeman's Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South. And maybe also Allen Chun's Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification, which also might be relevant. I've read some of the articles from which Chun's book developed, but I want to see what might have changed from the previously published versions of his chapters. 

Oh, and I suppose I should do some writing, too, in the midst of all this reading and skimming. I wouldn't want that the only written product that grows out of all this work is a bunch of blog posts about my writing/reading process...

See you Monday!