Summer writing project (Day Three)

Overslept this morning, so I didn't make much headway on my project so far. One thing I did decide to do, though, was to save my work as a new file and then delete everything after the (somewhat long) introduction I mentioned yesterday. I did that because I felt that the current draft, a lot of which came from a 2005 conference paper and a chapter from my dissertation, was no longer reflecting what (I think) I'm trying to do. So I decided instead to start from scratch. I can always go back to previous drafts to copy relevant parts into the new version when necessary. 

Right now I'm reading Evan N. Dawley's book, Becoming Taiwanese. I just finished the third chapter, in which Dawley explores how social organizations in Jilong mediated between the residents of Jilong (both islanders and Japanese settlers) and the shifting approaches the Japanese colonial government was taking toward Taiwan. He ends the chapter with the suggestion that it's in the context of the 1930s-era push for assimilation in the expanding (and increasingly intolerant) Japanese empire that we can begin to see "Taiwanese" "as an ethnic group that obtained cohesion and sought survival within the confines of the Japanese Empire" (160). 

Anyway, back to work...