Two new books in the former native speaker's library; writing plans

I received my copies of Xiaoye You's Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China and Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh's (eds.) Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, so that's exciting. You's book promises to take a "decolonial and transnational approach" to the study of rhetoric in ancient China, so I think I'll be bumping that book to the front of my readings in preparation for the "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics" RSA Summer Institute seminar I mentioned I'll be participating in this May. 

But first I want to finish reading Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》(蔚藍文化， 2016), after which I'll write some notes here about that. It's quite a moving (and sometimes frustrating) biography of Yang Kui (or Yang K'uei, if you prefer), and it has me thinking a lot about Yang as rhetor and rhetorician. I'll try writing up something about Yang Tsui's depiction of him in that light.

Julean H. Arnold, Education in Formosa (1908)

Arnold, Julean H. Education in Formosa. Bulletin, No. 5. Whole Number 388, United States Bureau of Education, Department of the Interior, 1908.

Came across this document while spelunking through the web for sources about Candidius, the seventeenth-century Dutch missionary to Formosa. (I did find some good sources on him, by the way.) Anyway, this relatively short bulletin (about 70 pp.) was written by Arnold, the American consul at Tamsui (淡水) at the time,* and was of interest to the US government, according to the letter of transmittal, because 

educational campaign of the Japanese Government in Formosa, which he describes with careful attention to essential details, offers a significant parallel to the educational campaign which our Government is conducting, at no great distance  from Formosa and under somewhat similar conditions, in the Philippine Islands.

The text is a bit hard to read--it's not a great copy, but a transcription of the preface might give some idea of the tone of the document:

With Japan and America entering the ranks of the colonizing powers, the question of colonial education becomes particularly important, especially so in view of the fact that education in both Japan and America occupies a commanding position. It is rather significant that the two great Pacific powers should have become colonizing nations within three years of each other.

It is the purpose of this monograph to set forth the results of Japan's efforts to establish an educational system in Formosa, her first colonial possession. In order that we may fully understand the nature of the problem with which she has to contend, I have attempted to describe somewhat fully the work of her predecessors in the island, the Dutch and the Chinese. Thus the monograph has naturally resolved itself into a history of education in Formosa. While I have touched upon the subject of education in both China and Japan, I have made no effort to describe conditions as they obtain in those countries. For such a description, the reader is referred to Mr. Robert E. Lewis's admirable book, The Educational Conquest of the Far East.

For much of my material I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Rev. William Campbell's work, entitled "Formosa Under the Dutch," and to the official publications of the Formosan government. I am especially indebted to Mr. Mochiji, director of education in Formosa, and to Mr. Ogawa, his very able assistant, for their extreme kindness in affording me every possible opportunity to study conditions at first hand.

JULEAN H. ARNOLD.

AMERICAN CONSULATE.

Tamsui (Daitotei), Formosa

I'd also note that this book is cited in E. Patricia Tsurumi's Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945.

*The author also produced a booklet entitled The Peoples Of Formosa, which was published in1909 by the Smithsonian. A footnote on the first page of the booklet describes it as part of a report originally sent by Arnold to teh State Department, translating a report to the Japanese government by "Mr. Oshima, Superintendent of Police of the Japanese Government of Formosa ... on the management of savage affairs during the fiscal year 1907." Arnold's papers are available at the Hoover Institution Archives.

Taiwan Studies Workshop at the University of Tübingen (Oct 2023): proposal deadline May 31

Copying this from the NATSA website to keep in mind:

Taiwan as Pioneer workshop

at the ERCCT, University of Tübingen, Germany

4-6 October 2023

The Taiwan as Pioneer (TAP) project at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany, will hold a workshop for Ph.D. candidates, postdocs and established scholars, from October 4-6, 2023. The workshop will be conducted in English and Chinese. The main topic for the workshop is "Innovative methodologies and new perspectives on Taiwan studies." Other paper submissions pertaining to the fields of Taiwan society and culture are also highly welcomed, but we ask participants to highlight and discuss their methodological choices in more detail than in a regular presentation.

This established format of the workshop provides participants with the opportunity to:

• present their research to an international audience of peers

• engage in scholarly exchange on theory and methodology

• get to know Tübingen, the ERCCT and Tübingen University

• join the TAP network

• the possibility to contribute to TAP’s Handbook of methodologies for Taiwan Studies

Travel expenses and accommodation will be covered by TAP:

• Participants from Germany: travel fees up to 200 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

• Participants from Europe: travel fees up to 500 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

• Participants from Asia (and Taiwanese people and Taiwanese studies reserchers in North America): travel fees up to 1,400 EUR and four nights at 80 EUR

Successful applicants are requested to submit a 6000 words (TNR 12, single line spacing, does not include reference list) research paper after the workshop (by 12-31-2023) for online publication on the TAP website at the University of Tübingen. The possibility that this paper could become a chapter of the Handbook can be discussed in more detail.

To apply, please send your CV and an outline of your research project (max 2500 words) until May 31, 2023 to:

Dr. Amélie Keyser-Verreault, Ph.D.

TAP project lead at the ERCCT

Mail: amelie.keyser-verreault@uni.tuebingen.de

Notification of acceptance will be sent by June 30th.

About TAP: The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has awarded a grant to four post-doc researchers to conduct the joint research program TAP (Taiwan as a Pioneer) for a duration of four years. TAP is an interdisciplinary and supra-regional postdoctoral joint project for the promotion, structural strengthening and networking of Taiwan research in Sinology. The research focuses on Taiwan's role as an innovator in the dynamics of global megatrends. The inter-institutional network between the universities of Trier, Tübingen and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, funded by the BMBF, is to create intra- and interdisciplinary structures over the next four years (02.2022 - 01.2026), by means of which Taiwan research can be sustainably anchored in the German science location. For more information, please see:

https://www.uni-trier.de/en/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-ii/faecher/chinese-studies/translate-to-englisch-tap-taiwan-als-pionier

About the TAP network:

https://uni-tuebingen.de/einrichtungen/zentrale-einrichtungen/european-research-center-on-contemporary-taiwan/activities/taiwan-as-a-pioneer/

ChatGPT's suggestions about my list of comparative rhetoric readings

Just a footnote the previous post: after I finished it, I plugged the comparative rhetoric readings into ChatGPT to get its response to how to organize those readings. It didn't complain as much about the diversity of topics, but it just spat out the list in a different order. I asked it how it decided on the order, and it gave me the following response:

I organized the list of articles and books in a way that provides a coherent flow of ideas and themes. I began by grouping together articles that have similar themes or authors, and then arranged them in a way that makes sense chronologically or thematically.

I started with some articles that introduce the concept of comparative rhetoric and translingual approaches to meaning-making, such as Cushman's "Translingual and Decolonial Approaches to Meaning Making" and Cousins' "Self-reflexivity and the Labor of Translation." Then, I moved on to articles that focus on decolonization and pluriversal rhetorics, such as Cushman et al.'s "Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric" and Johnson and Endres' "Decolonizing Settler Public Address."

Next, I included articles that examine non-Western rhetorical traditions, such as Lipson and Binkley's "Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics," Lu's "Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" and "The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong," and Tomasi's "Rhetoric in Modern Japan." I also included articles that discuss the development of comparative rhetoric and its future, such as Mao's "Beyond Bias, Binary, and Border" and "Thinking beyond Aristotle" and Wang's "Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms."

Finally, I included articles that explore other related themes such as posthumanism, hybridity, and materialist approaches to activism. The order of the articles and books is not set in stone, and it could be adjusted based on the reader's interests and needs.

This is interesting to me for two reasons: how it says it decided how to organize the sources (sounds pretty reasonable) and the fact that it basically appears to be reflecting on its process. For the fun of it, I asked it what it learned from the process, and it said,

As an AI language model, I do not learn in the same way that humans do. However, I can tell you that organizing sources in a systematic and coherent way helps to make information more accessible and easier to understand. By categorizing sources and grouping them together, it becomes easier to identify patterns, compare and contrast different viewpoints, and draw more informed conclusions. Additionally, organizing sources can help to identify gaps in knowledge or areas where further research may be needed. Overall, a well-organized set of sources can facilitate the research process and ultimately lead to more robust and accurate conclusions.

Well, that's sort of a relief... 

Books to the ceiling, books to the sky...

I've quoted this poem a couple of times already. One of the many things that I have trouble with is deciding what book to read next. Sometimes I just grab something off the shelf that looks interesting. Sometimes I choose something that I've had for a very long time because I feel guilty that I've neglected it (hi, John Shepherd's Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800!). Sometimes I choose something written in Chinese because I feel guilty that I haven't read a book in Chinese for a long time (hi, Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》!). Sometimes I choose a biography or a work of fiction because I find them easier to read than a more scholarly or theoretical work, and sometimes I choose a more scholarly or theoretical work because I feel guilty that I'm making life too easy for myself by reading something that isn't torture to get through. (My Calvinist feelings of total depravity even motivate my reading choices, it seems.)

But I've got a long list of readings that I've given myself for that proposed semester leave that I mentioned (no word on that yet), and I'm trying to decide the order of the readings. One way might be just to jump from one book to another than seems relevant based on what I learn from the first book. Another might be to look through the books to find themes that connect them, sort of like writing a syllabus for myself. I haven't found any good answers on the internet yet (probably because I'm not using the right search terms). Maybe I should ask ChatGPT?

OK, here's what I asked the old Chatter:

I have a lot of books that I need to read for a research project. They're on a variety of topics, some more closely related to each other than others. How should I decide the order to read them in?

And they said,

When deciding the order to read your books for a research project, it's important to keep in mind your goals and priorities for the project. Here are some steps you can take to decide the order: 

1. Identify the most important books: Take a look at all the books you have and identify the ones that are most important to your research. These may be the ones that are most closely related to your topic or the ones that are most highly recommended. 

2. Create categories: Once you've identified the most important books, try to categorize them based on their topic or theme. This can help you to see how the books relate to each other and which ones should be read together.

3. Prioritize: Decide which categories of books are most important for your research and prioritize them. This can help you to focus your reading and ensure that you're getting the most important information first.

4. Balance: As you decide the order in which to read your books, try to balance the categories so that you're not reading too many on one topic before moving on to another. This can help you to stay engaged and avoid burnout.

5. Make a plan: Once you've decided on the order in which to read your books, create a reading plan. This can help you to stay on track and ensure that you're making progress towards your research goals. You can also adjust your plan as needed based on your progress and any new information you learn.

Overall, by identifying the most important books, categorizing them, prioritizing, balancing, and making a plan, you can create an effective reading order that helps you achieve your research goals. 

Hmmm... all in all, not bad advice. (Wonder where they're getting it from?) It sounds basically like what I said about writing a syllabus for myself, though. (With the possible exception of the point about "balance".)

I'm going to try something more specific, though. I'm going to feed my reading list into ChatGPT and see what it suggests about that... Wait a second...

Well, it didn't know quite how to answer that: "Wow, that's quite a list of books! Since the topics of the books are quite diverse, it's difficult to suggest a specific order for you to read them in." It did give suggestions about how to read some of the books, though. Back to the drawing board...

Watching "The #Milk Tea Alliance: Precedents and Possibilities"

Spring break has started, but I have a lot of stuff to do. But first I want to watch Jeffrey Wasserstrom's talk on the the "#Milk Tea Alliance: Precedents and Possibilities" from Feb. 15. I like his historical take on transnational activism. This is the description of the talk:

As a distinctively twenty-first century phenomenon, #MilkTeaAlliance refers to struggles from Hong Kong, Thailand, and Burma to Taiwan against the increasing power of the Chinese Communist Party. The campaign is empowered by social media, but region-wide cross-border collaboration among activists and exiles is not without precedents. This talk will explore the similarities and differences between #MilkTeaAlliance and its historical predecessors, and reflects on the limits of social science analysis that fails to go beyond geographical borders. The staying power and the future influences will also be assessed.

Wasserstrom talks about Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (梁啟超), who has shown up in some of my recent reading. He compares Liang to Thai student activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, who has, like Liang, translated some works about democracy from the West (and, in Netiwit's case, from Hong Kong and China).