Yesterday, I attended the "Taiwan Studies+ 2.0" international symposium at Harvard. I found all of the presentations really fascinating, even (especially?) when I didn't know anything about the topics. There were presentations about video games, noise pollution, Japanese-era mountaineering, representations of Indigenous people in ecological literature, capitalism, the "semiconductor shield," diasporic Taiwanese activism, ROC/Taiwan relations, and transitional justice, among other topics.
Sitting there, I realized how much about Taiwan and Taiwan Studies I don't know. But it was an inspiring feeling rather than a depressing one. It reminded me that my own perspective on Taiwan--one that I've acquired through drilling down on a very niche topic (the life and writings of George H. Kerr)--is in need of these encounters with other perspectives so that I'm not stuck in my GHK bubble. Part of that is becoming more aware of how Taiwan is represented in various academic disciplines, not just history.
One of the questions that came up in the final discussion was about the current status of Taiwan Studies. There was the positive feeling among participants that they don't have to explain Taiwan as much in their articles as they used to (what I've called the "shaped roughly like a tobacco leaf" approach to writing about Taiwan). At the same time, people expressed concern about how to represent Taiwan in relation to China and to global events, and one participant spoke eloquently of the urgency of representing Taiwan during a period of wars and the potential for war in the Taiwan Strait. I'm reminded of a rhetoric scholar from Hong Kong who wrote on social media a while back that a paper they had written about Hong Kong was rejected with the response that Hong Kong was a dead subject. Hopefully, this won't happen to Taiwan or to the people who study Taiwan.
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