Review of Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms published

My review of Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, edited by Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh is out. It was a pleasure to read this book, particularly realizing the risks some of the authors took in writing it.

"Midterm" reflections on August's "new year's resolutions"

Back in August, I wrote up a few new year's resolutions for the 2024-2025 academic year. In the past, I've usually written them up and then ignored them, but this time I'm going to take a look back at them and figure out what I did, what I didn't do, and what course corrections I might make.

• "Try to get up earlier in the morning"--the idea here was go get up early enough to do my Duolingo and a little writing. This didn't work at all as planned. I did manage to get up early some mornings and do a little journaling, but I didn't have enough time to do my Duolingo before I had to get the day started. And many days, I woke up just in time to jump in the shower before starting to get my son ready for school.
• "Use my commute time to read"--since I didn't have time to do my Duolingo in the morning, I usually did it on the trip into school. Sometimes I read on the way home from school, but a lot of times, I was using that time to catch up on work. 
• "Make time for writing"--I pretty much failed at this during the semester, unless you count my teaching-related writing and service-related writing. I had the usual amount of the former and, it seems, more than the usual amount for the latter. I did a few little revisions on a couple of book reviews that will be coming out soon, but besides that, I didn't work on any of the papers I have to revise.

So things didn't go quite as well as planned. I think one thing that cut down on my writing time was that I was teaching a new course, so that involved a lot of work to keep ahead of the students. This semester, I'll be teaching "old" courses (though of course I can't seem to stop myself from fiddling with the assignments), which might help. 

Another thing that might help in terms of the writing is that next semester, I'm rejoining a writing accountability group that has always forced me to spend at least an hour and a half a week on writing. I've always found that helpful. I need to finish that George Kerr paper first, then get started on the chapters I need to write for the collaborative biography. 

I think I need to add "going to bed earlier" to the list of resolutions because if I don't get to bed earlier, I can't wake up earlier. I'll try to work on that. I've been napping a lot recently because of some muscle relaxants I have had to take for a sciatica problem, but hopefully I'll get over that before vacation is over. Napping always throws off my evening sleep schedule. 

As for using commuting time for reading, I think I'll still end up doing Duolingo during the trip in. I'll try to do some reading on the way home. I'll have to decide what I want to read, though! Right now, I'm about a third of the way through David S. Reynolds' John Brown: Abolitionist, but I'm going to try to finish it before the semester starts. I have to think about what to read after that. Any ideas?

A few reflections on the "Rhetorics in Contact" course

Back in August, I wrote about my plans for the new course I was going to be teaching, "Rhetorics in Contact." Now that the course is over, I want to reflect on the course and think about what I might do better next time. In no particular order:

• I think the readings worked well. As we read and responded to them, we actually started finding connections that I hadn't noticed before. Shimabukuro's book was particularly good for bringing together a lot of points that we had discussed earlier, though often she would use different language for talking about similar kinds of concepts. I personally gained a lot from reading through her book again for the course.
• Here's something I posted on BlueSky about Shimabukuro's book and current events. (Hope you can read it!)
• We used Perusall for "socially annotating" the readings. It made things nice generally, but in the case of Shimabukuro, I was a little annoyed that the Perusall edition of the book didn't have any page numbers. It made it harder to cite the book when we were working on final papers. Haven't yet figured out a workaround for the next time, so any suggestions are welcome!
• Maybe because we were using Perusall and doing social annotation (and maybe for some other reasons, as well), class discussions weren't as active as I had hoped. I think I have to work harder next time on making sure class time is better used, and I'm not just doing most of the talking.
• We did a few informal writing assignments that I liked. I think I want to keep most of them and perhaps do a few more. After we read Garrett and Xiao's "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited," for instance, I asked students to write about any discourse traditions in their families or cultures. Their responses were interesting. (And I had fun writing my own response, too!) We also did some practice analysis of materials in NU's Digital Collections. I also had them write some reflections on their class trips to the archives. 
• I think I need to do a bit more with helping them on the archival projects. (One student suggested starting earlier, but I have to think about that. Maybe we could go to the archives earlier.) More class time devoted to them bringing in archival materials and challenges they were facing would be useful, perhaps. And more work with citing archival documents. 
• I also should do a bit more with helping them think about connections between the readings and the archival collections they were working on. One student in their final reflection pointed out how working on the archives helped them better understand the concepts from the readings, but I think I could do a bit more to help in that direction. 

Anyway, overall the course went well (aside from problems with class discussions or lack thereof), so I'm encouraged to try teaching this again if I get the chance!

Pulse Check on Taiwan’s Democratic Resilience

 I need to watch this at some point (when I have 3 hours to spare!):

Not sure what I'm getting myself into...

I just joined Bluesky for some reason. I'd like to find people who are interested in talking about comparative rhetoric and books about Taiwan. 

I'm not sure if I'll stay on; if it seems worth it, I'll stay, but right now I don't see much going on that I'm interested in. 

As I like to say to my mom, "We'll see what happens."  

Twenty-year-old thoughts on yesterday's election

They don't all apply, but they're food for thought:

"One thing a lot of Democrats are thinking about these days" (11/7/04)

"Faith and rhetoric in the U.S. election (and beyond)" (11/7/04)

"A note from an Ohio 'Blue'" (11/11/04)

Just in time for Hallowe'en...

For some reason, I didn't notice the overlap between the themes of the two books I wrote about--even though they're right in the titles! It wasn't until I went to hear Kim Liao talk about her book and answer a question about her choice of title that it clicked with me that both of the books are about hauntings. (Hence the title of my blogpost.) Anru Lee's book, Haunted Modernities, involves both the literal and figurative ghostly presence of the 25 "maiden ladies" who died in the 1973 ferry accident in decisions about how to honor them even as Kaohsiung's economy and culture shifted from industrial to post-industrial and to a tourist destination. Kim Liao's book, Where Every Ghost Has a Name, at times describes Thomas Liao's ghostly presence guiding Kim through her journey of learning about him. 

While the first book is an anthropological work and the second a memoir, they both take seriously Taiwanese beliefs about the afterlife. Lee in particular doesn't try to explain away the spiritual aspects but situates it among the cultural and economic changes in Kaohsiung (and at the same time situates the cultural and economic changes among the spiritual aspects of the lives and deaths of the 25 young women).  

One story in Lee's book that exemplifies this involves a Kaohsiung City employee, Mr. Lin, who around 2006 was tasked with the job of getting the family members of the deceased female workers to agree to renovate their tombs. The family members had to ask the deceased young women by casting divination blocks. They got agreement from most of them, but one deceased woman wouldn't respond to her surviving sister. Finally, Mr. Lin agreed to talk to the deceased sister himself.

However, he also did not get a good response, even after multiple attempts. "After a while, I had to consult a religious practitioner at a local temple and learn to phrase my plea in a hard-to-refuse way," Lin explained. ...

Even so, an unequivocal "yes" was still hard to come by. Mr. Lin begged and begged, and even promised to bring fruits as offerings to the deceased every month in the future. ... "In the end, I told them I was only a minor employee who took orders from some big boss [i.e., the mayor] and pleaded with them to understand my quandary. As soon as I said that, they granted me a divine answer. [These women] certainly know the difficulties of being someone's subordinate!" (138-9)

Anru Lee gave a talk today about her book at the University of Washington. In the Q&A period, there was a lot of talk about "haunting as method" in Lee's book:

Two finished books in the former native speaker's library!

I just finished reading Anru Lee's Haunted Modernities, which was a fascinating study of the intersections of memory, feminism, women's lives (and deaths), modernization, industrialization, post-industrialization, and local traditional religious beliefs and practices in Taiwan. I'd love to use it in a class, but I'm not sure that I'm ever going to teach a class in which I can teach it...

Here's a podcast interview with Anru Lee about her book.

I had put Lee's book aside briefly, partly due to work and partly because I wanted to finish Kim Liao's book Where Every Ghost Has a Name before she comes to Northeastern this coming Wednesday. I enjoyed this book, too. It gave me a new perspective on Thomas Liao, an historical figure I've read about mostly through the lens of his correspondence with George H. Kerr. It also ties in to my honors course text, Mira Shimabukuro's Relocating Authority, in interesting ways, particularly in terms of how they're both investigating histories that were suppressed both by unsympathetic governments and by the survivors of past trauma who sometimes just wanted to forget about the past. 

Here's an interview with Kim Liao about her book.

Rebecca Nedostup talk, “War Being” in Mid-Twentieth Century China and Taiwan

Need to watch this video sometime.

I don't know if it's my computer or their set-up, but the audio is terrible.

[Update 10/31/24: Uh oh...]

'Tis the season (evidently) to buy books, even if I don't have time to read them

Just picked up (well, was sent) a new book from the University of Washington Press on the CIA and the Asia Foundation, a Cold War-era nonprofit/CIA front (that is now evidently not funded by the CIA, I guess). The book is Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA, by David H. Price. 

One thing I'll be reading this book for is how it extends or differs from Emma North-Best's long article on the CIA and the Asia Foundation on the MuckRock website. I remember reading that article a few years ago after I came across a 1951 letter from Philip Horton, assistant editor of The Reporter, to Allen Dulles, who was "Deputy Director for Plans" at the CIA at the time (if Wikipedia is correct). 

In the letter, Horton quotes a letter he had received from Kerr (who was at the Hoover Library at the time), in which Kerr criticized the Committee for a Free Asia (the precursor to the Asia Foundation). Kerr reported on a visit to Hoover by CFA president George H. Greene, Jr.* (not sure what his first name was). Kerr continued, 

Either the management is extraordinarily naive, or they assume us to be so. The line will be almost unmodified extension of the Voice of America or U.S.I.S. propaganda. "Tell the Asians how wonderful life is in America, how good our institutions are, and how very very wicked and dangerous the Communists are." There is heavy emphasis on the latter approach, with  little ready response to our questions concerning positive content. It was freely admitted that China is the primary concern. Chiang is to be neither praised nor condemned. "Counterpart Committees" will be set up overseas, operating under guarantees that the local government will not influence nor affect the content of propaganda. It was asserted that such a condition was expected to obtain in Formosa, which is to be a principal base of operations. 

It has been pointed out to the representatives of the Committee that (1) most Asians are tired of hearing how good we are, and the history of our representative institutions has little bearing on their problems, for the conditions surrounding their evolution cannot be duplicated in Asia; (2) most non-Chinese Asians fear a strong China, whatever its political orientation, and will hardly respond with enthusiasm to a rally in support of "anti-Communist government" for China, especially if it means support for the Nationalists; (3) Formosa cited as an example of "Free Asia" would be damaging nonsense. 

Those of us who talked with Greene have a troubled sense that the Administration may have decided to switch to all-out support for the Nationalists, hopefully trusting that Chiang may be thrust aside, and that the Committee not only has the State Department's blessing in this attempt to sweeten the picture, but is most actively setting it up. Each of us asks the other if at any point the [China] Lobby may be putting up funds. Odd to conceive, but not impossible in Washington. 

Actually, if the thing were worked out on a realistic appraisal of the American position in Asian eyes, it could do an enormously important job, unhampered by red tape.

Wonder if this letter helped get Kerr in any trouble with the government... 

*All you had to do was look in the index of the book you just bought, Jon... 🙄

Another new (new new new!) book in the former native speaker's library

I just got my copy of Kim Liao's Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence, which came into print (or "dropped," as the youngsters say) a few days ago. I read a little of it on the Amazon website (as much as I could) while I waited for the hardback copy, and I can't wait to read it. I'm going to put it next on my list after finishing Anru Lee's Haunted Modernities. (Interestingly, Lee has a blurb on the back of Liao's book.) 

I'm especially interested in seeing how Kim Liao treats the relationship between Thomas Liao and his family and George H. Kerr. I realize that, as K. Liao says, this is a work of creative nonfiction, so some of the conversations between the characters are reimagined, but I want to see how her perspective on Kerr compares to my own perspective.

Kim Liao is coming to Northeastern in October, so I guess I'd better get going on reading her book!

Update on new (academic) year's resolutions

I'm happy to announce that I've chosen the first book that I'll be reading on the train to school, starting on Tuesday (I'm sure all of my reader was dying to know): Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, by Anru Lee. 

I mentioned back in May that I had started to read the book shortly after I received it, but then, between teaching two summer courses and getting a book review and some other writing projects done during the summer, plus preparing for my honors course, I just didn't have time to get back to it. I really have enjoyed it so far, though, and I'm looking forward to getting back to it. Maybe I'll write a few notes about it once I finish. 

"Rhetorics in Contact" and August mushroom hunts

We're just a few days away from the beginning of the semester, and I've been feverishly working at getting my new "Rhetorics in Contact" course together. Right now it's a pretty small group of students (it's a freshman-level course in the Honors Program), but a few more people might trickle in before classes start next Wednesday, I hope.

My course description asks, 

What happens when people try to communicate persuasively with each other across cultural boundaries? How do participants’ histories, traditions, and communication patterns shape cross-cultural encounters, and how do those encounters shape future communication within and across cultures? 

In this course, we’ll be looking at different examples of how rhetorical traditions or legacies affect communication across cultural boundaries and how cross-cultural encounters are represented differently by the participants. Through the course readings, we’ll be developing a specialized vocabulary for talking about intercultural rhetoric and thinking about methods for studying it. We’ll go on to apply some of these methods to documents in the Special Collections of the Northeastern Archives, analyzing the discourses of social organizations and movements in Boston, such as the Chinese Progressive Association and the movement to desegregate Boston’s public schools. We’ll also reflect on how rhetoric across cultures affects (or should affect) advocacy in the complex global and local contexts that we currently face.

Because we're going to be working with the archives a lot, I'm not having us read a lot of different articles. Our reading list for the semester is as follows (links to relevant blog posts):

• Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession, 1991, pp. 33-40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25595469. (Although this isn't technically a rhetoric article, many of the concepts that Pratt discusses--like contact zones, autoethnography, transculturation, etc.--are very relevant to intercultural rhetorical studies.)
• Garrett, Mary, and Xiaosui Xiao. "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited." Rhetoric Society Quarterly,  vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 30–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3885923. (See my discussion of the article in this post.)
• Gaillet, Lynée Lewis. "Archival Survival: Navigating Historical Research." Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Alexis E. Ramsey, et al., Southern Illinois University Press, 2010, pp. 28-39. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/4176. (Although this chapter is more aimed at graduate students and PhD-level scholars in rhetoric and composition, I think much of the discussion can be useful for undergraduate honors students, as well. For instance, when Gaillet discusses grant applications, I ask students (in Perusall) to consider what kinds of undergraduate research grants are offered at Northeastern. I think this could be useful to them in their future work.)
• Shimabukuro, Mira. Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration, University Press of Colorado, 2015. (This will be interesting because I have to admit, rereading the book to annotate it on Perusall, it's pretty challenging in places. But see my discussion of the book here for my reasons for using this fascinating study.)

Other than these readings, students will be focusing a lot on exploring NU's Special Collections and settling on a collection or collections to focus on. One thing I'm trying to do with this assignment is stretch their ideas of what academic research is. Gaillet quotes the late compositionist Robert Connors as saying, "[A]rchival reading is ... a kind of directed ramble, something like an August mushroom hunt" (qtd. in Gaillet 38). Although the topics we'll be covering (and uncovering) in the course are serious (sometimes deadly serious), I also want students to experience archival research as a joyful (but sometimes depressing!) and exciting (but sometimes tedious!) process.

New year's resolutions for the 2024-2025 academic year

I haven't done this for a few years (I think the last time was 2021), but it's not necessarily a bad idea to write down a few things I'm going to try to do this year (or at least this semester). 

One is to try to get up earlier in the morning. I can use the time to do a little writing and get my Duolingo done. I used to do the Duolingo on the train into school, but this semester, I want to use my commute time to read. As my reader(s) know, I've got a stack of books that I should get started on!

Another thing I need to do is make time for writing. I have to do revisions on a paper that has been accepted (my first journal article about GHK!), and then I need to get to work on a collaboratively written biography of Kerr. I also have a rhetoric paper to work on that I have been ignoring for months.

I guess that's a good start--as I've said in the past, when it comes to resolutions, less is more!

Review of A World of Turmoil published

My review of Stephen J. Hartnett's book, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War, is out in the latest issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs. (Although the issue is dated Fall, 2023, it was published almost a year later!)

While I had a few problems with Hartnett's conclusions and recommendations, I found the book to be a valuable overview of the roles of communication and rhetoric in the history of US-China-Taiwan relations from a Taiwan-sympathetic rhetoric scholar.

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Christina Yi, Andre Haag, and Catherine Ryu, eds. Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire, University of Hawai'i Press, 2023.

This book showed up out of the middle of nowhere. I saw that there was an interview with the editors on the New Books Network, but before listening to the interview, I ordered the book. (To be honest, I still haven't listened to the interview. But I'll get around to it sooner or later!)

In my somewhat foggy state of mind, I think I was attracted to the word "persuasion" in the title and the term "pan-Asian rhetoric" in the book's summary. Paging through the book, I was surprised to see a chapter on Li Xianglan (李香蘭), who is also known as Yamaguchi Yoshiko (山口 淑子) or Shirley Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi was someone I had forgotten that I had heard of before--the other day I stumbled onto her movie, China Nights (「支那の夜」), also known as Shanghai Nights (「上海之夜」) on YouTube. I ended up watching the whole movie even though it was 98% Japanese with no subtitles. (Needless to say, I didn't get a lot out of the dialogue.) The Wikipedia article about Li Xianglan (zh) reminded me that she had also played an Indigenous girl in a movie made in Taiwan called Sayon's Bell (「サヨンの鐘」). A 2011 post by Darryl Sterk from the anthropological blog Savage Minds introduces a recent "anti-aboriginal romance film" named Finding Sayun (【不一樣的月光：尋找沙韻】) that critiques the representation of Indigenous people in the original film.* 

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading that chapter to find out more about Yamaguchi and Sayon's Bell, which I've also found a copy of on YouTube: 

I also found this 10-minute preview of Finding Sayun: 

* I think my title punctuation is a mess in this paragraph--apologies!

Aging

I've been hearing a lot lately from friends and relatives about various age-related or partially age-related health problems they're encountering. And then I share my own health problems back! I guess I'm at that stage of life when this is par for the course. Combined with that are the deaths of famous people from my childhood or youth, like Richard Simmons, Bob Newhart, Dr. Ruth, etc. And then President Biden steps away from the presidential campaign after lots of loud questions about his ability to govern at his age. (I'm not going to go into political commentary here.) 

Not sure what point I'm trying to make here, if any. Just that this is on my mind these days.

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Got back from a short trip to find these two books that I ordered from 博客來 books:

• 移工築起的地下社會：跨國勞動在臺灣 (Underground Lives: Stories Untold for Migrant Workers in Taiwan), by 簡永達 (2023)
  
  
• 冷戰下的「臺灣研究」：北美人類學家訪問紀錄 (Studying Taiwan Before Taiwan Studies: American Anthropologists in Cold War Taiwan), edited by Derek Sheridan, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, and Tseng Wen-liang (2024)

The latter is in both English and Chinese, so I'll probably be reading that first. But before that, I have a lot of work to catch up on...

【台灣演義】大學史 （History of Universities in Taiwan)

This was produced in 2020, but I didn't see it back then. It's pretty interesting. I learned a bit more about higher education during the Japanese colonial period and the martial law period.

I don't agree with some of the information in the video, though. They said that Soochow University was the first private university in Taiwan, but according to Wikipedia, it wasn't actually fully certified as a university until 1971. Classes started at Tunghai University in 1955, though for some reason, Tunghai isn't mentioned in this video. 

Missing the NATSA conference

This week I was supposed to be attending (and presenting at!) the 2024 North American Taiwan Studies Association conference in NYC, but I bowed out in May due to too many other commitments. Turned out that it's lucky I did because last week I had a nasty encounter with some poison ivy that is currently making my life miserable. But I felt a bit bad when I read through the conference handbook and saw how interesting it was going to be. It looks like one of those very rare conferences (in my experience) where I would like to attend almost every session! Ah well...