As the site of crossings of colonizers, settlers, merchants, and goods, island nations such as Taiwan have seen a rich confluence of cultures, where peoples and languages were either forced to mix or did so voluntarily, due largely to colonial conquest and their crucial role in world economy. Through an examination of socio-cultural phenomena, Comparatizing Taiwan situates Taiwan globally, comparatively, and relationally to bring out the nation's innate richness. This book examines Taiwan in relation to other islands, cultures, or nations in terms of culture, geography, history, politics, and economy. Comparisons include China, Korea, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, Ireland, Malaysia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and the Caribbean, and these comparisons present a number of different issues, alongside a range of sometimes divergent implications. By exploring Taiwan's many relationalities, material as well as symbolic, over a significant historical and geographical span, the contributors move to expand the horizons of Taiwan studies and reveal the valuable insights that can be obtained by viewing nations, societies and cultures in comparison. Through this process, the book offers crucial reflections on how to compare and how to study small nations. This truly interdisciplinary book will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, comparative cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and literary studies.

As the site of crossings of colonizers, settlers, merchants, and goods, island nations such as Taiwan have seen a rich confluence of cultures, where peoples and languages were either forced to mix or did so voluntarily, due largely to colonial conquest and their crucial role in world economy. Through an examination of socio-cultural phenomena, Comparatizing Taiwan situates Taiwan globally, comparatively, and relationally to bring out the nation's innate richness. This book examines Taiwan in relation to other islands, cultures, or nations in terms of culture, geography, history, politics, and economy. Comparisons include China, Korea, Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, Ireland, Malaysia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and the Caribbean, and these comparisons present a number of different issues, alongside a range of sometimes divergent implications. By exploring Taiwan's many relationalities, material as well as symbolic, over a significant historical and geographical span, the contributors move to expand the horizons of Taiwan studies and reveal the valuable insights that can be obtained by viewing nations, societies and cultures in comparison. Through this process, the book offers crucial reflections on how to compare and how to study small nations. This truly interdisciplinary book will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, comparative cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and literary studies.

This book situates Taiwan's indigenous knowledge in comparative contexts across other indigenous knowledge formations. The content is divided into four distinct but interrelated sections to highlight the importance and diversity of indigenous knowledge in Taiwan and beyond. It begins with an exploration of the recent development and construction of an indigenous knowledge and educational system in Taiwan, as well as issues concerning research ethics and indigenous knowledge. This is followed by a section that illustrates diverse forms of indigenous knowledge, and in turn, a theoretical dialogue between indigenous studies and settler colonial studies. Lastly, the Paiwan indigenous author Dadelavan Ibau's trans-indigenous journey to Tibet rounds out the coverage. This book is useful to readers in indigenous, settler colonial, and decolonial studies around the world, not just because it offers substantive content on indigenous knowledge in Taiwan, but also because it offers conceptual tools for studying indigenous knowledge from comparative and relational perspectives. It also greatly benefits anyone interested in Taiwan studies, offering an ethical approach to indigeneity in a classic settler colony.

This book situates Taiwan's indigenous knowledge in comparative contexts across other indigenous knowledge formations. The content is divided into four distinct but interrelated sections to highlight the importance and diversity of indigenous knowledge in Taiwan and beyond. It begins with an exploration of the recent development and construction of an indigenous knowledge and educational system in Taiwan, as well as issues concerning research ethics and indigenous knowledge. This is followed by a section that illustrates diverse forms of indigenous knowledge, and in turn, a theoretical dialogue between indigenous studies and settler colonial studies. Lastly, the Paiwan indigenous author Dadelavan Ibau's trans-indigenous journey to Tibet rounds out the coverage. This book is useful to readers in indigenous, settler colonial, and decolonial studies around the world, not just because it offers substantive content on indigenous knowledge in Taiwan, but also because it offers conceptual tools for studying indigenous knowledge from comparative and relational perspectives. It also greatly benefits anyone interested in Taiwan studies, offering an ethical approach to indigeneity in a classic settler colony.

This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.

Minor Transnationalism moves beyond a binary model of minority cultural formations that often dominates contemporary cultural and postcolonial studies. Where that model presupposes that minorities necessarily and continuously engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical relationship of assimilation and opposition, this volume brings together case studies that reveal a much more varied terrain of minority interactions with both majority cultures and other minorities. The contributors recognize the persistence of colonial power relations and the power of global capital, attend to the inherent complexity of minor expressive cultures, and engage with multiple linguistic formations as they bring postcolonial minor cultural formations across national boundaries into productive comparison.Based in a broad range of fields-including literature, history, African studies, Asian American studies, Asian studies, French and francophone studies, and Latin American studies-the contributors complicate ideas of minority cultural formations and challenge the notion that transnationalism is necessarily a homogenizing force. They cover topics as diverse as competing versions of Chinese womanhood; American rockabilly music in Japan; the trope of mestizaje in Chicano art and culture; dub poetry radio broadcasts in Jamaica; creole theater in Mauritius; and race relations in Salvador, Brazil. Together, they point toward a new theoretical vocabulary, one capacious enough to capture the almost infinitely complex experiences of minority groups and positions in a transnational world. Contributors. Moradewun Adejunmobi, Ali Behdad, Michael Bourdaghs, Suzanne Gearhart, Susan Koshy, Francoise Lionnet, Seiji M. Lippit, Elizabeth Marchant, Kathleen McHugh, David Palumbo-Liu, Rafael Perez-Torres, Jenny Sharpe, Shu-mei Shih , Tyler Stovall

"Quite apart from her contributions as a literary critic, Shu-mei Shih is able to historicize literary developments of the period most persuasively. Her analysis of Shanghai, the city, and the literary movement it spawned, is crafted with great sensitivity to both history and literature. In many ways, it is the most inclusive historical study of modern Chinese literature in its formative period."--Prasenjit Duara, author of "Rescuing History from the Nation"

"This is the most thoroughly researched study of Chinese modernism published to date. The author's theoretical interventions greatly enrich our understanding of colonial modernity and the stakes of comparison in cross-cultural studies. The book is a major contribution to modern Chinese literary studies and comparative literature."--Lydia Liu, editor of "Tokens of Exchange"

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back--investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines--offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and "French theory" originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chance, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. edouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. "The Creolization of Theory" is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities.

"Contributors." etienne Balibar, Dominique Chance, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, edouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Francoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

"The reader may be startled by the juxtaposition of visual and phonic in the title of this stimulating volume. Shih does it with a purpose. The Sinophone refers more to a people than a voice, as the basis for affinity across global spaces, that confers a commonality upon them even as they follow diverse historical trajectories. The visual confirms this commonality, even as it opens up those same people to forces of cultural globalization, forces that themselves both unite and divide. The deconstruction of categories such as China or Chineseness always seems to invite their reconstruction on new bases. Shih offers a novel and illuminating account of this double motion in the contemporary production of a 'global Chinese' (Sinophone) culture through visual media. An important addition to cultural and diasporic studies in the China field."--Arif Dirlik, author of "Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism"
"Against the backdrop of what she calls the Sinophone Pacific--that representational time-space traversed by polyphonic articulations of de-standardized Chineseness as well as by myriad visual mediations-- Shu-mei Shih offers an admirably global vision for minoritized culture production. Her analysis of gender, class, language, and cultural politics is as trenchant as her challenge to China-centrism is timely. A remarkable critical accomplishment."--Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University
"Tracing the spectral production of 'Chinese' identity as it is disseminated globally, Shih boldly moves away from using place (ethnicity) and the body (race) to anchor Chinese identity, to argue that the visual (film) and the verbal (languageand linguistics) are the most salient ones in the modern and contemporary historical formation. She succeeds brilliantly."--David Palumbo-Liu, author of "Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier"

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back--investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines--offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and "French theory" originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chance, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. edouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. "The Creolization of Theory" is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities.

"Contributors." etienne Balibar, Dominique Chance, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, edouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Francoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih