bourdieu_boy

I have another chapter in a new book that just came out with HKU Press. The chapter is "How to Speak About Oneself: Theory and identity in Taiwan. Book blurb as follows.:

What difference does a region make? Are the new regional cultures of Northeast Asia the product of individuals fighting to overcome national trade barriers, or are they driven by governments promoting national interests in new ways? Are they the result of economic pursuits alone, or do cultural and political forces play a role? Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia takes a Cultural Studies approach to the cultural industries in Northeast Asia. The volume opens with an innovative section considering the discipline itself as a kind of cultural industry, highlighting the challenges and possibilities that arise from the context of Northeast Asia. Other essays on specific cultural industries and their products range in coverage from labor in the Korean animation industry to anti-Korean manga in Japan, the emergence of an East Asian brandscape, Chinese consumption of Japanese animation, the Asian regional strategy of the Pusan International Film Festival, and more.

The publication of Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia marks one of the first efforts to address the emergent shape and shaping of a distinctive Northeast Asian cultural sphere in our time and surely represents the best portrayal of the complex tapestry embracing the plural forces of nation, market and cultural industries that is currently constituting this new configuration. From 'Cool Japan,' regional 'brandscapes' to hybrid forms of animation, politicized cartoons, and regional pop music, these essays explore how cultural studies has expanded its disciplinary vocation to meet the demands of a cultural zone different from the usual suspects and expanded its reach to examine policy and the cultural industries implicated in figuring and producing this new cultural unity. Above all else, the collection authoritatively demonstrates the continuing tension between envisioning a Northeast Asian cultural imaginary as a displacement of older historical grievances capable of exceeding the nation and the more difficult labor of realizing political and economic cooperation among the region's nations to actualize a new history." – Harry Harootunian, New York University

"This timely and erudite intellectual interrogation of regionalism offers a potent counter-discourse to challenge nation-state boundaries and problematize the binary model of globalism/localism. There is no comparable book on the market." – Ming-bao Yue, University of Hawai'i at Manoa


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An animated short film from 1999 by Los Angeles-based Taiwanese filmmaker Charlene Shih. It uses Chinese characters and references to shanshui painting as a basis of its artistic language. The title is a play on the English and pinyin romanization "women", meaning "us" in Chinese.

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I have a chapter in a new book that just came out with Routledge. Blurb as follows:

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of ‘Taiwan Studies’, and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future.

As the study of Taiwan shifts from being a provincial back-water of sinology to an area in its own (albeit not sovereign) right, a combination of established and up and coming scholars working in the field of East Asian studies offer a re-reading and re-writing of culture in Taiwan. They show that sustained critical analysis of contemporary Taiwan using issues such as trauma, memory, history, tradition, modernity, post-modernity provides a useful point of departure for thinking through similar problematics and issues elsewhere in the world.

Re-writing Culture in Taiwan is a multidisciplinary book with its own distinctive collective voice which will appeal to anyone interested in Taiwan. With chapters on nationalism, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, religion and museum studies, the breadth of ground covered is truly comprehensive.

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A relatively confusing trailer for Cape No.7, with rough English subtitles.

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An editorial piece published in a newspaper this week in Australia.

Since August, the island of Taiwan has been in the grip of the movie phenomenon “Cape No.7”. It is a rare thing in any country, a locally-made film that has smashed box-office records, becoming not just the most successful local film of all time, but the second most successful film in Taiwan ever, after Titanic.

Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945, when it was passed to the Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek, and Cape No.7 tells parallel love stories between the last days of colonial rule and the present day. In 1945, a young man is repatriated to Japan and writes love letters on the ship to the Taiwanese girl he is leaving behind. They are addressed in the old Japanese way to a place called Cape No.7 and are never delivered. Sixty years later, a young failed rock singer working as a postman is given the letters, and a chance at success and love with a Japanese woman who is promoting a rock music festival in his hometown.

Cape No.7 is a feel-good story of personal redemption, complete with rock concert finale and a public declaration of love by the hero, and perhaps Strictly Ballroom is the nearest Australian equivalent. However, rather than through family relationships, redemption is achieved by the narrative link to Taiwan’s Japanese past. Evoked with an intense nostalgia, the colonial love story offers the truth and virtue that allows the young man to find his way through his contemporary discontents.

The success of Cape No.7 and its representation of Taiwan’s colonial history comes during an improvement in Taiwan’s political relationship with China. In the legislative and presidential elections earlier this year, the Democratic Progressive Party suffered heavy election defeats to the KMT. The electorate was tired of the divisive identity politics of the former president Chen Shui-bian and the DPP had lost much of its moral authority through a series of corruption scandals. The KMT came back to power on a campaign to boost economic growth and repair China relations.

Many of the domestic economic promises of the KMT have proven to be very unrealistic, greatly exacerbated by the global economic crisis, and the popularity polls of the new president Ma Ying-jeou have fallen towards 25%.

On relations with China, however, the KMT government has pressed ahead with the support and encouragement of the Chinese side. Under a policy of “no independence, no unification and no military action”, as well as ingenious conceits such as the “1992 Consensus”, discussions between the Taiwanese and mainland China have reopened on fundamental issues such as trade and transport. After years of stalled negotiations, direct travel and freight links have been agreed and mainland Chinese tourists have been coming to Taiwan, albeit in small numbers.

The improvement in cross-straits relations has been very enthusiastically received by the international community, long frustrated with the brinkmanship of the previous DPP government and its willingness to confront China while relying on an assumption of US support.

Now, the symbolic gestures towards Taiwanese independence of the DPP have been replaced with symbolic, and some policy, actions far more accommodating towards China.

During the visit by the Chinese representative Chen Yunlin to Taipei in November for the new negotiations, events were carefully staged and words carefully framed to avoid any suggestion of Taiwan’s sovereign status. The visit overlapped with the very public arrests and detention of former president Chen Shui-bian and other senior DPP officials on corruption allegations, and last week President Ma reportedly ruled out a visit to Taiwan by the Dalai Lama in 2009.

Demonstrations were held in Taipei against the Chinese visit, with the largest attracting half a million people, and the police countered very hostile crowds with violence of a level not seen since the dark days of martial law in the late 1970s. A student movement has sprung up, the Wild Strawberries, who have been camped in the old Chiang Kai-shek Memorial square for several weeks.

However, the phenomenon of Cape No.7 is a reminder that some of the most important political changes are not seen on the streets. Since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, a rich and profound process of history writing has been undertaken in politics, the media, academia and popular culture. Starting with the 2-28 Incident - the anti-Chinese Nationalist uprising of 1947 - and moving onto the Japanese colonial period and recently to the 1950s and 1960s, the Taiwanese have been recovering histories suppressed and erased during the period of authoritarian rule.

Cape No.7 is an upbeat marker of how those distinctive histories have become a received part of an affirming popular Taiwanese national history. The symbolic politics invoked by the new KMT government will no doubt have satisfied the Chinese government, and that is an important development in cross-straits relations, but Cape No.7 suggests that Taiwanese value both the history writing that is possible in a democracy and also enjoy the uniqueness of the histories that they have recovered.

Unfortunately, Cape No.7 has been banned in mainland China, and the representative Chen Yunlin has been reported as describing the film as expressing the legacy of “colonial brainwashing” of the Taiwanese by Japan. The Chinese blogsphere, while always overheated, has offered ferocious vitriol and condemnation of the film and of Taiwanese attitudes to Japan generally.

The international community might be happy about the direction of the new Taiwanese government, but it might also remain mindful that long-term and peaceful rapprochement between China and Taiwan will ultimately require an acknowledgement of the plurality of history and needs a way to acknowledge of the legitimacy of Taiwan’s unique historical experience. The success of Cape No.7 is a sign of just how far China and Taiwan yet have to go.


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Something I have been working on now I have returned home Australia.

The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is a long-overdue attempt from Australia to bring together academics doing research about the island of Taiwan. It is based around a "wiki", a closed interactive website. It is in its early days, but features internet generated content, such as news feeds, a forum, events calendar, and daily images of Taiwan. The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is based in Australia but open to scholars everywhere. The website requires registration and an "application" to join the network. Those interested can find it at:

http://atsn.wikidot.com


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The BBC's station identifier for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, animation produced by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz, using the classical Chinese adventure novel Journey to the West as its theme.

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And nicely timed, CBS News America ran this Assignment America story this weekend.

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This weekend I have been at St Antony's College, Oxford, for a post-election workshop on democracy in Taiwan. My brief was the media, and among the political scientists and Washington hard-heads, I did my usual gesture at epistemological critique. We enjoyed "High Table" in the cafeteria ... I mean, college dining hall, as well as St Antony's very own range of undrinkable wines and sherry. The event was successful and enjoyable and concluded with a very pleasant dinner at a local Italian with academic luminaries and the sparkle of political celebrity in the form of Bi-khim Hsiao, "Taiwan's Natasha Stott-Despoja*", who was literally and metaphorically on the road to recovery after the unimaginable physical and emotional demands of the presidential election campaign.** I finished the event off British style with an arduous journey back to London through a range of transport failures that took hours.

Here is approximately what I had to say at the conference.


The importance of the media in democracies has long been recognized by essayists, activists and theorists, from Thomas Carlyle to Jurgen Habermas to Samuel Huntington.

The media is part of democratic process, delimiting the power of states and empowering citizens by functioning to produce civil society or the public sphere by mediating between the state and the public.

In Lipsett’s early work, the media are a function of modernization or more properly modernity, which is a pre-condition of democratization - the theme of modernization or modernity is one which occurs again and again with respect to Taiwan, and even the title of this event - “consolidation” alludes to the temporality implicit in the notion of modernity.

Especially through Huntington, the media in Taiwan has been understood as part of a positivist explanatory mechanism of Taiwan’s democratization, what I have referred to an an equation of democratization, in which linguistic categories, like “media”, the “middle class”, the “economy” etc are lined up in logically causal relationships. So the emergence of a newspaper reading middle class in Taiwan through a booming economy in the post-WWII era is understood as a factor to have caused democratization.

In my own work I have been critical of this mode of social analysis. The objectification of socio-political life in this mode of political science implies a political and moral response to that life. Democracy was caused by the struggle by democracy activists, not objective social processes that do not demand a political engagement with that struggle by observers.

( Read more... )

* Or Australia's Bi-khim Hsiao.
** And, indeed, a political life and a life in politics.
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The rolling PR disaster that has been the global torch relay for the Beijing Olympics is in Australia at the moment for a run around the nation’s capital, Canberra. I had piece in the Canberra Times about it today.


When the Beijing Olympic torch relay runs through Canberra, it does so as an overloaded symbolic event, preempted by global news reporting in which protests and counter-protests have dominated the relay’s image-making.

The purpose of the relay, as suggested by the ACT Torch Relay Planning Committee, is to “cheer on our Australian heroes”. This is a perhaps optimistic but not unreasonable attempt to wrest the meaning of the torch back for an Australian audience. Yet it only adds even more to the weight of meanings that have burdened the torch since it was lit.

The lighting occurred in Greece with an invented ceremony. Through references to classical Greek civilization, it invoked the performance of an immutable historical tradition while actually looking like something out of a Ray Harryhausen movie.

( Read more... )

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The British press have offered up their reviews of Cloud Gate:

The left-wing Guardian

The right-wing, Murdoch-owned Times

The even more left-wing Independent

The right-wing Conservative Party favourite, Daily Telegraph

All broadly in agreement.


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An excerpt of of a performance by the Cloud Gate dance company from Taiwan, founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-min, of one of Lin's most famous pieces, Moon Water. Video requires Quicktime 7.

Later this year I am returning to Australia after nearly seven years living among the British in Great Britain. In early 2002, not long after I arrived here, I went to Sadler's Wells to see Moon Water by Cloud Gate, the famous contemporary dance company from Taiwan. It was a memorable evening. Cloud Gate have been back to London more than once in the intervening years, and indeed, I was lucky enough to be invited to an after-performance reception for the company at the Barbican in 2005. But this week, Cloud Gate have returned to do an encore of Moon Water, and we saw it last night. The performance seemed more vivid and intense than the first time. It made more sense, and it seemed to offer bookends on this period living here.

The whole work is set to Bach's suites for solo cello and makes complex references to a number of movement styles, but especially tai chi and qi gong. At the end of the piece, the stage is flooded with water, which reflects the dancers' bodies and movements. It's amazing.

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Beijing Olympics torch relay in London. Video requires Quicktime 7. As is now known, the blue tracksuited guards are Chinese military police cadets. Apparently, the British police called them "Smurfs".

It was a day of a certain amount of drama over the torch relay in London on Sunday. Both Sky News and the BBC gave it non-stop tv coverage through the day and both were on the lookout for any moment of violence.

The protests were almost all on the Tibet issue but there were a couple of elisions. One was that there seemed to be large numbers of people out in explicit support of China, but these were largely ignored by the media coverage, and secondly was the occasionally crass but rather hopeless sponsorship of the event by Samsung.

Ultimately, one can see how the symbolism of the torch was being messily and confusingly fought over. British Olympians and relay participants were trying to position the torch as representative of the Olympics while the protesters were treating the torch as simply representing the Chinese state.

Meanwhile, the actual Chinese state is clearly hoping to achieve a conflation of itself with the Olympics through its global deployment of the single unifying symbol of the torch, thus transubstantiating the meaning of both. It conspicuously failed to do so in London.

The photo-op by British PM Gordon Brown seemed to express these doubled meanings. At No.10 Downing St. he stood smiling next to the athlete holding the torch but pointedly refused to hold it himself. He seemed to be judging his proximity to the torch as some measure of his association with its different symbolic meanings.

The media went for a simple morality tale of power versus the powerless, in this case allegorically represented by the torch and the protesters, playing out on London streets the real violence and struggle for power within China. The pro-China supporters didn't really fit into this narrative, and poor Samsung and their mobile phones had no chance in such a symbolically overloaded event.


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Democratic Progressive Party Super Sunday Rally, Taipei, 16 March. Video requires Quicktime 7.

The "Trojan Horse" at this rally (0:21) was an elaborate visual pun on policy and personalities in the election campaign. It expresses a critique of a KMT policy for a free trade agreement between China and Taiwan, a so-called "one China market", as a "trojan horse" undermining Taiwanese sovereignty. And the surname of the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou also means "horse". Ma, horse, trojan horse, free trade agreement, giant wooden horse on wheels to be pushed around the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.


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The main Democratic Progressive Party rally for Hsieh Chang-ting's presidential campaign in Taipei, March 21. Video requires Quicktime 7.

It's hard not to get caught up in the drama of these events, and the DPP are the masters of political theatre, but the voters made their choice loud and clear.



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Hsieh Chang-ting's campaign headquarters, Kaohsiung. Video requires Quicktime 7.

On Saturday, Taiwan votes in its presidential election, and a group of us are here from European academic institutions. The result is as ever unpredictable, although the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou remains the front-runner. On Thursday afternoon, at the campaign office of the DPP candidate Hsieh Chang-ting, preparations for the final huge rallies on Friday night are in full swing. Here volunteers prepare the ubiquitous party flags for rally-goers.


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Next Saturday March 22 is the Taiwanese presidential election. ABC Radio National's "Rear Vision" program is covering Taiwan this week, and I was interviewed for it last Monday at the ABC studios in Portland Place in London. Overall, the interviewer was well informed, but the references in the introduction to an "independence referendum" show how far the media has to go before it understands the Taiwanese situation.

The likely election result seemed to be favouring the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou, but some bad behaviour by KMT legislators and the situation in Tibet might have given the DPP a sniff in the last couple of days. It is going to be an intense week.

A link to the program on ABC RN is here:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2008/2189619.htm


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I stopped in Hong Kong on my way to Taipei yesterday to take up a long-standing offer to have a local's view of the city. Hong Kong is a place I have been to more times that I can remember but somewhere I never feel I have had a chance to get to know.




Hong Kong island from the Star Ferry terminal. Duh.





The People's Bookshop coffeeshop in Causeway Bay. Maoist kitch/po-mo cool, Hong Kong style. The Little Red Book is actually the menu.





The New Territories.




The new MTR line that runs to the New Territories. Makes just about every other subway system in the world look 19th century.


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