Taiwan Extra and the Future of Sinophone Studies

 

This talk proposes the notion of “extra-Taiwan” and “extra-Taiwaneseness” as a new strategy in Taiwan studies. This approach treats Taiwan as an epistemological condition, moves beyond the geophysical constraints of Taiwan as a bounded entity, and considers cross-border movements central to the construction of Taiwan and Taiwaneseness. The examples of diasporic indigeneity, tea nationalism, indigenous queerness, and Taiwan studies programs/centers outside Taiwan will illustrate how Taiwan studies as a field is already grasping with the notion of “extra-Taiwan.” Such formulation shares with Sinophone studies the agenda to decenter various forms of political hegemony (what I call the seven “original sins”), including nationalism, essentialism, imperialism, assimilationism, diaspora, disciplinary alienation, and heteronormativity. “Extra-Taiwan” also moves Sinophone studies in a direction that exemplifies minor transnationalism at its best: a type of minor transnationalism between two regions expressed outside those two original locations. Political opportunities such as these will be one of the greatest challenges confronting Taiwan studies in this century.

 

 

Professor Howard Chiang, Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies. He has written two award-winning monographs on China, forming a duology of queer Asian Pacific history through the lens of knowledge production. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (2018) analyzes the history of sex change in China from the demise of castration in the late Qing era to the emergence of transsexuality in Cold War Taiwan. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (2021) proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (2019), a landmark 3-volume reference compendium. He is currently completing Trans Without Borders (under contract).