A series of talks, events, and workshops by Taiwan-based scholars, artists, and directors.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
reading and Talk by Yang Shuang-zi, author of Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, and translator Lin King
4:30PM, HG 1030
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-conversation-with-yang-shuang-zi-author-of-taiwan-travelogue-a-novel-tickets-1115887973969
WINNER of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
Soon a Taiwanese woman—who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism. Her works have been translated into Japanese and French.
Lin King’s writing and translations have appeared in Boston Review, Joyland, Asymptote, and Columbia Journal.
This event is hosted by the Global Asias Research Cluster and the Taiwan Academy of the Los Angeles Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office, and co-sponsored by UCI Illuminations, the International Center for Writing & Translation, and East Asian Studies.
Tuesday February 25, 2025
TALK AND WORKSHOP WITH PROF. LAWRENCE Z. YANG, INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH AND CULTURE STUDIES, NATIONAL YANG MING CHIAO TUNG UNIVERSITY
Workshop: Propaganda as Environment: Reading Media, Texts, and Archives beyond the Cold War Blocs
1-3PM, HG 1002
Please register here to receive pre-circulated texts: https://forms.gle/JuWz8jcFBgM5UA39A
This workshop focuses on Prof. Yang’s book project, Logistical Cinema: Nationalist Propaganda and the Media Culture of Cold War Taiwan, which examines the KMT’s cinema, literature, and print culture during Taiwan’s grand era of infrastructural planning, environmental mapping, and political cleansing. Through case studies on the USAID agricultural cinema, the informatization of crisis in civil defense campaigns, and the transformation of railway media systems, Yang demonstrates how a transmedial analysis of Taiwan’s rich Cold War archives facilitates the reconstruction of a hitherto obscured genealogy of media aesthetics and how these inquiries may help us rethink contemporary geopolitics of Taiwan, US, and China.
Talk: “Pixel Productivity: Social Education, Industrial TV, and the Rise of Professional-Managerial Vision in Taiwan”
4-6PM, HG 1030
Taiwan’s entry into its golden television era in the 1970-80s was intertwined with cold war geopolitics and international division of labor. As the KMT government sought to provide Taiwan’s skilled labor to subcontracted electronic manufacturing, which attracted US television giant RCA to establish its first Taiwanese branch, its technocratic leaders began to mobilize the island’s first TV network to propagate industrial, scientific, and military knowledge under the “social education” media campaign. The campaign carried the specific task of envisioning Taiwan’s transformation into an economy built upon professional and managerial expertise—in line with the appearance of its first semiconductor industry in Hsinchu. TV, as such, epitomized both the island-state’s industrial reality and the medium through which futures of scientific-managerial modernity could be imagined.This essay excavates this intertwined media history by looking into the productions of Kuangchi Program Service (KPS), a media studio founded in 1958 by Jesuit priest Philip Bourret, and its decades-long involvement with KMT’s social education TV. Focusing on A New Look at Modern Weapons (1981) and The Cutting Edge (1982), I will contextualize these two popular scientific education series against the emergence of self-help discourse, scientific management, and KMT’s aspiration for knowledge-based productivity.
Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming-Chiao Tung University. Previously a Research Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, Yang received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley with certificates in Film & Media Studies and Critical Theory. His research focuses on propaganda media industries and aesthetics in modern China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His broader research interests cover war and militarism, theories of materialism, and the intersecting industrial-technological histories of cinema, architecture, and urban infrastructure. At NCTU, he is developing a new project on China’s Belt and Road Initiative propaganda and its influences on the media production of South East Asia after the 2010s. Yang is currently completing a book manuscript titled Speculative Statecraft: Logistical Media and the Culture of Chinese Cold War.
Prof. Yang’s events are part of UCI Global Asias‘ 2024-2025 Taiwan Studies Series, and co-sponsored by the Yang Family Visiting Scholar Fellowship.
PAST EVENTS
November 22, 2024
Talk and Workshop with Prof. Ian Rowen, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University
Workshop: “Capitalist Surrealism, Cold War Fever Dreams, and Chinese Burning Man’s Nomadic Re-Enchantment of Global Exchange”
Friday, 11/22, 12:30-2PM, HIB 137
Playground of bohemians and billionaires alike, Burning Man’s Black Rock City is to the world of today what London was to that of Karl Marx: A dazzling epicenter of global culture and commerce, a veritable capital of the world economy, a place to prophecy the future. A nomadic desert urban form framed by paid and volunteer labor and filled with the gifts of participants, it temporarily centers a nomadic network of regional events and copycat projects that span the planet. In this workshop, we will consider it in relation with San Francisco, a fixed center of the global tech economy to which Burning Man serves as a cultural infrastructure, and Beijing, a party-state-corporate capital where Burning Man’s imagined economic and cultural value has attracted attention from high echelons of the Chinese Communist Party.
Following Kojin Karatani’s radical emphasis on modes of exchange, we will examine flows of spaces between Black Rock City’s gift economies, China’s nominal communist party-state and supposed 關係 (guanxi , relationship) culture, and the US’s nominal liberal capitalism. We will consider whether these modes of exchange constitute a novel aesthetic that might be named as “capitalist surrealism” in the midst of geopolitical conflict, and explore how they may refract, amplify, and resolve contradictions of capital and culture.
Talk: “Translating Taiwanese Eco-literature: Geopolitical Ecologies of a Contested Critical Zone”
Friday, 11/22, 4PM, HG 1030Thursday, 11/21, 4PM, HG 1010
Presenting a forthcoming co-edited volume of Taiwanese eco-literature in translation, this talk considers Taiwan’s contested statehood and fecund yet fragile natural environment as geopolitical affordances that subtend institutional and financial support for literary projects. Casting light on the production and circulation of multilingual texts, this auto-ethnographic examination of a transnational project affords a novel ecological view of ethnogenesis, nationalism, conflict, and cooperation in Taiwan and beyond.
Ian Rowen is Associate Professor of the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the author of One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell University Press, 2023), the editor of Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror (Cambria Press, 2021), and the lead translator of Tibetan Environmentalists in China: The King of Dzi (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). He has served as the Burning Man Project’s Taiwan and China Regional Contact, and continues to serve as an international Metaregional contact. Starting in March 2025, he will be Associate Professor and Inamori Frontier Fellow of the Kyushu University Institute for Advanced Study.
Prof. Rowen’s events are part of UCI Global Asias‘ 2024-2025 Taiwan Studies Series. Co-sponsored by Geographers at UCI and the Yang Family Visiting Scholar Fellowship.