New Books in Taiwan Studies

Today I talked to Andrew Small about his book No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West (Melville House, 2022). Winston Churchill famously described Russia in 1939 as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But as Andrew Small correctly argues here, China’s path forward has often been laid out quite explicitly by its authoritarian leader Xi Jinping in speeches to the Com...

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book...

Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2023) is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significa...

In this episode, our host, Niki Alsford, invites Prof Scott Simon, the Chair of Taiwan Studies at the University of Ottawa, to share his thoughts and reflections on Prof Hu Tai-li 胡台麗, who pioneered documentary ethnography in Taiwan. Prof Simon talks about how he considers Hu's contributions and influence in academia, especially on the subject of ethnic relations in Taiwan. He further shares hi...

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use touris...

In this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short story collection, Human Glitches. Lin comments on our transforming process as cyborgs. For Lin, sci-fi no longer represents futuristic imagination, but the very reflection of our technologically conditioned hyperreality. We chat about her fascination...

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Prof Dafydd Fell, Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The two discuss Prof Fell’s most recent book, “Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan” published by Routledge in 2021. In this engaging chat, Prof Fell shares with the audience how he decided to write a book on green...

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews the Taiwanese movie director Asio Liu on his most recent movie project on the Vietnamese refugee camps in Penghu. Many of us are familiar with the inexorable flow of Vietnamese boat people right after the end of the war in Vietnam. Though, very few know that some of the Vietnamese boat people landed in Penghu, in the Taiwan Strait, just off the w...

For this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Norbert Danysz, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2. We chatted about recent developments related to comics in Taiwan – the definition of “Taiwan comics”, their typology, and state promotion of this medium with the aim of building Taiwan’s soft power. To find out more about niche and mainstream comics, who reads them, how and for whom t...

In this episode, we have the pleasure to have Mr Chi Ta-wei, a renowned Taiwanese writer, talk about his acclaimed LGBTQ+ novel, The Membranes. Chi reviews this work which was published in the 90s and provides his reflection on how to re-read the novel in the context of the Anthropocene. We also chat about the influence of Japanese manga and anime on his Sci-fi world-creating and his view on conte...

For this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Maja Korbecka, a PhD candidate at Freie Universitat Berlin. We chatted about five East Asian films released between 2016 and 2022, and the topics of queer, sci-fi and the family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this instalment, we had the pleasure of hosting Teri Silvio, who works as Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology. We chatted about Teri’s recently published book, Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (2019), her previous work and current projects. To find out more about performance and animation, a Taiwan-centered mode of animation (ang-a...