Comparatizing Taiwan

Shu-mei Shih is Hong-Yin and Suet-Fong Chan Professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

Comparatizing Taiwan examines Taiwan's many relationalities, material as well as symbolic, over a significant historical and geographical span, and views Taiwan in relation to other islands, cultures, or nations. Through an examination of socio-cultural phenomena in Taiwan, it situates Taiwan globally, comparatively, and relationally to bring out the richness of Taiwan as such, and offers a model for studying small nations elsewhere. 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.

Introduction: Why Taiwan? Why Comparatize? Part I: Taiwan in Comparison 1. Comparativism and Taiwan Studies: Analyzing Taiwan in/out of Context, or Taiwan as an East Asian New World Society 2. Tiger's Leap into the Past: Comparative Temporalities and the Politics of Redemption 3. Comparison for Com-passion: Exploring the Structures of Feeling in East Asia 4. Archipelagoes of Taiwan Literature: Comparative Methods and Island Writings in Taiwan 5. Paradoxes of Conservation and Comparison: Taiwan, Environmental Crises, and World Literatures 6. Weak Links, Literary Spaces, and Comparative Taiwan 7. Far-fetched Lands: The Caribbean, Taiwan, and Submarine Relations Part II: Imperial Conjunctures and Contingencies 8. Is Feminism Translatable? Spivak, Taiwan, A-Wu 9. Voices of Empire in Dubliners and Taibenren 10. Body (Language) across the Sea: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Embodiment of Post/colonial Modernity 11. Interlingual Discovery: Sato Haruo's Travels in the Colony 12. Taiwan's Postcolonial and Queer Discourse in the 1990s 13. Taiwan after the Colonial Century: Bringing China into the Foreground