Becoming Taiwanese beyond control: reflections on a book in the wild

The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Dr Evan Dawley to give a talk as part of this year’s Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School on his book Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s–1950s, reflecting on its making, arguments, and afterlives.

How do books get made, and what happens to them when they leave an author’s hands? These are the questions that shape this talk about my first book, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, which has been out in the world for just over seven years. The book is an urban social history of Jilong, which makes the argument that the conditions of Japanese colonization and post-1945 Chinese re-colonisation provided the environment within which urban dwellers, who were themselves the descendants of an earlier phase of colonisation, created a new Taiwanese ethnic identity and community. 

Researched at a time when Japanese-era Taiwan’s history was emerging as a field of study and presented in popular memories, and written during the full-flowering of Taiwan’s democracy, the book was shaped both by the historical sources and the contexts of its own creation. Once it entered the world, the book took on a life of its own, it became something with which others could interact, respond to, and draw their own conclusions about. In this talk, I will discuss the very long process of producing this book, how it was shaped by my own ideas and the circumstances in which it was researched and written, and how I view what has become of it after I ceased to have control over it.

Image credit: Andy Kuo via Unsplash.