Department of Comparative Literature

From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility: The Ethnography of a School in Nationalist Taiwan 

Speaker:
Professor Allen Chun, Research Fellow Emeritus, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica

Moderator:
Dr. Daniel Vukovich, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, April 6, 2023
Time: 4:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom and Face-to-Face
All are welcome. Registration is required.

https://bit.ly/CSGC6April2023

Beginning as a year-long ethnography of a school in Taiwan in 1991, it provides a concrete point of departure and framework of political-cultural practice for understanding the subtle evolution of a system of socialization that resides at the basis of an ongoing process of national identification. The 1990s is also a crucial juncture for viewing the transition from a sinocentric politicizing regime to a Taiwanizing one. The historical sociology that gave rise to the ethnography of 1991 in the speaker’s opinion offers a different critical perspective on contemporary Taiwan. The overt sinicization of early KMT rule in postwar Taiwan also provides a comparative viewpoint for assessing similar experiences in post-1997 Hong Kong.

Allen Chun is Research Fellow Emeritus in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. From August 2019, he has been Chair Professor in the Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. His interests involve cultural theory, nation-state formation, transnationalism and identity, and his research has focused mostly on Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. His recent books include “Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification” (SUNY 2017) and “On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification” (Berghahn 2019).

For registrants who select Zoom, we will send you the link prior to the event. For registrants who select Face-to-Face (F2F), we will write to you prior to the event with the venue location. There is a limited quota for F2F and we apologise if we are unable to accommodate all requests.

Enquiries: Georgina Challen – gchallen@hku.hk