Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation

Recently I have read the following book Its main points are:

Book title: Leo Ching. 2001. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Main points:

-ch. 5 – “here I am interested in reconstituting two crucial issues of colonial/postcolonial studies: identity and historicity. In this chapter, through a contextualized reading of the orphan of Asia, I argue that the reconstitution of consciousness offers a more historical and thus critical alternative in conceptualizing colonial violence than the politics of identity.”(176)

- the book argues that “the novel opens up a larger historical canvas that depicts the irreducible colonial-national-local triangulation between Japan, China, and Taiwan throughout the Japanese colonial period.  The orphan of Asia presents an allegory of Taiwan’s gradual ‘coming into being’ with the intensification of colonial rule and its disillusion with Chinese nationalism.”(176)

-“the difference between Chen and Sung is stark. For Chen, the ‘orphan mentality’ is an impediment to the channeling of a Taiwanese identity into a grander Chinese identity. For Sung, on the contrary, the orphan signifies the very essence of Taiwanese-ness, the signifier that severs itself from both national (China) and colonial (Japan) representations through the sentiment of rejection and abandonment.”(184)