Thammasat University students interested in Taiwan, political science, history, international relations, diplomacy, American studies, translation studies, Marxism, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, Cold War studies, area studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 9 November Zoom webinar on The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana.

The event, on Thursday, 9 November 2023 at 4pm Bangkok time, is organized by the School of Humanities, Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures and Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of international relations between Taiwan and the United States of America.

The speaker will be Professor Jon Solomon who teaches in the Department of Chinese Literature at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, France.

Students are invited to register for the event at this link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=90646

With any questions or for further information, please write to

gchallen@hku.hk

The new book by Professor Solomon, The Taiwan consensus and the ethos of area studies in Pax Americana: spectral transitions, is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

The words Pax Americana in the subtitle are a Latin term meaning American Peace, applied to the concept of relative peace in the Western Hemisphere and later in the world after the end of World War II in 1945, when the United States became the world’s dominant economic, cultural, and military power.

The event website notes:

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, and that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debates about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, and American studies, black studies, among others.

In a foreword, Emeritus Professor Naoki Sakai of Asian Studies at Cornell University, New York, the United States of America, states:

The book is devoted to an inquiry into the area of Taiwan. In the first place, it may appear to take up Taiwan as a subject-matter for the investigation to which the entire monograph is devoted, as a target of inquisitive gaze institutionally framed in the disciplines of area studies. In a conventional academic publication of this kind, neither the author nor the reader is expected to pay too much attention to the manner or conventional procedure in which the proper name Taiwan is assumed to signify, be referred to, or connote. In reading a book on Taiwan, one is not expected to pose such questions as, “What is meant by Taiwan?” “What procedures and presumptions allow one to take Taiwan for granted in this or that sense?” or “How am I solicited or seduced to seek to know about Taiwan?”. In the first place, it may appear that the author wants to discuss Taiwan and illustrate its multiple aspects in many different contexts by demonstrating his expertise as a specialist on Taiwan—and China, since Taiwan is often subsumed as a province or region under the larger area of China studies—that he has acquired over many years. Conventionally, it is expected that readers are to engage in the narrative offered by the specialist by accepting his claimed expertise or entrusting the disciplinary formation upon which his knowledge is built. Thereby, they are to join the author’s search for knowledge and engage in his endeavour to discover some truth, in this case, about Taiwan. For readers to accept the author’s expertise is not only to accept his authority as a specialist but also to accede to the disciplinary institution and its epistemology under which his specialised knowledge has been nurtured, with decades of training, apprenticeship, fieldwork, research, academic publication, and so forth. The author’s expertise, thanks to which we are enticed to read his book, is a product of the disciplinary as well as social institutions in which he was supposedly trained as an expert of knowledge production on an area. Without doubt, Taiwan is one such area. Both the author and the reader are supposed to engage in a certain regime of truth that is generally marked as “an area studies,” a particular naming that, as I discuss below, has become prominent globally since the late twentieth century. And it is important to keep in mind that the regime of truth in question is also a disciplinary one in the sense that, in this disciplinary discourse, both the reader and the author are trained and disciplined to operate in that regime. In other words, the regime of truth also serves as a discourse of subjective transformation or subjectivation. Accordingly and customarily, this book is classified into the genre of area studies on Taiwan—or China.

As soon as you open Spectral Transitions (allow me to abbreviate the title of the book hereinafter), you are made aware that the conventional desire to hear the voice of an area expert is betrayed every step of the way.

No doubt, this is a book about Taiwan in the first place. But subsequent to that, it is not on Taiwan, or, to put it succinctly, it is discernible that Jon Douglas Solomon is rather concerned with how the proper noun Taiwan serves as a referent in the diversity of registers, geographic, political, cultural, military, economic, epistemological, and so on; he draws your attention to the conditions and norms by which so-called Taiwan could be constituted in its multiple contexts; he is interested in the multiple histories in which not merely the residents in the territory governed by the sovereign state of the Republic of China since the days of the Allied occupation immediately after Japanese colonial rule, but also all those who participated in one way or another in the global hegemonic arrangement called Pax Americana were involved. Solomon wants to study not only the area of Taiwan but also the constitution of the area itself. For, the very plausibility of thematically addressing Taiwan as an area can never be dissociated from the historical prearrangement upon which the global hegemony of the United States was built. To challenge the enclosure of Taiwan as an area is to open it up to histories, or what the author alternatively calls “transitions.” Although the government of the United States flatly denies the colonial status of Taiwan, the sovereignty of the Republic of China (= Taiwan since 1949) has been subjugated to that of the United States of America on many occasions.

Subsequently it is important to recognise in what register—there are many of them, as a matter of fact—Taiwan is problematised. There are potentially multiple registers in which knowledge about it can be reflected on. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)