This book began as a year-long ethnography of a school in Taiwan in 1991 then evolved more into a historical sociology of national formation and its cultural mindset. Cultural nationalism is a widely debated but poorly understood process. Contrary to prevailing perceptions, the Cold War may have given way to a more progressive open society, but the politicization of ethnicity hardened a more deeply entrenched cultural frame of mind. Instead of liberating an indigenous reality, Taiwanese consciousness has ironically polarized the political dead ends of reunification and independence. In the final analysis, the ethnography can serve as a paradigmatic case study for critical cultural studies. There are clear ramifications also for a comparative study of the cultural politics of other Chinese speaking or Asian societies and their histories.
Allen Chun is Chair Professor in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Program, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His interests involve cultural theory, nation-state formation, globalization and identity. His research focuses on Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. His recent books include Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (2017) and On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification (2019).
