Colors of the Empire: Visual Representations of Race and Gender in Colonial Taiwan

Yen-Yu Lin’s dissertation project, Colors of the Empire: Visual Representations of Race and Gender in Colonial Taiwan, examines the racialized and gendered “rule of difference” through material culture with an empirical focus on Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945). This project shows why the global aesthetic system in pursuit of visual whiteness functioned as an intersectional apparatus of colonial governance in Japan’s non-white, “same-race” empire. Given the multiplicity of imperial powers that impinge upon colonial Taiwan, this project engages with multiple global systems of racialization—Indigeneity, Chinese-ness, and Japanese-ness—under the overlapping shadows of the Japanese empire, the birth of modern China, and the US empire.