Taiwan

This project uses the many religious sites in the red cypress forest of Alishan to investigate conceptions of human and nonhuman personhood in twentieth century 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).

“Colorism” — the institutionalized hierarchy which privileges white or light skin color — appears to have been increasingly globalized in recent years.

The CGII grant will support the final stage of my dissertation research, which entails examines how Tibetan communities on the margins of the Sinosphere use supplemental education programs to navigate Chinese hegemony exerted through mainstream schooling.

As Japan built its empire in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it enforced assimilationist policies that changed the lives of the people in its territories.