Tell the Good Taiwan Story

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In contrast to the PRC campaign "Telling the Good China Story," this lecture seeks to tell not one but many good Taiwan stories. Instead of the monolithic discourse of nationalism that dominates global geopolitics, the stories of and from Taiwan have continuously compelled us to rethink the terms of narrativity and polity, from territorial sovereignty to indigenous identity, from translational exercise to transgressional impulse, and from historical precarity to environmental crisis. The works of writers such as Wu Mingyi, Chen Yaochang, Luo Yijun and Chen Xue highlight how despite the media boom in our time, storytelling constitutes the essence of our capacity to imagine a different world and therefore transform the status quo.

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is Director of CCK Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies, and Academician of Academia Sinica and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wang’s recent English publications include The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (2014), Harvard New Literary History of Modern China (ed., 2017), What Fiction Matters in Contemporary China (2020).

This event is part of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies’ "Taiwan in Dialogue” Lecture Series - Spotlight Taiwan Project, supported by a grant from the Taiwan Academy, Los Angeles and Ministry of Culture, Taiwan.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Pacific Center