The setting for Becoming Taiwanese is Taiwan's northern port city of Jilong (also known as Keelong, Gelang, and Kiirun). With a swerve away from the two most often discussed settlements on the island (Tainan and Taipei/Taihoku), Evan Dawley has crafted a new lens to ponder the question of “becoming Taiwanese.” With that lens, he investigates institutional and social conditions in the city as revealed in statistical and archival evidence, exposing the complex conditions that brought key players into a performance of new ethnic identities.
Of the many things accomplished in Dawley's study, two stand out: first, his building out of a common assumption in Taiwan studies, and second, his explanation of how certain intellectual contradictions might have emerged in previous scholarship. A common argument is that Taiwanese consciousness emerged only with the coming of the Japanese colonial settlers, who named the various Chinese populations as “islanders.” Here Dawley shows how...
