Call for Papers: East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (Special Issue on Taiwaneseness in Contemporary Popular Culture)

The end of the martial law ushered in an intensified process of “Taiwanization” in many social and cultural fields, and Taiwanese identity has arguably become the favourite concern of English-language scholarship on Taiwan. However, while local/national identity as formulated in the cinema (especially during the 1980s and 1990s) has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention, many other areas and aspects of popular culture have remained relatively unexplored.

This special issue of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture seeks to throw some light onto such hitherto less visible areas, by focusing on the articulation of Taiwaneseness in cultural texts and practices from the most recent years. We welcome contributions that engage with the following questions: Does contemporary popular culture display a Taiwanese specificity, a local “cultural geometry”? What kind of cultural practices could define Taiwaneseness? Does popular culture openly undertake the task of constructing a Taiwanese identity, or is this task hidden between the lines? Does it assume (overtly or covertly) the existence of any kind of “other” for a contrastive definition of Taiwan? What is the relevance of other regions (such as mainland China, Japan, Korea, the United States, or others) in shaping what Taiwan now is? Does contemporary popular culture engage with issues of ethnicity? Does it revisit the past and employ history and memory for a national project?

Guest editor Adina Zemanek is looking for abstracts on the following topics: television, cinema, comics, fashion, fandom, street-style, celebrity culture, the body, popular fiction, music, dance, contemporary forms of traditional popular culture (performing arts, or others).

Deadline for abstract submission: January 31, 2016

Email for abstract submission: adina.zemanek@gmail.com or eajpopculture@gmail.com