Every 3rd Monday of the month, from 19 October 2020 to 21 June 2021, from 15h to 18h.

Address : Room 751, EHESS, 54 Bd Raspail, 75006 Paris.

Fieldwork Grants

Bibliographical References

Seminar Summary (in French)

This seminar will chart the different stages of an identity affirmation process expressed in Taiwan by what we might call “Formosan tropism”. Indeed, we will try to identify the historical and cultural framework within which an increasingly assertive and insular identity with regards to China was formed and advocated. While observing these identity mutations in light of the debates that continue to accompany them, we will also chart the memorial foundations by exploring memory spaces in Taiwan itself. We will focus just as closely on places linked to the Republic of China, and thus relating to the trajectory of the Chinese mainland, as to those places specific to Taiwan’s own historical and cultural experience. Our studies will deal with concrete, material and geographically located objects, but also with more abstract and diffuse incarnations of memory, such as political symbols, the terms and names for public and private spaces, figures from local and national history, the formulation of narratives, etc.

The seminar will call for the use of primary and secondary written sources in French, Chinese and English. It will also be an opportunity to project video footage, as well as fiction and documentary films connected with the theme of identity and memory.

In this fifth year of the seminar, we will continue our exploration of the concept of ‘making community’.In particular, we will question the way in which the past is mobilised at a time when the question of what is common, i.e. the feeling of a shared belonging to the same political and social space, is being asked. In doing so, we will focus on affects, with a more specific study of sensitivities.

This seminar is open to Masters and doctoral students, as well as the general public.