Allen Chun

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Fellow at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

book review of Becoming Global Asia. Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore

This paper challenges prevailing approaches to the "anthropology" of taste, in its presumed diffusion of a cultural tradition, the emphasis on semantic content in the literal constructions of taste, and flawed perceptions of the relationship between taste and cuisine. I argue that the construction of taste is best understood as the product of a reg...

In 2022 and 2023, Duke University Press published three major works as part of its Sinotheory series. Ban Wang's book explored the political ethos of tianxia underlying the advent of the new rise of China. Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau's volume of essays presented critical views of the latter in East Asia from the context of literary postcolonial...

The blooming of Taiwanese identity out of the dregs of the KMT’s mono-cultural nationalist hegemony combined with the advent of oppositional, cosmopolitan, multivalent and various emancipatory cultural trends then in turn pointed to the same unilineal evolution from nation-state monotheism to true cultural indigenization. Yet in actuality, the prec...

The linked and dependent interrelationship between the educational bureaucracy and the school cannot be underestimated. In addition to the top-down management of its organization and activities, there is a regular flow of directives and information that originates daily from the government. The systemic institutionalization of education was as impo...

As a social institution, the school is a product of its distinctive evolution, but it is mainly characterized by its ordinariness. At the same time, it is a fixture of its time, a model of modern discipline as well as an agent of sociopolitical action. The middle school in the northern Taiwan city of Hsinchu that I observed during 1991–92 had been...

What is a Nationalist ideology? If anything, the writing of political discourse reflects upon the role of the state as a thinking, acting and practicing the subject. In postwar Taiwan, the KMT regime took an unusually active role in invoking icons of traditional authority, writing myths of historical unity, advocating the legitimacy of certain shar...

This book is in short an ethnography of a middle school in Taiwan in the early 1990s. In literal terms, it describes a moment in time as well as an institution in social space. It is less a description of a cultural institution than an attempt to understand the mechanisms of power that have inscribed the school within other overarching institutions...

Education is “normal” in more ways than one. First of all, modernity is the era of the norm. It not only gave birth to the notion of society as the social structural framework upon which various institutions, behaviors, rites and practices were seen as functionally integrative, but it was also reinforced by theories of the norm in various incarnati...

Marcus and Fischer’s advocacy of cultural critique in anthropology, which I subscribe to wholly, is admirable, but it takes for granted the inherent nature of anthropology as the study of other cultures while more importantly sanctifying values of its implicit cultural relativism. The dialogical nature of ethnography refers to the reconciliation of...

In recent decades, migration studies has become a major academic cottage industry, in Taiwan as well as elsewhere. Migration is hardly new in global history, nor are experiences of economic exploitation and social injustice rooted in the systemic regulation of foreign labor. Its growth in the late twentieth century was not only the product of trans...

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, Taiwan has been universally praised for its policy actions in preventing its initial outbreak there from Wuhan and for its strict measures in containing its communal spread locally. Memory of the SARS crisis played a major role, but people in Taiwan forget that SARS was initially considered a problem confined mo...

This is, in short, a clearly written and comprehensively organized work, not only a meticulously researched history of the chile pepper in China but also, as the subtitle notes, a cultural life story of a spice (or plant) that played an important role in transforming regional cuisine and in turn other related aspects of society. As a history of foo...

The notion of colonial governmentality is the product of two intersecting themes, one being a deep product of Foucauldian reflections on the evolution of modern welfare states and the other being its political appropriation in a colonial context. David Scott’s essay on colonial governmentality was in this regard an attempt to bridge Michel Foucault...

These representations and politics of the invisible belong to the order of the imaginaire. As Deleuze said, "the imaginaire is not the unreal, but the inability to distinguish the real from the unreal. " All the same, the imaginaire is not constituted once and for all; it is "constitutive. "-Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity

What used to be viewed as relatively self-defined polities in a previous era … are now being reconfigured by competing centripetal and centrifugal tensions.

This paper began as an inquiry into the plight of ethnic Japanese in postwar Taiwan. As a group, they have been an object of benign neglect. Despite the advent of “multiculturalism” (duoyuan wenhua zhuyi) in Taiwan, was marked by an “alien” (mainlander Chinese) KMT regime and led to the eventual liberation of opposition parties and indigenous ethni...

What is the unseen presence of the nation-state? What is so mystifying about the state of social theory that has effectively masked the nature of its cultural hegemony? At the time of his initial writing, Geoffrey Benjamin’s ruminations on these themes were novel and theoretically critical. Thirty years on, many of these conceptual mysteries remain...

This is a review essay of James Clifford’s recent book, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, viewed in the context of his entire trilogy. The thematic transition from roots and routes to returns is the evolution of an approach to cultural relocations and indigenous histories that parallels Clifford’s subjective shift from that...

In Asylums, Erving Goffman once famously said that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no law. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault gave a more sociological spin on the normality of the prison, by saying that the apparatus of sequestration must manufacture a behavior that characterizes individua...

One might ask, what are the colors of cosmopolitan hybridity, and to what extent does or can the totality of representation that frames cultural discourse take on a life of its own? This paper examines the pictorial history of City Magazine (haowai) and the underlying mentalite that made it a successful voice in the emergence of 1980s pop culture i...

Within the discipline of cultural studies, the Americanization of popular culture in Asia seems to be taken-for-granted as a coherent whole and thereby unproblematized. This paper argues that such anti-hegemonic, anti-colonial approaches to culturalism are inadequate. Reflecting on cricket as British imperialists' moralizing, culturalizing and poli...

Contrary to definition, postcolonial critique is not even about colonialism, literally. What it really refers to on the other hand and in what sense it is ‘post’ are more difficult to answer. In short, the advent of postcolonial critique as a broad-based theoretical movement may have developed full scale in the 1990s, but its meaning and focus for...

Ethnoscape is a term coined by Arjun Appadurai in his essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (1990). One of five such terms, ethnoscape is defined as “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals...

Ethnoscape is a term coined by Arjun Appadurai in his essay “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy” (1990). One of five such terms, ethnoscape is defined as “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Allen Chun Allen Chun is an Associate Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Glossary cheng ch'eng-hu Chi-li lu ch'i ch'i-k'uang ta-chi chi-fa chia-li Chia-li i-chieh Chia-li ch'üan-chi Chia-li hui-t'ung Chia-li ta-ch'eng chia-li t'ieh-shih Chia-li t'ie...

The trope of identity has served in recent decades as a powerful construct in literary criticism, cultural studies, history, race and gender studies, invoking in turn identity politics of various genres. Despite its seemingly interdisciplinary usages and broad theoretical ramifications, the concept of identity has been conditioned by semantically f...

Identity politics has accented the primacy of subjectivity of all kinds. I deflate the importance of identity in the short term here, as a preamble for arguing that our identities have always been fictions that are shaped by underlying institutional forces; that is, contrary to what we think, these identities can change and are stratified less by t...

Abstract This paper examines the formulation and practice of British colonial land policy in the New Territories of Hong Kong shortly after the signing of the lease. Far from having put into operation a set of legal codes and administrative practices which mirrored indigenous custom hence rationally preserving the nature of traditional social organ...

Those of us in the ‘social sciences’ who take theory ‘seriously’ have been taught to treat ideas as ideas. The history of theory is thus the history of ideas as they have evolved from or in contradistinction to other ideas. Some disciplines even have ‘classical’ theory, a wellspring of concepts and frames of mind that have served to produce more co...

Examining the cultural, political, economic, technological and institutional aspects of popular music throughout Asia, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of Asian popular music and its cultural industries. Concentrating on the development of popular culture in its local socio-political context, the volume highlights how local appropriati...

The concept of cultural China, which has attempted to champion diasporic values in the construction of new Chinese identities, resembles the cosmopolitanism of Black Atlantic, which has become Paul Gilroy’s paradigm of counter-modernity, both through its appeal to hybridity and the emancipatory power of culture. Despite superficial similarities bet...

In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within our culture without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. (Said 1989: 217)

This paper attempts to examine the colonial experience of Hong Kong as a function of the historicity of British imperial rule, whose ideology and practice can be contrasted with experiences in other places (India, Oceania, Africa, etc.) as well as other times and where the changing nature of colonial governmentality can be seen to be influenced by...

boundary 2 27.1 (2000) 51-74 In this era of late modernity, it appears that academia has evolved to a stage where one might question whether its institutional practices and everyday regimes have actually produced a significant advancement in “knowledge.” The underside of what Stanley Aronowitz once called “the last good job in America” is what othe...

Much recent scholarly writing on the Taiwan "miracle" has shifted beyond the success of economic liberalization and toward a political transition that has seen the seemingly spontaneous dismantling of an autocratic regime and the heralding of democracy as an ideological mantle. Contrasts with the failure of perestroika and market reform elsewhere h...

This paper attempts to evaluate the current literature on descent and lineage organization in China and its significance for anthropological discussions of kinship theory. Despite increasing anthropological skepticism over the applicability of lineage theory and the corresponding decline of interest in unilineal descent, the existence of lineage or...

Space of Culture, Terror of State, or the 'Polities' of the NationState Nationality attempts in social practice what Hegel attempted in social theory. The fantasies which constitute the nationalist imaginary are themselves Hegelian in character; or to put it differently, Hegelianism simply transcribes the elisions and contradictions of the idea of...

L'A. retrace l'histoire des relations entre le gouvernement britannique et les habitants de Hong Kong en ce qui concerne la politique fonciere de 1841 (maintient de pratiques chinoises) a nos jours. Il montre que la conception utilitaire de la propriete de la theorie de M. Freedman concernant l'organisation lignagere est incompatible avec les notio...

Baker, Hugh D. R., Chinese Family and Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. xii + 243 pp. including chapter references, index, appendices, and glossary. $17.50 cloth.Wolf, Arthur P. and Chieh‐shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. xx + 426 pp. including chapter references, ind...

The phenomenon of pariah capitalism was effectively cast out of the mainstream of sociological attention most eminently through the writings of Max Weber. Perhaps quite rightly so, the pursuit of profit in what he called ‘adventure capitalism’ should not be confused with the ethos of rational calculation peculiar to modern bourgeois capitalism (Web...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1985. Includes bibliographical references (p. 420-451).