Taiwan Extra and the Future of Sinophone Studies: Insights from Professor Howard Chiang

Written by Qiuzi Mei

Edited by the Taiwan Gazette

Speaker bios

Professor Chiang specializes in East Asian Language and Cultural Studies while serving the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-Liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at UCSB. His research focuses on psychoanalysis, queer history, and trans reasoning across the Pacific.

Erin Y. Huang is a scholar of transregional Asian studies specializing in the aesthetics and politics of Chinese, Sinophone (Hong Kong and Taiwan), and Sino-American visual and literary cultures. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a certificate in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Irvine. Huang is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Duke University Press, 2020) and has taught at Princeton University and New York University. She is currently based at the University of Toronto..

On January 24th, 2025, the East Asian Studies Department and Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute welcomed Professor Howard Chiang from the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-hosted his lecture, part of the Global Taiwan series. This talk proposes a radical future of Taiwan Studies in collaboration with Sinophone studies. Professor Chiang presents on the concepts of “extra-Taiwan” and “extra-Taiwaneseness” as the next pivot in these fields of scholarship.

In the preface of the lecture, Professor Chiang provided an overview of the similarities between Taiwan Studies and Sinophone Studies --two disciplines that have been marginalized in global academia. In addition, Taiwan Studies is often seen as an appendage to China Studies, thus resulting in fewer specialized faculty and also publishing opportunities. Thus, these practical limitations discourage young scholars from participating in its study. Nevertheless, the differences between the two disciplines also deserve consideration. Sinophone Studies decenter the focus on Chineseness and engage with the diasporic communities, thereby avoiding the fixations of nation-state geographies.

On the other hand, limited by the national framework, Taiwan Studies is often preoccupied with a “geographical obsession with Taiwan itself.” Concomitantly, the current discipline falls short of capturing the trans-Atlantic activities of people, objects, and ideologies. Furthermore, Professor Chiang also examined the genealogy of Taiwan Studies and argues that the current body of scholarship still follows the premise of Taiwan as a bounded geographical entity.

To address this conceptual obstacle, Professor Chiang introduces the new approach through Taiwan as “an extra.” This extra means that, rather than considering Taiwan as a bounded identity, this new approach allows us to see Taiwan as a concept, an epistemological condition. This decentering move aligns with Sinophone studies. As the latter challenges the Han dominance and Han ontology in Chinese discourse, Taiwan studies can also expand their horizon to other cross-border movements, which are central to the construction of Taiwan and Taiwaneseness. Professor Chiang calls attention to the extra of geography, the extra of discourse, and the extra of temporality.

Professor Chiang further elaborated on this approach with four examples related to Taiwan. The first case is the mobility of tea production between Taiwan and Southeast Asia. While Taiwan merchants outsourced tea production to Southeast Asia, Taiwan’s ethnicity is consolidated through pathways outside of Taiwan. This gave rise to the second bubble tea alliance in Southeast Asia. This movement has gathered transnational support to confront the PRC government outside of Taiwan, alluding to the political infinity through Taiwan’s relationship with other countries. The third example is the queer and trans movement and Indigenous studies in Taiwan. For both the Austronesian indigenous and the queer communities in Taiwan, neither of them can be bracketed by the Western concepts of “indigeneity” or “LGBTQ.” The queer Indigenous movement in Taiwan exemplifies the extra of Taiwan and gives specific focus to the Adju, the two-spirit people in Paiwan people. Adju differs from the Han-Chinese label of Tongzhi (commonly used to refer to gay men), and it also does not conform to the Western notion of transgender. Professor Chiang believes that Adju may be a good vantage point for examining the potential of such extra as an alternative politics. The last example is the 2018 Taiwan LGBT Pride Parade in Taipei (?). This event is conditioned by Taiwanese migration experiences in North America, which unsettle the nation-state and political determinations of Taiwanese people (?). Moreover, this exposes the need to study Taiwan outside of Taiwan to see how it interacts and participates in global conservation.

In conclusion, this talk has illuminated a future for Taiwan Studies by critically adopting the approach of Sinohpone Studies. This approach shifts away from the idea of Taiwan as an unchanged geographical site to see it as an extension of time and space. Chiang states that Taiwan Studies should not be tethered to the island and rely on Taiwan's already assigned agency; instead, it should think beyond the epistemological constraints and release the potential of this discipline.