Taiwan Education and Research Program, Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and East Asian National Resource Center Presents

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

7:30 pm – 8:45 pm EST

Zoom Event

Join us for a book talk with Professor Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang on his book “The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan“

About

The Great Exodus examines one of the least understood forced migrations in modern East Asia—the human exodus from China to Taiwan following the Nationalist collapse and Chinese Communist victory in 1949. Peeling back layers of Cold War ideological constructs on the subject, the book tells a very different story from conventional historiographies the Chinese civil war and Cold War Taiwan. Underscoring the displaced population’s trauma of living in exile and their poignant “homecomings” four decades later, Yang presents a multiple-event trajectory of repeated traumatization with the recurring search for home, belonging, and identity. By portraying the Chinese civil war exiles in Taiwan both as traumatized subjects of displacement and overbearing colonizers to the host populations, this thought-provoking work challenges the established notions of trauma, memory, diaspora, and reconciliation. It speaks to the importance of subject position, boundary-crossing empathic unsettlements, and ethical responsibility of researching, narrating, and representing historical trauma.

Registration

The event is open to the public. Registered guests will receive details for joining the Zoom meeting.

Speaker

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Associate Professor of History, The University of Missouri

Moderator

Liana Chen, Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature; Director, The Taiwan Education and Research Program (TERP), GW

Speaker

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (楊孟軒) is an Associate Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History, University of Missouri-Columbia. Dominic completed his PhD in the Department of History, University of British Columbia (2012). He has been a recipient of multiple SSHRC awards (Canada) and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation grants, as well as the Taiwan Fellowship. Dominic has published articles in journals such as China Perspectives, Taiwan shi yanjiu (Taiwan Historical Research), Journal of Chinese Overseas, Historical Reflections, and Journal of Chinese History. His first book The Great Exodus from China won the Memory Studies Association First Book Award in 2020, and in 2021, was selected as a Finalist for the International Book Award in the category of History: General. For his research, Dominic also received University of Missouri Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Research and Creative Activities Award in 2020. He is the first faculty in University of Missouri Department of History to receive this honor in the award’s twenty-year history.

Moderator

Liana Chen is an Assistant Professor of Chinese language and literature at the George Washington University. She holds a PhD from Stanford University, and an MA from National Taiwan University. Dr. Chen is the author of Literati and Actors at Work: The Transformations of Peony Pavilion on Page and On Stage in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2013). Her areas of teaching and research focus on Chinese drama and theatre, Chinese literature of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and Taiwanese literature and film. Liana Chen’s research has been supported by The American Council of Learned Societies and Sigur Center for Asian Studies at GW.