Image credit: Wiki Commons : 2024 Taipei Lantern Festival held in two weeks after Lunar New Year, the day of Lantern Festival.
This special issue, Feeling Taiwan, challenges the academic tendency to treat emotions as secondary to rational analysis. Instead, it argues that feelings are fundamental to understanding Taiwan’s history and lived experience. By examining affective registers—such as grief, pride, discomfort, and trauma—the collected articles demonstrate how personal feelings and structural forces intersect to shape social relations and knowledge production.
The six articles offer diverse entry points into these themes. Anne Sokolsky examines emotional mediation in Japanese colonial texts, while Hsiao-Man Cavalli and Lily Y.H. Lin navigate affect in party politics. Yang-Hsun Hou reflects on Han settler colonial identity through pride and guilt, and Judy Lee explores diaspora-making among Hongkongers in Taiwan. Additionally, Yu-Yueh Tsai addresses historical trauma via Lanyu’s housing modernisation, and Jung Chen investigates the emotional labour involved in queer reproductive journeys. This special issue, alongside the edited volume, proposes that studying Taiwan requires engaging with its complex affective landscapes to define realities
Feeling Taiwan: Emotions, Knowledge, and the Politics of Everyday Life Written by Po-Han Lee, Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe, and Yu-chin Tseng.
Expressing Emotions in a Colonial Text: Huang Fengzi’s Taiwan no shōjo (A Young Girl of Taiwan) Written by Anne Sokolsky.
Towards hope – the transformative power of affects in academia: On alternative ways of perceiving and narrating bipartisan politics in Taiwan Written by Hsiao-Man Cavalli and Lily Y.H. Lin