The Formosan ideology: Oriental colonialism and the rise of Taiwanese nationalism, 1895--1945 (Japan, China)

This is a study of colonial nationalism. Theoretically it asks why many colonies came to be imagined as nations by the natives. Empirically it explains why a Taiwanese nationalism, instead of a Chinese nationalism, emerged in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial rule in the 1920s. I review two theories of colonial nationalism, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, and find them suffer from structural incompleteness and empirical difficulties, which can be attributed to a bias that reduces colonialism to a European model and neglects Japan's oriental colonialism.; I revise these two theories to accommodate Japanese colonialism and combine them into one Anderson-Chatterjee thesis. The Anderson-Chatterjee thesis understands colonial nationalism as arising from actions of the colonized to critique and interpret an exclusively structured colonial space. Along this line, I argue that Taiwanese began to imagine Taiwan as nation as a result of the exclusion of Japan's oriental colonialism, and this nascent national imagining was developed into a full-fledged nationalist ideology by the Taiwanese through their struggle against the oriental colonialism.; I first re-conceptualize Japanese formal empire as an expanding nation-state and argue that Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Korea and Katafuto was a nationalizing colonialism aiming at incorporating these peripheries through a system of differential incorporation, which placed the peripheries in a state of institutional liminality and imposed on them a condition of double marginality. Next I show how the state of institutional liminality turned the colonial space of Taiwan into a national space in the minds of Taiwanese, who began to develop discourses of political nationalism out of contentions with the Japanese state in the 1910s and 1920s. Along their fight against Japan's assimilationism in the 1920s and 1930s, they also articulated a cultural nationalism. Both politically and culturally, the condition of double marginality compelled the Taiwanese to choose a pro-West and modernist ideological strategy to construct their national imagination. Last I test my argument against Okinawa and Korea.