One of the perks to being a qualitative humanities scholar is that I get to call a lot of things “research.” This doesn’t always make for an ideal work-life balance, but it does set the stage for hours of wild speculation about the minutia of daily life, particularly when two qualitative researchers get together over drinks.
Two Ethnomusicologists Walk into a Bar. Really.
The setting for this particular meeting of ethnomusicological minds was the bar 島 Dau (meaning “island”), recommended by my inimitable colleague, who was my co-researcher on this particular trek.
The bar is secreted away in one of the labyrinthine alleys that give so much of Taipei its unique character. For readers in the US, “alley” is a bit of a misnomer. These are not the foreboding alleys of Gotham City fame, nor even the dumpster- and trash-filled alleys of New York City, but the vibrant heart of a cosmopolitan, global city. Within a few meters of 島 Dau are a Southeast Asian restaurant serving classics like roti prata, laksa, and teh tarik, and a spectacular Hong Kong diner so chockablock with neon lights and pictures of Bruce Lee at his most ripplingly bare-chested, and accompanied by a playlist so full of Leslie Cheung 張國榮, that it could be its own entry in my nostalgia series.
Visually, 島 Dau itself is sort of the love child of the sleek modernity of Manhattan nightlife, the neon idyll of Light the Night, and the self-conscious kitsch of a tiki bar. Oh, and for reasons unknown, there are anime characters on the menu.
This rather unlikely combination of stylistic elements is the kind of situation that tempts me to think, “Only in Taiwan.” And yet, essentializing statements like, “Only in [place X],” are really comments on the ways that national identity is constructed, represented, and received. These are the scenes where the mundane reality of nationalism comes to permeate the social fabric of our daily lives.
How Did We End up at Nationalism?
First, I should confess: if you thought that I can go on about nostalgia ad nauseum, hoo boy, have I got bad news for you. Nationalism is at the heart of my research, and once you start to focus on it, it’s easy to see it pretty much everywhere. The French Revolution, Cuban Revolution, or China’s Cultural Revolution? Nationalism. National anthems at sporting events? Nationalism. American flag bikini tops with ten-gallon hats? Yup, you guessed it.
But what is nationalism? Nowadays, nationalism is often used colloquially to describe a state of mind (i.e., “so-and-so is a nationalist”), usually with negative connotations. But I study nationalism as a process, not as a state of being. It is the process by which massive groups of people who will never meet one another come to see themselves as belonging to the same group.1 Nationalism is not necessarily a political process (think “Red Sox nation” or “Wolverine nation”), but rather a social process that is uniquely suited to political formations.
When we make a statement like, “Only in [place X],” we are essentially commenting on the ways that we perceive the collective imagination of a particular group. We can make this comment about ourselves (the “rueful self-recognition” that Michael Herzfeld refers to as cultural intimacy)2 or about others. But because nationalism is a process, not a state, it is constantly being renegotiated in all the minor spaces of daily life, from the evolution of national symbols (is apple pie still as American as apple pie?), to the ways in which we express and display our national belonging.
And with that, let’s head back to 島 Dau.
The Menu That (Could Have) Launched a Thousand Dissertations
Ok, maybe not 1,000. But I honestly found 島 Dau’s menu fascinating. The menu explicitly uses tea-based cocktails to make a claim on Taiwanneseness, while the black-and-pink anime figures on the menu (including a famously flexible pirate) use an international visual vernacular to create a cosmopolitan atmosphere. The menu’s varied imagery contains anime-style images of gods, gangsters, and even a rather curious picture of an enormous octopus with its tentacles wrapped around a gender-ambiguous human figure that appears to be wearing high heels and little else.
But what I find most interesting here are the menu’s section headings. These include “1990s Memory,” “Ocean,” “Faith,” and (most provocatively) “Colonial.” If I think of the characteristics that I routinely hear invoked to define Taiwaneseness, this seems like a pretty good list. Many of my Chinese teachers speak fondly of their memories of the 1990s, when a wave of political movements used 1990s-era memories of the White Terror and the 228 Incident to push post-martial-law Taiwan firmly towards democratization. The ocean figures prominently in Taiwan’s national imaginary, reflected in the dominance of Taiwan’s sea shipping industry, the ubiquitous local pride in Taiwan’s beaches and marine life, and the increasing embrace (or instrumentalization) of the island’s Austronesian aboriginal communities. Faith remains an organizing factor for much of society, not just in the many festivals and temples that attract tourists in their tens of thousands, but also in the form of little neighborhood temples, like the one in the storefront connected to my apartment building, where the strong smell of incense inevitably makes me look through the tinted windows every time I walk by.
Of all the headings, I’m most fascinated by 島 Dau’s choice to lean into Taiwan’s colonial identity. There is no doubt that Taiwan is an island that has been subjected to repeated rounds of colonization: the Spanish and Dutch, Ming Dynasty restorationists, Qing Dynasty bureaucrats, Japanese imperialists, and KMT refugees, each successive wave of colonizers has left a mark on local language, cuisine, arts, aesthetics, and customs.
But for many former colonies, the fact of colonization is a source of shame. It represents a rupture, when the (usually imagined) “cultural purity” of the past is irrevocably lost to the violence of invasion.3 At 島 Dau, however, the colonial past is folded into the light-hearted iconography of the menu, painted in the glow of pink neon light fixtures, and emotionally softened through a playlist of contemporary Mandopop power ballads that is remarkably similar to the algorithmically constructed one that a certain major streaming platform built for me at my work desk in Chicago. The cumulative effect is both resolutely local and resoundingly global. It is the distinct product of Taiwan’s unique history and contemporary local conditions. “Only in Taiwan,” indeed.
Soooo … ?
What’s the takeaway from this? Heck if I know. But 島 Dau is definitely a space, an aesthetic, a vibe that pokes at many of the thorniest elements of Taiwanese national identity. It gives us a glimpse of the ways that nationalism—that contentious, imaginative process—unfolds in the most unlikely nooks and crannies of daily life. And it certainly provided these two ethnomusicologists with plenty of conversation fodder. Enough, in fact, that we might need to go back for follow-up research.
Perhaps the most influential text on nationalism is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), but nationalism studies has produced many classic texts, such as Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1983), Etienne Balibar’s Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verson, 1991), and Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). The topic of nationalism has also occupied many music scholars, as in Thomas Turino’s Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago: UChicago Press, 2000), Philip Bohlman’s prolific works, including Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (New York: Routledge, 2011), and Anna Schultz’s Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Michael Herzfeld’s Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016) is another text that can be counted amongst the classics of nationalism studies.
To clarify, I am only suggesting that culture is rarely “pure,” with or without colonialism. This in no way changes the violence of externally imposed cultural change brought about by colonization.