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- Lectures
- Institute of European and American Studies
- Location
1F Conference Room, Institute of European and America Studies, Academia Sinica
- Speaker Name
Kiki Zhao (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, University of California, San Diego)
- State
Definitive
- Url
https://www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/Content_List_Page.aspx?pid=0&uid=237&cid=65437
2025-12-26 14:30 - 16:30
Abstract
This speech is about my dissertation project, "Transpacific Intimacies: Everyday Work, Taiwanese Civilians and American GIs, 1951-1979," is a social and cultural history of US military involvement in Taiwan from 1951 to 1979 from the perspective of Taiwanese civilians and American GIs.
It examines how Taiwanese civilians' everyday labor working within the US military facilities as contractors dealing with logistics, driving, cooking, tidying, caring for, and/or providing sexual service to American GIs sustained the US military infrastructure in Taiwan, a crucial nexus for the United States to advance its military, economic, and ideological interests in Asia and the Pacific during the Cold War. It also studies how Asian/American and Black American GIs who were stationed at or passed through Taiwan interacted with and developed relationships with local civilians, often leading to their questioning of the roles of the US military and reckoning with their own racial and political identities.
It pays special attention to the gendered and racialized labor of local women, arguing that these quotidian, everyday labor and intimate encounters forged between civilians in Taiwan and non-white American GIs shaped domestic and international relations on both sides of the Pacific in ways that have not yet been fully appreciated by either scholars of the US empire or Taiwan/China Studies.
It argues for the importance of placing the study of Taiwan within the vast literature on the "empire of bases." In so doing, my project asks: 1. Why, as scholars critique the US military bases elsewhere, is a critical study of its military presence in Taiwan lacking? 2. Is "occupation," a state that is commonly used to describe conditions under US military rule in places like Okinawa, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Hawai'i, an apt characterization of the US presence in Taiwan even if it was not described as such locally?
Combining archival research and oral interviews in Taiwan and the US, this project aims to bridge the gap in modern histories of the US empire and East Asia.
