Today, 1945 is widely recognized as a moment of global re-ordering. Through redrawn borders and population displacement, the immediate postwar declares itself as a watershed even while in practice political precedents and perceptions persisted. This talk looks at the relationship between language, power and identity in Taiwan during this period, exploring the syncretic bleed between pre- and post-1945 approaches to linguistic governance by the Japanese imperialist government and their Chinese Nationalist Party successors. In particular, it focuses on the control of the movement between languages – including Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and to some extent English – as essential to defining imperialization and post-imperialization in Taiwan’s public sphere. Rather than characterizing regime change as divergence, the imitation of linguistic policy, republication of texts and comparative commentary on both governments instead points to patterns of repetition and borrowing that stretched across the end of empire.

Dr Aoife Cantrill is Laming Junior Research Fellow in Living Foreign Languages at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Previously, she has worked as a research fellow at National Taiwan Central Library, and as Lee Kai Hung postdoctoral research associate and lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research looks at textual culture in Chinese-speaking territories of the Japanese Empire, with a particular focus on gender, material culture and translation.