| This dissertation examines the historical construction of local, ethnic, and national identities, and the creation of a new Taiwanese ethnicity, in the port city of Jilong (Keelung), Taiwan, focusing on the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) and its immediate aftermath. Taiwan's historical development occurred within the context of the decline of the Qing Dynasty, the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire, and the civil war between Nationalists and Communists in Mainland China. In this era of structural changes Jilong became the largest port on the island and a frontier area where Taiwanese, Japanese, and Chinese congregated and interacted as they built a colonial and post-colonial society.; Multiple identities were in formation in this period, including a local Jilong identity that both Japanese and Taiwan's islanders constructed as a shared conceptual space. For a time it enabled cooperation between these two groups, particularly their elite members, as together they built the city. At the same time, the islanders who descended from settlers from the Chinese Mainland constructed a new ethnic identity for themselves in contradistinction to the attempted imposition of an increasingly intolerant Japanese national identity. In so doing they relied upon religious traditions, a range of private and semi-private social organizations, and developed patterns of social welfare and social work. As they transformed themselves into a Taiwanese ethnic group, they built and maintained rigid conceptual borders between their group identity and resisted the Japanese officials and settlers who sought to assimilate them to Japanese social and cultural norms. In the post-colonial period, Taiwanese repelled the efforts by the Nationalist Chinese to impose their own national identity on the island and its residents, and so remained ethnically Taiwanese.; The central arguments of this dissertation are that identities and ethnicity are constructed from within and without; identities and borders are defined through the interactions of individuals and groups; actions are representative of identities; and ethnicity is a viable social category in its own right. In this last regard, I argue that the experience of Taiwanese ethnic formation provides an important counter-example to the dominant trend of nation-state formation in the 20th century. |
