The invisible ones: The politics of culture work among Taipei's Hakka (Taiwan, China)

This dissertation is about the production of culture among minority Hakka culture workers in contemporary Taipei, Taiwan. The "invisible ones" in the title of the dissertation refers to a position---historically unique among Chinese ethnic groups---which situates the Hakka as both Han Chinese, yet also culturally 'Other.' Historically situating the emergence of this particular subject position within transnational networks of Hakka Chinese revolutionaries and nationalists in the early twentieth century, I argue that contemporary Hakka culture workers continue to draw on this ambiguous location in order to contest the Taiwanese state's recent attempts at crafting a multicultural national narrative. As state-sponsored national imaginaries are crafted through narratives aimed at producing compliant national subjects, they are also cross-cut by alternative narratives of modernity, nation, gender and race that are available to the individuals that produce the videos, films, ethnographies and art that constitute the bulk of the materials produced among Taipei's Hakka culture workers. Each chapter documents a particular example of how the contests over the imagination---viewed here as a politically contentious cultural arena---inform the style, content and narrative of each cultural production. I argue that these representations of Hakka culture are so successful in re-articulating narratives of the multicultural Taiwanese national narrative because of how they reproduce the liminal status---indeed, the flexibility---of transnational Hakka peoplehood constructs in a changing national political economy. If, as some have argued, multiculturalism in Taiwan is merely a more flexible form of late-modern governmentality, then the relative success among the younger generation of Hakka culture workers can be attributed to the equally flexible means by which they are able to contest this particular narrative.