Taiwanese Student Migrants and Cold War Activism with Wendy Cheng

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, theInstitute for Regional and International Studies National Resource Center(IRIS NRC) supports and enhances global awareness and inspires informed thinking about the complexities of our world.We provide resources and expertise to K-12 and post-secondary educators, students and the community at large. Working in collaboration with campus, national, and international partners, IRIS NRC strives to put the Wisconsin Idea into action. We are committed to offering cross-regional and globally themed programming in an effort to understand our increasingly interconnected world.

IRIS NRC

IRIS NRC International Book Club with Author Wendy Cheng

While Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s are often depicted as compliant model minorities, many were in fact deeply political. Shaped by Taiwan's colonial history and influenced by the global social movements of their times, they fought to make Taiwanese people visible as subjects of injustice and deserving of self-determination. Wendy Cheng is the author of <a href="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295752051/island-x/" title="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295752051/island-x/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism</a>. She joins us to discuss her book, which documents how Taiwanese Americans developed tight-knit social networks as infrastructures for identity formation, consciousness development, and anticolonial activism on US campuses.The first 20 people to register will receive a free copy of the book (US mailing addresses only).Wendy Cheng is Professor of American Studies at Scripps College and Core Faculty in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies. She received her A.B. from Harvard University in English and American Language and Literature, her M.A. in Geography from UC Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, comparative racialization, critical geography, urban and suburban studies, and diaspora. Her book, The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), won the 2014 Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Asia and Asian America. Her coauthored book, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with Laura Pulido and Laura Barraclough; University of California Press, 2012), for which she was also the photographer, won the Association of American Geographers’ Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography and the SCIBA Nonfiction Award. Her current research projects focus on the political activism of Taiwanese student migrants to the United States and racial plunder in everyday landscapes.Cheng is a board member of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Amerasia Journal, and the Journal of Asian American Studies, and was a founding member of Arizona Critical Ethnic Studies. She coedits A People’s Guide book series with University of California Press. Learn more about Wendy Cheng on her website, <a href="https://wendycheng.com/" title="https://wendycheng.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">wendycheng.com</a>.Thank you to the <a href="https://geography.wisc.edu" title="https://geography.wisc.edu" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Department of Geography</a> and <a href="https://asianamerican.wisc.edu/" title="https://asianamerican.wisc.edu/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Asian American Studies</a> at UW-Madison for co-sponsoring this event.

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