Dr. Liza Wing Man KAM from the Department of East Asian Studies at Georg-August Universität Göttingen will give a public lecture at the ERCCT on January 24, 2019, at 6.15 p.m.
Her topic is "Obscured history, romanticised memory: commodification of the Japanese colonial past in Taiwan with urban heritage in Hengchun as case study"
The lecture reflects on the concepts of heritage, history and memory through investigating three urban scenarios in Hengchun-- an extremely popular tourist sightseeing spot known as ‘Aka’s House’ fabricated after the popular Cape No. 7 film and its sequel; the discreet and non-captioned/explained Japanese colonial relics laying all over the Old Town; and the Western Gate of the Old Town embedded with its obscured history of the thousands of Taiwanese soldiers called into the army to fight for the Japanese during the Second World War. Through collecting and reflecting on the narratives from Hengchuners of different generations viewing their town through different objectives, the lecture attempts to explore the various connotations of colonial heritage in Hengchun in the contemporary era and hence its meaning to Taiwan.
Venue is room no. 036 of Keplerstraße 2, 72074 Tübingen.
Liza Wing Man Kam works as Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies at the Georg-August Göttingen University and Research Fellow at Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She trained in architectural schools and practices in Paris, London, Liverpool, Hong Kong and Singapore before she joined the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in 2009 for her doctorate, where she started investigating colonial space in Hong Kong with its unique post-colonial settings, and such colonial space’s inter-relation with historiography, identity formation and civic awareness.
Kam currently works on the colonial Shinto Shrines in Post-war Taiwan as both religious and political symbolisms for enunciating the different powers in Taiwan throughout the last two centuries. Departing from analysing these shrines as colonial architectural icons she studies the shrines’ evolved/ evolving roles as driving force for the younger generations in Taiwan to negotiate the Taiwanese identity. She aspires to broaden the understanding of decolonization by comparing the seemingly antithetical ideas of colonial nostalgia and decolonization in the cases of various Asian polities such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Goa and more. She is also interested in the flow of intellectual and culinary ideas with empire expansions.
