Fwd: Hybrid Book Talks: Renegade Rhymes with Meredith Schweig (May 16) and Interconnected Worlds with Henry Yeung (May 23)

The UW Taiwan Studies Program will welcome associate professor of ethnomusicology at Emory University, Meredith Schweig, to discuss her book Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (University of Chicago Press, 2022). 

More details here: https://uwtaiwanstudies.ticketleap.com/renegade-rhymes-with-meredith-schweig/

Online participants can join the book talk via Zoom here: https://washington.zoom.us/j/99721107676

Renegade Rhymes invites readers into Taiwan’s vibrant underground hip-hop scene to explore the social, cultural, and political dynamics of life in a post-authoritarian democracy. Beginning in the immediate aftermath of martial law (1949-1987), the book follows Taiwan’s earliest rappers and DJs as they critiqued the island’s political system, spun tales from their perspectives as members of marginalized ethnic communities, and reimagined previously suppressed local musical forms. A series of ethnographic and historical chapters trace an arc between these earliest interventions and the innovations of present-day musicians, who grapple with ongoing existential uncertainty imposed by the island’s ambiguous geopolitical status and accelerating neoliberalization. The book argues that rap artists past and present configure post-authoritarianism as a creative political intervention, whose ultimate objective is the reordering of epistemic hierarchies, power structures, and gender relations.  

Meredith Schweig completed her MA and PhD in ethnomusicology at Harvard University, where she also received her BA in Music and East Asian Studies.  Schweig is the recipient of a 2023-2024 Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Previously, she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Taiwan (2020-2021), and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Hyperstudio Fellow at MIT (2013-2015). Her 2016 article “‘Young Soldiers, One Day We Will Change Taiwan’: Masculinity Politics in the Taiwan Rap Scene” was awarded both the Marcia Herndon Prize and the Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her 2014 article "Hoklo Hip-Hop: Re-signifying Rap as Local Narrative Tradition in Taiwan” was awarded the Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize from the Association for Chinese Music Research.  On Thursday, May 23 from 3:30 to 5pm in THO 317 and online, the UW Taiwan Studies Program will welcome Henry Yeung (National University of Singapore) to discuss his book Interconnected Worlds: Global Electronics and Production Networks in East Asia.

His book offers key empirical observations on the highly contested and politicized nature of semiconductor global production networks since the US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic. In this capital-intensive manufacturing industry, governance and power dynamics are manifested differently from many other industries due to highly complex technology regimes, production network ecosystems, and, more recently, geopolitical imperatives. While some of these critical dynamics had been in play ahead of the 2020s in China, Taiwan, and South Korea, their intensity and significance became more apparent by the early 2020s. The book also examines the need for strategic partnerships with technology leaders toward building national and regional resilience in the US, Western Europe, and East Asia.

More details here: https://uwtaiwanstudies.ticketleap.com/interconnected-worlds-with-henry-leung/details

Join online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT1OcBavBUk

Henry Yeung has been a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, since 2018, and a Professor of Economic Geography since 2005. As a leading academic expert in global production networks and the global economy, his research interests cover broadly theories and the geography of transnational corporations, East Asian firms, and developmental states.