The UCLA Taiwan in the World lecture series aims to promote Taiwan studies and disseminate knowledge about Taiwan in a global context and shed light on Taiwan's political economy, international relations, and US-Taiwan-China relations, as well as Taiwan's society, political system, social structure, and institutions.
Motivated by an interest in how intellectuals and activists map Taiwan onto competing global imaginaries when envisioning different forms of solidarity, two dominant axes are proposed that shape political subjectivities: an East-West axis, which frames global politics in terms of a (New) Cold War divide between democracy and authoritarianism, and a North-South axis, which frames global politics in terms of colonial histories and anti-colonial struggles. In Taiwan, the dominant East-West framework has sidelined considerations of how the North-South axis informs the aspirations of political subjects in the global South. Efforts to move beyond these frameworks and reimagine solidarities in new ways are frequently dismissed as aligning with either U.S. or Chinese geopolitical agendas. By comparing the global imaginaries of Chinese and Taiwanese migrant entrepreneurs in Africa, Professor Sheridan complicates both imagined axes. Chinese entrepreneurs often see Africa as an underdeveloped market, drawing parallels to China’s own rapid economic rise in ways that both promise convergence while reinforcing hierarchies. Taiwanese entrepreneurs, while adopting a similar commercial approach, differentiate themselves from Chinese actors. Despite these distinctions, both groups participate in a shared capitalist imaginary that depends on North-South hierarchies of uneven development. This talk interrogates the ideologies underlying claims of difference; whether those imagining South-South commerce to be distinct from North-South relations, or those which imagine Taiwan can help in a manner distinct from China. While political discourses encourage differentiation, the underlying logics of engagement may be more convergent than assumed.
Derek Sheridan is an Associate Research Fellow with the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica (Taiwan). Professor Sheridan hold a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brown University (2018). His research focuses on geopolitical imaginaries and the ethics of global inequalities in China-Africa relations. His first book, currently in preparation, is an ethnography of Chinese entrepreneurial migrants in Tanzania. Based on fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, a key trading node with a long history of Afro-Asian connections, the book examines how Chinese migrants and ordinary Tanzanians have come to depend on each other for their livelihoods within an uneven and hierarchical global political economy. His second project concerns the exchange of martial arts culture between Asia and Africa. He has also studied political culture in Taiwan and US-Taiwan relations. In collaboration with the North America Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) and the Institute of Taiwan History, He recently edited a volume on oral histories of foreign anthropologists who conducted fieldwork in Taiwan during the Cold War. His research has appeared in American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, China Quarterly, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and The International Journal of Taiwan Studies.