From Postcolonial to Subimperial Formations of Medicine: Superregional Perspectives from Taiwan and Korea

In the twentieth century, Taiwan and Korea shared similar experiences of colonial governance: from being situated on the periphery of the Qing geocultural orbit and the early frontiers of the Japanese Empire to becoming a Cold War protectorate of US neoimperialism. This special issue draws on theoretically robust and empirically weighted approaches to examine this shared but contested past. Though the respective histories of medicine in postcolonial Taiwan and Korea have become vibrant sites of scholarly dialogue, there has been no sustained effort to bridge them or bring them together in a unifying, comparative, and critical frame. This special issue takes a bold step in that direction without claiming exhaustive or exceptional coverage. Featuring articles authored by an international and interdisciplinary cohort of scholars, this issue of EASTS explores the cultural transformations of medicine, health, and the body in light of such unique trajectories of political affinity and potential divergences. Although contributors mainly focus on their geographical area of expertise rather than elaborating on specific historicities that emerge beyond those regional parameters, the diversity of topics, chronologies, archives, and theoretical frameworks sampled in this issue offers a rare occasion to reflect collectively on the historiographical stakes of what makes the politics of Taiwan-Korea comparison meaningful.

This collection of articles is the result of a workshop held at the University of Warwick in Venice in July 2014. It develops two main arguments. First, in highlighting the situatedness of Taiwan and Korea on the margins and intersections of giant superpowers, the articles not only confront the Cold War underpinnings of health care regimes but also delineate the discrepant narratives arising from various geopolitical structures that do not easily conform to a grand master narrative of imperialism. As such, this special issue makes a case for the highly contingent, contested, and pluralist origins of modern medical systems, thereby superseding any interpretive preference that lends weight to either the operation of a single variant of colonial modernity or the paradigm of the developmental state typically preconditioned by the industrial-economy boom (see, e.g., Wong 2011). Second, theorized in terms of subimperialism, the articles recast the often overlooked imperialist agencies/agendas of the two regions under consideration, especially in relation to Southeast Asia and domestic nationalist projects.¹ Although Taiwan and Korea have rarely been considered as agitators of imperialism, this special issue makes a case for pulling these regions out of the trappings of a strictly postcolonial framework. Conventional approaches to East Asian postcoloniality tends to relegate Taiwanese and Korean pasts to the domain of colonial victimization, thereby neglecting new modalities of geopolitical power surfacing under its shadow. Building on the Taiwan-Korean relational nexus, this special issue turns our historical purview from theories of postcolonialism to the analytics of subimperialism.

Taken together, the various case studies register multivalent and rhizomic forms of minor transnationalism across East Asia, before and after formal decolonization, and around rather than through "the center."² In other words, despite their diverging empirical focus, the following articles actually broach the linkages and connections—whether in the form of comparison or modularity—across Taiwan and Korea, especially since both regions continue to remain peripheral to traditional area studies disciplines. When applied to the study of Taiwan, for instance, the framework of subimperialism has typically enabled comparative analysis that comfortably stays within the confines of the Sinosphere (e.g., Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sinophone communities worldwide). By looking across and between Korea and Taiwan, the case studies therefore envision alternative genealogies of postcolonial belonging that topple formal national or colonial strictures. And based on this unlikely encounter as mediated by the social valence of medicine, the concept of subimperial formation captures communities and cultures of "science" that exceed a language-based approach to cultural studies, which has already begun to displace an older framework of ethnic and national communities.³

The first two articles explore the pluralist origins of health care in postcolonial Taiwan and Korea, respectively. Scholarship on the history of Taiwan generally considers the year 1949 as a significant temporal rupture—as either the beginning or the ending...