Anru Lee – författare

Offers an analysis of the dynamics of Taiwan's export-oriented industrialization, particularly its impact on women and other workers.Since the 1980s Taiwan has grown into a global manufacturing powerhouse, a model of success that has inspired emulation throughout the developing world. Yet at the very peak of this expansion, Taiwan began to feel squeezed by changes both domestically and internationally. In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity examines Taiwan's economic restructuring since the late 1980s. Anru Lee discusses the latest phase of Taiwan's socio-economic development, most importantly the dialectical relationship between its export-oriented industrialization, change in production processes, and discourse on work ethics, including the subject formation of women workers as it relates to conditions in the global economy. At the center of this study is the process by which labor-capital relations become fair and legitimate, and how they contribute to our understanding of Asian capitalism and its role in the world economy.

In 1973 twenty-five young women drowned in a ferry accident on their way to work in factories in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone. Their remains were recovered and interred collectively in what came to be called the Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb. Without a husband’s ancestral hall where they would have been laid to rest, the spirits of these unmarried women were considered homeless and possibly vengeful, and so the Maiden Ladies Tomb was viewed as a place to be avoided—especially by young men traveling alone, fearful of encountering a female ghost searching for a husband. Over the years, numerous plans were made to revamp the tomb site; finally, in 2008, at the urging of local feminist communities, the Kaohsiung City government renovated the Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb and renamed it the Memorial Park for Women Laborers. Haunted Modernities interrogates the nature of shared expressions of history, sentiments, and memory as it investigates the role of these women and other female workers in the shifting public narrative during and after the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation. By exploring the ways in which the deceased young women were perceived to "haunt" the living and the diverse renovations recommended, the book illuminates how women workers in Taiwan have been conceptualized in the last several decades. In their proposals to renovate the tomb, the interested parties forged specific accounts of history, transforming the collective burial site according to varying definitions of "heritage" as Taiwan shifted to a postindustrial economy, where factory jobs were no longer the main source of employment. Their plans engaged with acts of remembering—communal and individual—to create new ways of understanding the present. The Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb as a heritage site elucidates how "history" and "memory" are not simply about the past but part of a forward-looking process that emerges from the social, political, and economic needs of the present, legitimized and validated through its associations with the past.

In 1973 twenty-five young women drowned in a ferry accident on their way to work in factories in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone. Their remains were recovered and interred collectively in what came to be called the Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb. Without a husband’s ancestral hall where they would have been laid to rest, the spirits of these unmarried women were considered homeless and possibly vengeful, and so the Maiden Ladies Tomb was viewed as a place to be avoided—especially by young men traveling alone, fearful of encountering a female ghost searching for a husband. Over the years, numerous plans were made to revamp the tomb site; finally, in 2008, at the urging of local feminist communities, the Kaohsiung City government renovated the Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb and renamed it the Memorial Park for Women Laborers.Haunted Modernities interrogates the nature of shared expressions of history, sentiments, and memory as it investigates the role of these women and other female workers in the shifting public narrative during and after the Maiden Ladies Tomb renovation. By exploring the ways in which the deceased young women were perceived to "haunt" the living and the diverse renovations recommended, the book illuminates how women workers in Taiwan have been conceptualized in the last several decades. In their proposals to renovate the tomb, the interested parties forged specific accounts of history, transforming the collective burial site according to varying definitions of "heritage" as Taiwan shifted to a postindustrial economy, where factory jobs were no longer the main source of employment. Their plans engaged with acts of remembering—communal and individual—to create new ways of understanding the present. The Twenty-five Maiden Ladies Tomb as a heritage site elucidates how "history" and "memory" are not simply about the past but part of a forward-looking process that emerges from the social, political, and economic needs of the present, legitimized and validated through its associations with the past.