Made in Taiwan: Studies in Popular Music is part of the Routledge Global Popular Music Series, which aims to provide English-speaking readers with timely and authoritative introductions to different world popular music scenes. It joins two previous volumes that shed valuable light on the workings of popular song in East Asia—Made in Japan (2015) and Made in Korea (2018)—and was followed last year by the excellent Made in Hong Kong (2020). The series is distinguished by its roster of contributors drawn primarily from institutions local to the countries they examine, many of whom do not always disseminate the products of their research in English. For this reason alone, Made in Taiwan should find warm welcome among English-speaking readers with special interest in the island’s culture industries. As it stands, however, this essential volume also has much to offer a broader academic constituency keen to take a deep cultural-historical dive into the complex and “multilayered realities of Taiwan” (xvii).

The editors provide a brief but lucid explication of the vexing term “Taiwanese” as a prerequisite to unfolding these multilayered realities. Tipping their hats to the island’s contested political history and intractable debates surrounding the legitimacy of “Taiwanese” identity, they are resolute that Made in Taiwan “approaches Taiwan as a sovereign state comprised of nonexclusive imagined communities whose rich and often discordant historical and geopolitical encounters have nourished an equally complex and affectively engaging popular-music culture” (xvii). Through close examination of a wide variety of genres, they pay careful and sustained attention to the historical contexts, material conditions, and structural arrangements that have impinged on culture producers since the inception of Taiwan’s popular music industry in the late nineteenth century. Their work is neither to define “Taiwanese” or “Taiwaneseness” as an identity marker nor to circumscribe its multifaceted expression in popular musics, but rather to delineate over the course of fifteen chapters the ways in which popular musics from Taiwan have developed dynamically—not unlike conceptions of Taiwaneseness themselves.

The organisation of the book and its division into four parts represent an earnest effort to render all of this complexity legible to the reader. In Part I: Trajectories, three chapters provide historical perspectives on the formation of Taiwanese popular musics in the decades following World War II. The first of these, by Tung-Hung Ho, is perhaps the volume’s most ambitious. Zeroing in on five significant moments in the history of Taiwanese popular music, Ho attempts to wrestle clarity from ambiguity surrounding the politics of Taiwanese musical “nativism”. Although that term may connote nationalist, racist, and xenophobic sentiment, Ho argues both for awareness of the social and political contexts that historically rendered nativism an indispensable “armor” (24) for politically progressive Taiwanese popular musicians, and for the necessity of continually developing pluralist musical nativisms moving forward. While chapters 2 and 3, exploring the development of Mandopop in the 1950s and 60s (Szu-wei Chen) and the indigenous “mountain music industry” (Kuo-chao Huang), do not respond directly to Ho’s provocations, they illuminate penumbral corners of Taiwanese popular music history and invite the reader to imagine alternative nativisms with novel aesthetic and political features.

The four chapters of Part II: Identities explore how identities mediate and are mediated by popular musics in Taiwan. The authors featured in this section are notably plural in their writing styles and methodologies, but chapters on Taiyu songs (C.S. Stone Shih and Yu-yuan Huang) and Anglo-American pop-rock (Meng Tze Chu) are motivated by a common desire to inspire reassessment of genres, artists, and fandoms that have been either overlooked or denigrated in existing discourses. Chapter 7, by Andrew F. Jones, is distinguished in this part of the volume by its engagement with sound media. But even as Jones considers the particular ways in which celebrated Hakka folk rock group the Labor Exchange Band deploys the LP record as “a musical, narrative, and social form” for “organizing and conveying personal and collective experience” (120), he shares his colleagues’ attention to the ways in which nostalgia, memory, and ambitions to indigenisation motivate his musical subjects.

Part III: Issues, Part IV: Interactions, and a Coda together comprise seven chapters that consider Taiwanese engagements with global and transnational popular musics, traversing the sonic and social worlds of rock (Chi-chung Wang), EDM (Eva Tsai), and hip-hop (Hao-li Lin), as well as indie music (Yu-peng Lin and Hui-ju Tsai, Miaoju Jian) and China Wind music (Chen-yu Lin). While much of Made in Taiwan concerns itself with revealing unexamined or understudied themes and scenes, Chen-Ching Chen’s penultimate chapter asks readers to reconsider what they know about Teresa Teng, Taiwan’s most globally recognisable pop star. The majority of the scholarship on Teng addresses her reception in the People’s Republic of China and in Chinese diaspora communities. Chen, however, probes the singer’s entanglements with the authoritarian Kuomintang government in order to deepen understanding of the Taiwanese public’s complex relationship to Teng and her legacy.

The specialist reader will appreciate the inclusion of an extensive bibliography of sources in English, Mandarin, and Japanese, as well as lists of narrative films and documentaries that focus on popular music, and a brief list of digital music archives. A transcribed interview between the book’s editors and veteran multi-genre artist Lim Giong provides a fitting postscript to Made in Taiwan. As Lim ruminates on the vicissitudes of his own career working across styles, media, and industries, he reveals the extent to which Taiwanese popular musics ceaselessly evolve in step not only with social and political realities, but also with the shifting passions of their creators.