The Anthology Of Taiwan Indigenous Literature

Few people beyond the shores of Taiwan are aware that it is home to a population of indigenous peoples who for more than fifteen thousand years have lived on the island. Over the years, through the Chinese imperial period, the Japanese occupation, and for most of the twentieth century, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan were marginalized and deprived of rights. However, with the lifting of martial law in 1987, new government policies regarding ethnic groups, and growing interest in Taiwan's aboriginal peoples, indigenous writing began to blossom. With its intense and lyrical explorations of a fading culture, indigenous writing has become an important topic of discussion in Taiwanese literary circles. This collection of indigenous literature is the first such anthology in English. In selecting the stories, essays, and poems for the anthology, the editors provide a representative sampling from each of Taiwan's nine indigenous tribes. The writers explore such themes as the decline of traditional ways of life in Taiwan's aboriginal communities, residual belief in ancestral spirits, assimilation into a society dominated by Han Chinese, and the psychological and economic encroachment of the outside world. Their writings offer previously unheard perspectives on the plight of aboriginal cultures and the experiences of Taiwanese minorities. John Balcom has included an introduction to provide the reader with background information on Taiwan's indigenous peoples. The introduction addresses the origins of Taiwan's Austronesian peoples and general information on their culture, languages, and history. A discussion of the growth and development of indigenous literature, its sociolinguistic and cultural significance, and the difficulties faced by such writers is also included.

Few people beyond the shores of Taiwan are aware that it is home to a population of indigenous peoples who for more than fifteen thousand years have lived on the island. Over the years, through the Chinese imperial period, the Japanese occupation, and for most of the twentieth century, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan were marginalized and deprived of rights. However, with the lifting of martial law in 1987, new government policies regarding ethnic groups, and growing interest in Taiwan's aboriginal peoples, indigenous writing began to blossom. With its intense and lyrical explorations of a fading culture, indigenous writing has become an important topic of discussion in Taiwanese literary circles. This collection of indigenous literature is the first such anthology in English. In selecting the stories, essays, and poems for the anthology, the editors provide a representative sampling from each of Taiwan's nine indigenous tribes. The writers explore such themes as the decline of traditional ways of life in Taiwan's aboriginal communities, residual belief in ancestral spirits, assimilation into a society dominated by Han Chinese, and the psychological and economic encroachment of the outside world. Their writings offer previously unheard perspectives on the plight of aboriginal cultures and the experiences of Taiwanese minorities. John Balcom has included an introduction to provide the reader with background information on Taiwan's indigenous peoples. The introduction addresses the origins of Taiwan's Austronesian peoples and general information on their culture, languages, and history. A discussion of the growth and development of indigenous literature, its sociolinguistic and cultural significance, and the difficulties faced by such writers is also included.

In 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, sank off the coast of southern Taiwan. Fourteen sailors reached the shore, where almost all were killed by indigenous people. In retaliation, the United States launched two disastrous military operations against local tribes. Eventually, the U.S. consul to Amoy, Charles Le Gendre, negotiated a treaty with Tauketok, the chief of the eighteen tribes of the area, that secured safe passage for shipwrecked sailors. Yao-Chang Chen’s historical novel Puppet Flower retells the story of the Rover incident, bringing to light its pivotal role in Taiwanese history. Merging documented events and literary imagination, the novel vividly depicts Tauketok, Le Gendre, and other historical figures alongside the story of Butterfly, a young woman of mixed ethnic heritage who serves as an interpreter and mediator during the crisis. Chen deftly reconstructs the multiethnic and multilingual society of southern Taiwan in the second half of the nineteenth century from multiple perspectives, portraying local people’s daily struggles for survival and their interactions with Han Chinese settlers, Qing dynasty bureaucrats, and Western officials, tradesmen, and adventurers. The novel explores nineteenth-century Sino-American and Sino-indigenous relations and emphasizes the centrality of Taiwanese indigenous cultures to the island’s history. A gripping work of historical fiction, Puppet Flower is a powerful revisionist narrative of a formative moment in Taiwan’s past. It was recently adapted into a popular Taiwanese TV miniseries, Seqalu: Formosa 1867.

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the "post-truth" era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination.

This edited volume provides a complete introduction to critical issues across the field of Indigenous peoples in contemporary Taiwan, from theoretical approaches to empirical analysis. Seeking to inform wider audiences about Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, this book brings together both leading and emerging scholars as part of an international collaborative research project, sharing broad specialisms on modern Indigenous issues in Taiwan. This is one of the first dedicated volumes in English to examine contemporary Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples from such a range of disciplinary angles, following four section themes: long-term perspectives, the arts, education, and politics. Chapters offer perspectives not only from academic researchers, but also from writers bearing rich practitioner and activist experience from within the Taiwanese Indigenous rights movement. Methods range from extensive fieldwork to Indigenous-directed film and literary analysis. Taiwan's Contemporary Indigenous Peoples will prove a useful resource for students and scholars of Taiwan Studies, Indigenous Studies and Asia Pacific Studies, as well as educators designing future courses on Indigenous studies.