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The Production of Indigeneity: Contemporary Indigenous Literature in Taiwan and Trans-cultural Inheritance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2009

Kuei-fen Chiu
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Abstract

This study investigates the complicated interplay between indigenous and mainstream discourse in the production of Taiwanese indigeneity. Via the case study of Syaman Rapongan 夏曼藍波安, an indigenous writer in Taiwan known for his ethnographic portrayal of his tribal culture, I examine how the production of indigeneity in Taiwan involves not only inscription of resistance from indigenous people but also strategic exploitations of transnational legacies by different social groups as they struggle over the definition of indigeneity to formulate their own specific agendas. It is the contention of this article that the question of Taiwanese indigeneity is not just about indigenous self-representation, that is, claiming the subject position of the indigenous people and seeking to restore declining, oppressed indigenous cultural heritages. The study shows that we need to go beyond the familiar scheme of binary opposition to deal with the complexity of the question of indigeneity. The article ends with a re-theorization of the relationship between indigenous and new Taiwanese identity discourse in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of “inheritance.”

Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 200 , December 2009 , pp. 1071 - 1087
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2009

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References

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19 For the Democratic Progressive Party's promotion of Taiwan as a “country of the ocean,” see http://www.wretch.cc/blog/FrankCTHsieh&article_id=6317268.

20 For discussions of Taiwan literature and the so-called “oceanic literature,” see Nian, Dong, “Haiyang Taiwan yu haiyang wenxue” (“Oceanic Taiwan and oceanic literature”), Lianhe wenxue (Unitas: A Literary Monthly) Vol. 13, No. 10 (1997), pp. 166–68Google Scholar; Dai Bao-cun, “Dao zhi guo hai zhi min” (“Country of islands, people of the ocean”), http://www.ocean.org.tw/mag/003/003005.htm, accessed 25 December 2007.

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25 Ibid. p. 3.

26 Ibid. p. 25.

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28 Alternatively, Taiwanese may reject the idea of themselves as heirs to the indigenous culture by insisting on their Han identity. In that case, the Japanese colonial legacy would remain inactive.

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38 See Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? pp. 150–53. See also Li and Liu, An Overview of Taiwan History, p. 25.

39 The practice of using mixed languages in literary creation actually started as early as the 1920s when Taiwan was still under Japanese rule. Since then, the resuscitation of the spoken mother tongue has always been associated with political and ideological resistance in the history of Taiwan literature.

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41 Shih-Chung Hsieh, “Theoretical framework,” p. 156.

42 In fact, there has been a very uneasy tension between these two discourses as the risk of co-option of the indigenous movement by the growing Taiwanese identity movement is warily kept in sight.

43 Armstrong, Jeannette C., “Land speaking,” in Ortiz, Simon (ed.), Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), p. 197Google Scholar.

44 I would like to thank Professor Chaoyang Liao from Taiwan University for calling my attention to Jacques Derrida's theorization of “inheritance.”

45 Derrida, Jacques and Stiegler, Bernard, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (trans. Bajorek, Jennifer) (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 69Google Scholar.

46 Ibid. p. 25.

47 Ibid. p. 86.

48 Ibid. p. 26.

49 Derrida, Jacques and Roudinesco, Elisabeth, “Choosing one's heritage,” in For What Tomorrow – A DialogueGoogle Scholar (trans. Jeff Fort) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 3–4.

50 Rosalyn Diprose, “Derrida and the extraordinary responsibility of inheriting the future-to-come,” Social Semiotics, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2006), p. 442.

51 See Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 31Google Scholar.

52 Ibid. p. 155.

53 Derrida and Roudinesco, “Choosing one's heritage,” p. 4.

54 Ibid. p. 3.

55 Diprose, “Derrida and the extraordinary responsibility of inheriting the future-to-come,” p. 440.

56 Haddad, Samir, “Inheriting democracy to come,” Theory and Event, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2005)Google Scholar, accessed 12 December 2008.