The Northern Institute of Taiwan Studies (NorITS) was launched in 2018 and relies on the hard work of a team of five experts in the field. In this report we discuss the accomplishments our colleagues have achieved in these three years and the contributions that NorITS has made to Taiwan studies, with the aim to start a conversation on how to frame Taiwan studies against contemporary challenges and opportunities of academia.
In the field of postcolonial Taiwanese literature, a literary tradition that an author follows often consists in contextualising issues of political identity, historical representation or social struggle via the narrative account of a human protagonist. This paper examines Wu Ming-yi’s postcolonial ecological novels, Shuimian de hangxian 睡眠的航線 [Routes in a Dream] (2007) and Danche shiqieji 單車失竊記 [The Stolen Bicycle] (2015), which not only break with this literary norm, but further invite readers to pay attention to the involvement of non-human agents in Taiwan’s colonial history. With an ecocritical reading of Wu’s works, the paper investigates the significant role of these non-human agents—including butterflies, elephants, a bird, fish–men and a bamboo forest—and further demonstrates that a non-anthropocentric narrative offered by these non-humans is also powerful in the shaping of historical representations and political identities of Taiwan.
If Jacques Derrida's philosophy has radically changed our understanding of the relationship between human and animal subjectivity, Wu Ming-yi's literary writing goes a step further in challenging the relationship between human and non-human subjectivity in general.Composed of six individual short stories, The Land of Little Rain (ku yu zhi di, 苦雨之地, hereafter 'The Land') explores themes and subjects concerning non-human species in Taiwan. As an ecological writer, Wu Ming-yi is particularly interested in the question of how literature is able to configure non-humans (both animals and non-animals) and unveil their subjectivity to readers. In The Land, Wu pursues this objective both by developing a new mode of literary writing and by debunking our anthropocentric conception of language.Aligning himself with the nature writing at the early stage of his career, Wu's non-fictional essay collections focus mainly on empirical observation and scientific study of the natural environment and non-human species in Taiwan. By contrast, his cli-fi (climate fiction) and his postcolonial environment novels often showcase his literary imagination, in which he anthropomorphises non-human species and dramatises climate events, historical moments, or environmental exploitation. But Wu's writing in The Land may take his long-term readers by surprise. It breaks with this former division, going beyond the boundary of fictional writing Manuscript (anonymized) by integrating non-fictional material from his nature writing, thus forming a new cross-genre that Wu considers able to fully exhibit the being and essence of the non-human world.The stories presented in the collection should therefore not be read as the life journeys of the main human characters, but as stories about the non-humans. Each story begins with the author's hand-drawn picture of a wild Taiwanese animal or plant species-a Metaphire Formosae (earthworm), a black-naped Oriole (bird), Taiwan Hemlock (conifer tree), a Formosan clouded leopard, and a grey-face buzzard-in the style of eighteenth-century natural science drawing. 1 These images imitate the effects produced by a camera, representing and documenting wildlife and nature in a faithful manner close to our visual perception. To paint them in such detail, it is necessary for Wu to cultivate an insight into these non-humans. The author has to move away from his anthropocentric gaze and adopt a non-human perspective, capturing the meaning of a buzzard's glance, an earthworm's movement, or a bird's tweeting. Whilst Wu's other fictions give more attention to our ethical consideration of non-humans, the narratives in The Land underline the 'becoming' of non-humans. 'The Clouds are Two Thousand Meters Up (雲在兩千米)' narrates the protagonist's search for an unfinished story written by his deceased wife, a story about the Formosan clouded leopard, an extinct species that lies at the heart of the indigenous Rukai mythology. In the story, details about the leopard's biological features, habitat, diet or hunting habits are careful...
Between 2010 to 2020, the global media generally had a very positive view of the voluntary migration schemes or humanitarian refugee visas promised by their Pacific allies (e.g., Australia and New Zealand). However, the actual implementation of climate migrants’ relocation tells a different story, particularly in the case of I-Kiribati people. This paper examines Australian and New Zealand’s governmental policies of immigration for the Pacific islanders over the last two decades. Drawing on a decolonial theoretical approach inspired by Jonathan Pugh, David Chandler and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, in conjunction with Prem Kumar Rajaram’s post-Marxist migrant economy theory, this paper argues that the Australian and New Zealand governments ultimately only paid lip service to humanitarian aid for climate displaced people. In fact, the proposed schemes for I-Kiribati people or other Pacific climate migrants ultimately serve to convert the migrant populations into the host country’s labour force, of use for its neoliberal economy. The second half of the paper turns to an analysis of an award-winning climate documentary produced by a Canadian film maker, Matthieu Rytz. Rytz’s Anote’s Ark (2018) aligns with the “migrating with dignity” policy proposed by the former I-Kiribati president, Anote Tong. Bringing in Malcom Ferdinand’s decolonial analysis of the figure of Noah’s ark in the climate discourse, the paper problematises the general political consensus advanced by this particular type of contemporary climate documentary and challenges the feasibility of the “migrating with dignity” approach. Most importantly, it questions whether climate migrants can truly build a future with dignity in their host country if they are conditioned to supply the migrant labour market.
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