Urban Settler Colonialism: Policing and Displacing Indigeneity in Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract

This article argues that colonialism needs to be explicitly foregrounded in analyses of urban processes in settler colonial cities. Urban settler colonialism is an ongoing process that affects urban indigenous subjects, a force that builds on the longue durée of settler colonialism that has dispossessed them for centuries. My article draws on ethnographic research conducted with a group of indigenous Pangcah/Amis people who have migrated to the Taipei region in Taiwan over the last forty years. While paying attention to the long history of settler colonialism on the island and specifically in the Taipei region-the erasure of indigenous Ketagalan heritage in northern Taiwan, indigenous land dispossession in rural villages, and a consequent post-WWII influx of indigenous people into Taipei, and the displacement of urban indigenous squattersettlements since the 1990s-I will ethnographically focus on a group of indigenous public housing residents who have continued to face urban settler colonialism. I discuss how they have negotiated with surveillance and policing from their on-site housing management team, charges of incivility from Han state agents and neighbors, and displacement from urban redevelopment.

A Sacred Bird at the Crossroads of Destiny: Ethno-Ornithology of the Mountain Hawk-Eagle (Qadis) for the Paiwan People in Taiwan

“…In addition, Austronesian languages are based on oral transmission but, in moving to cities, many people have reduced their contact with elders, thus forgetting some cultural details. The revitalization of Indigenous culture in cities since the 1960s and 1970s (Liu 2011; Sugimoto 2019) has led to re-empowerment of Indigenous customs. However, knowledge about wildlife is difficult to resurrect outside of the local environment and without direct practice.…”

Seeing like police: Surveillant practices and scopic skills in Recife, Brazil

“…Far from promoting less discriminatory modes of surveillance, the proliferation of technological solutions for visualizing and predicting misconduct has worked to reproduce racialized forms of sociospatial differentiation across a wide array of contexts (Browne, 2015;Jefferson, 2020;Plájás et al, 2019;Suchman et al, 2017). Similarly, when lending their eyes and ears to surveillance partnerships, citizens end up performing the forms of "social sorting" (Lyon, 2003) that have for long been attributed to public security actors (e.g., Al-Bulushi, 2021;Barenboim, 2016;Monahan, 2017;Sugimoto, 2019).…”

“…Far from promoting less discriminatory modes of surveillance, the proliferation of technological solutions for visualizing and predicting misconduct has worked to reproduce racialized forms of sociospatial differentiation across a wide array of contexts (Browne, 2015; Jefferson, 2020; Plájás et al., 2019; Suchman et al., 2017). Similarly, when lending their eyes and ears to surveillance partnerships, citizens end up performing the forms of “social sorting” (Lyon, 2003) that have for long been attributed to public security actors (e.g., Al‐Bulushi, 2021; Barenboim, 2016; Monahan, 2017; Sugimoto, 2019). Whether through online and offline forms of “voluntary surveillance” that target Roma populations in suburbs of Rome (Ivasiuc, 2015, 2019, p. 233), or via the racializing “stares” of white residents toward women of South Asian descent in post‐9/11 US (Finn, 2011), the often‐mediated gazes of vigilant civilians tend to converge around situated “strangers” (Ahmed, 2000).…”