Discursive Limitations
Deconstructing Settler Colonial Cartography in Taiwan Cinema
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lin Chin Tsai
Taiwan is an island located on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean with a history of multiple colonialisms. Due to the increasing Han immigrants from China to Taiwan since the seventeenth century, Taiwan, an island whose indigenous inhabitants were the aboriginal Austronesian peoples, has become a settler colony de facto. However, Taiwan has long been excluded from global settler colonial studies. The prevailing discourse of postcolonialism introduced to Taiwan in the 1990s, as scholars pointed out, fails to fully conceptualize the colonization of indigenous peoples. Owing to the above reasons, this paper provides an analytical framework of settler colonialism, a distinct mode of domination that differs from the classic colonialism and postcolonial paradigm with its specific emphasis on settlers’ replacement of indigenous population and land dispossession, so as to address the discursive limits of postcolonial studies in Taiwan. Furthermore, drawing upon the approach of “cultural geography” and the politics of cartography, I scrutinize how maps are presented in two propagandistic films produced by the state-owned studios of the KMT (the Nationalist regime in Taiwan after 1945), Bai Ke’s "Descendants of the Yellow Emperor" (1955) and Chen Wen-chuan’s "Beautiful Treasure Island" (1952), and demonstrate how they construct a form of “settler colonial cartography” through the cinematic visualization of space and the use of multimedia. In this sense, to reflect on Taiwan’s cultural production through the lens of settler colonial criticism, I argue, is an imperative decolonization practice by which Taiwan is on its way towards spatial and social justice.
Old Wine in New Bottles?: Decoloniality Is Anything but New Epistemology
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fetson Anderson Kalua
Also known as decolonialism, the concept of decoloniality is a Latin American political and cultural theory, an intellectual crusade even, of Latin-American derivation whose vocation is to re-examine and rewrite the discourse of colonialism. Presenting decoloniality as a decisive intervention for most postcolonial societies to reclaim knowledge from what decolonial theorists is the grip of the Western (white) man, the scholars draw on renowned scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Aime Caesaire, as well as other discourses such as liberation theology, the Foucaudian poststructuralist, and other philosophical discourses, as the founding conditions of possibility for the development of the decolonial theory. In this paper, I situate the decolonial debate in the context of postcolonial theory and poststructuralist discourses, from which the discourse of decoloniality derives much of its force, to demonstrate its coterminous nexus with postcolonial theory and discourses – the link which lends colour and credence to the view that decoloniality is nothing but "old wine in new bottles." The argument of the paper is that decolonial scholars’ attempt to, at once, deconstruct and reconstruct or reshape what are regarded as normative and prevailing means of knowledge production is hardly a pioneering enterprise, and so the scholars have not blazed any trail in the field of colonial discourse. Thus the decolonial scholars’ supposed mediation on knowledge production constitutes a revisionist project.
Schopenhauer on Philosophy and Religion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session R. Raj Singh
Schopenhauer studied and adapted his own system any concepts of eastern thought. He was particularly drawn toward Vedanta and Buddhism. However, only a few brief and casual analyses are to be found in the secondary literature on this thinker. Many of Schopenhauer’s own concepts remain misunderstood and unduly critiqued due to lack of comparative study of these concepts with their eastern counterparts. This paper will examine Schopenhauer’s eastern sources as well as outline this thinker’s standpoint on how the insights from world religions can be thoughtfully deployed in philosophy after detaching them from the elements of dogma and superstition.
