Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

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.