Being-in-Common in Postcolonial Taiwan: Wuhe’s Remains of Life and the Limits of Identity Politics
Journal
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
Journal Volume
14
Journal Issue
3
Pages
443-461
Date Issued
2012
Author(s)
Abstract
For many practitioners of postcolonial criticism in Taiwan studies, postcolonialism is coextensive with identity politics. Often glossing over the diverse and even conflicting approaches to the identity issue in the contested field of postcolonial studies, these critics magnify the identitarian logic in their attempt to configure a ‘postcolonial Taiwan’, foregrounding specific identity categories and conceiving of the political as nothing other than power contestation. This essay addresses the limits and limitations of this formulation by comparing two distinct configurations of selfhood in relation to Taiwan's postcolonial moment. The essay begins by examining the critical work of the prominent literary historian Chen Fangming, a champion of what we may call identitarian postcolonialism. By showing how Chen tends to read selfhood as an organic whole and privilege the dichotomous logic as the basis of political thinking, the essay argues that the identitarian postcolonialism thesis elides other possibilities of thinking of the self in relation to ‘the political’. The essay then focuses its discussion on Wuhe's novel Remains of Life, a work that has as its backdrop the island aborigines’ bloody confrontation with the Japanese colonizers in the 1930s. Instead of employing the terms of identity politics and calling for restoration of the aboriginal ‘subjectivity’, the novel interrogates the identity principle and attends to our ontological status of being singular and being part of a plurality. This essay suggests that the progressive view that Wuhe's novel posits resonates forcefully with propositions of political ontology such as Jean-Luc Nancy's, a line of inquiry that the field of Taiwan studies has yet to open up to.
SDGs
Type
journal article