Diffracted National Narratives: Folkloric and Literary Writing in Colonial Taiwan

Abstract

Studies of colonial-era Taiwan’s literary and cultural production have been growing steadily in number since the 1990s but are mostly dedicated to constructing a coherent resistance-centred postcolonial historiography. Such a reading has some validity but is limited and tendentious because it reduces the dynamic interactions between Japanese and Taiwanese to an artificial binary. This article takes the concept “folklore” and related terms such as “locality” as its main point of inquiry, offering a revisionist reading of the diverse nationalist articulations of “folklore” and locality in three case studies: the diverse voices in Minzoku Taiwan, the differences between Shimada Kinji and Huang Deshi’s historiographies of Taiwanese literature, and Lü Heruo’s works on Taiwan’s cultural practices in the heyday of Japan’s imperialisation campaign. Through textual analysis, this article argues that the colonisers’ identity was in constant need of re-forging, whereas the colonial policies and what the colonised writers hoped to achieve were not always incompatible. The colonisers’ call for revitalising local cultures, in all the cases in point, provided a discursive space and highly contested ground for the colonisers and colonised to redraw the imperial boundaries and negotiate their own identities.