Eco-ethnography, Acculturation, and Marginality: Strategies of Translating Taiwan’s Dutch Past in Wang Jiaxiang’s Daofeng neihai, Chen Yaochang’s Fu’ermosha sanzu ji, and Ping Lu’s Posuo zhi dao

Abstract

Translating Taiwan has been a continuous practice of cross-racial documentation throughout the island’s palimpsestic history including the Dutch, Spanish, and Han colonization in the seventeenth century, and the more recent Japanese colonial rule and its subsequent KMT’s rule. As Taiwan has been subject to the complex alternations in political power, “translation” in Taiwan is inevitably intertwined with the politics of “othering.” The aboriginal population, for instance, has unceasingly been deemed derogatorily as “savage” or “barbarian” by the various “civilized” ruling regimes. Existing scholarship has concentrated on the representations of Taiwan’s aborigines by the Japanese or the Han rulers. But recently, a few novelists have chosen Taiwan’s Dutch-ruled period, a time in which Taiwan witnessed the dynamic cross-racial encounters and played a vital role in international oceanic history, as the focus of their narratives. Given Taiwan’s multi-colonial and multi-ethnic nature, it is therefore important to examine the politics embedded in historiography. Taking the concept of translation broadly as a tactic of historical enactment and inter-ethnic interactions, this paper offers a close analysis on the varied perspectives of positioning Taiwan in three novels concerning Dutch Formosa written by contemporary Taiwanese authors—Wang Jiaxiang’s Daofeng neihai (Daofeng Inland Sea, 1997), Chen Yaochang’s Fu’ermosha sanzu ji (A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa, 2012), and Ping Lu’s Posuo zhi dao (Ilha Formosa, 2012). All of them tackle the encounters four centuries ago between the Dutch people, the Siraya, and the Han population in Taiwan. This paper is primarily concerned with how the Dutch-ruled history is represented, as well as the implications and limits of the different representations put forward by the three writers. The first part will examine how Wang Jiaxiang’s Daofeng Inland Sea, a novel about the Siraya’s cultural survival, combines his ecological concerns and historical contemplation, in an attempt to evoke a pre-colonial utopia. The second part will employ the stance of new historicism to discuss the significance of multi-racial perspectives in Chen Yaochang’s A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa. The third part will analyze the gendered view on Taiwan’s Dutch-ruled past in Ping Lu’s Ilha Formosa, especially the function and limit of her portrayal of the cross-racial romance between Coyett (the last governor of Dutch-occupied Taiwan) and Nana (a Siraya girl). The last part will argue that the three novels illustrate respectively an aborigines-based eco-historical imagination, the necessity of “multi-tribe” narrative, and the postcolonial concern over Taiwan’s (feminized) marginality. Despite the authors’ diverse focuses, those works altogether re-imagine Taiwan historically in terms of its inter-dependent ethnic relations, exploring the possibility of inter-subjectivity or lack of subjectivity.