Literary Analysis: Toward an Oceanic Taiwanese Imaginary: Syaman Rapongan’s Sea Writing and Liao Hongji’s Whale Narrative

Abstract

<p><br></p><p>This chapter traces the emergence of environmental justice in Taiwanese literature using the Tao writer Shaman Rapongan and the Han author Liao Hongji as examples. It first revisits the continent-centric rhetoric of the Nationalist-ruled Taiwan, analyzing how this reconceptualization of Taiwan from an oceanic perspective, which gained momentum in the 1990s, was quickly co-opted into the construction of Taiwanese cultural nationalism. It then explains how this politically charged use of oceanic imaginary neglects the profound ecological concerns in the works of Rapongan and Liao. To redress it, this chapter reads the two writers’ works as eco-literature. It posits that Rapongan’s writing creates a heterotopia critiquing the Han’s cultural hegemony and simultaneously facilitating a transnational archipelagic connection with other island-based cultures. In comparison, Liao focuses more on the human–non-human tension in his narrative on whales and dolphins, and therefore is an exemplary author who challenges anthropocentrism. The chapter concludes by pointing out that the implications of this oceanic imaginary for Taiwan are at least twofold—to entangle the palimpsestic colonialism in Taiwanese history, and to enable Taiwanese literature to be framed differently, for instance, as global Indigenous literature, eco-critical literature, or world literature.</p>