ABSTRACT
Taiwan, the Republic of China, is a small island and has been without official nation-state status since 1971, the year in which Taiwan lost over to the People’s Republic of China its membership of the United Nations. As such, scholarship on Taiwanese history and culture has been shaped by diverse political interests, a problem further amplified and complicated by the island’s multiple colonial pasts as well as its highly contested relationship with a growing superpower. Even Taiwanese literature emerged as an institutionalized discipline only in the twenty-first century, now bearing an uneasy tension with the field of Chinese literature in Taiwanese academia. In light of these reasons, the literary scholar Shu-mei Shih has commented on the illegibility of Taiwan studies as an area of critical inquiry in the West:
Studying Taiwan is an impossible task. I say “impossible” because Taiwan is always already written out of mainstream Western discourse due to its insignificance. Taiwan, when any attention is given to it at all, is most often reduced to an object of empirical political analysis, and has been systematically dismissed as a worthwhile object of critical analysis in cultural and other humanistic studies with theoretical import. Taiwan is too small, too marginal, too ambiguous, and thus too insignificant. Taiwan does not enjoy the historical accident of having been colonised by a Western power in the nineteenth or twentieth century; instead it was colonised by other Asian powers: Japan (1895-1945) and the exiled Chinese Nationalist government (1945 to the late 1980s) respectively. If it had been colonised by Britain, Taiwan would have been able to share in the fashion of postcolonial theory. If it had been colonised by France, Taiwan would be part of Francophone studies. Colonisation by Japan and another ethnic Chinese regime effectively ghettoised Taiwan within the realm of “Asian studies,” where it is further marginalised within so-called Sinology or Chinese Studies.
