Indigenism as a project: language politics and the hegemony of postcolonialism in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates how Arif Dirk’s works are interpreted in Taiwan through the lens of language politics and argues that postcolonialism, the dominant epistemology, has been central in mediating the translation and interpretation of his works. It traces back the debates in the 1990s over postcolonialism and points out that postcolonial cultural hybridity has been used as the “unquestioned truth” to maintain the colonizer’s language and dismantle the nativist project of recovering lost languages and cultures. In this process, Dirlik’s works are appropriated to legitimize the colonizer’s status quo. This essay demonstrates how Dirlik’s engagement with “the colonial” in his later years helps to theorize contemporary forms of injustices committed by the nation state under global capitalism and offers a radical critique of our postcolonial present in Taiwan. By reading his critique of postcolonialism, we show how Dirlik’s works can be used to challenge the legitimacy of the ROC as a colonial state. By excavating his notion of indigenism and its spirit of utopianism, we hope to engage with the Tâi-gí movement in reviving a language that is on its way to extinction.

KEYWORDS:

• Arif Dirk
• traveling theory
• colonialism
• nativism
• indigenism
• Tâi-gí movement
• nationalism
• global capitalism

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Roxann Prazniak, Andy Wang, and Rob Wilson for organizing this special issue and for their thoughtful comments. Roxann, in particular, has been very supportive and helpful from the start in the shaping of this paper. We also thank Tiffany Hong for her contribution at the initial stage of this project. This project is funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in Taiwan.

Notes

1 Here, specifically Yi-cheng Lin is referring to concepts such as “socialism with Chinse characteristics,” but his aim is to promote a kind of epistemology and methodology on history—to trace the emergence of a concept and put it back into “history” without making any value judgements on the concept or history (2018, 15).

2 We use the translation Nativism to refer to Bentu Discourse (本土論). It was sometimes translated as indigenism in Taiwan’s context. However, with the ethnicization of the aborigines and their translation into indigenous people, nativism becomes the common term for Bentu Discourse.

3 The Meilidao Incident (the Formosa Incident), also known as the Kaohsiung Incident, marked the beginning of a series of protests against the KMT state, leading to the formation of the Democratic Progressive Party in 1986 and the lifting of the Martial Law in 1987. On 10 December 1979, many of the core members of the Formosa Magazine, also known as Dangwai, a coalition of people outside the KMT party, rallied for democracy and freedom. The KMT state responded with violent crackdown and the leading protestors were put in jail. With the intervention of the U.S., the trials against the protestors were forced to go public, with the result of gaining sympathy and support from the people, thereby forcing the KMT state to democratize.

4 One example is the meeting between ex-officio KMT chair Zhan Lian and the then CCP leader Jintao Hu in 2005 which marks the beginning of the official collaboration between the KMT ruling elites with the CCP.

5 Tâi-gí, a name that has existed for more than a hundred years, has been denied. The colonial ROC state imposed Minnanyu as its name in 1967 to emphasize its relationship with China while Hakka insists on naming it as Holo (a degraded, hostile name). The controversy over naming leads to the boycott of Language Equality Law by the Council of Hakka Affairs. In fighting for the passing of this law, Tâi-gí activists compromised their self-naming right and becomes nameless in the ROC state law. See Wang Fu-chang’s “A Reluctant Identity: The Development of Holo Identity in Contemporary Taiwan” (2014) for further elaboration on this issue. The right to self-naming was finally recognized by the Ministry of Culture in the beginning of 2021. The Minister of Culture, Lee Yung-te, recently proposed to add the prefix Taiwan to Tâi-gí, Hakka and Aboriginal languages in deflating the charge that the name Tâi-gí would monopolize Taiwaneseness. However, this has not been recognized by other government branches. For example, the Ministry of Education still uses Minnanyu instead of Tâi-gí as its official nomenclature.

6 The most dominant narrative in Taiwan’s public and official cultures is to use the endangered aboriginal languages to undermine the demand for Tâi-gí revival. For example, in the newspaper article, “Lai Ching-Te said Tâi-gí is Minnanyu. Hakka Society: Stop Privileging Minnanyu” (UDN 2018), the title intends to mislead the public to resent the Tâi-gí speaking people with an implicit reference to Holo chauvinism. In fact, what Lai declared was the language he spoke was Tâi-gí, not Minnayu. However, Seo-gim Lo’s response showed how the Hakkas make use of the aboriginals to attack Tâi-gí movement. Another example is Ciwas Ali, the aboriginal legislator, whose father is a Waishengren, and mother, an aborigine, has been a fierce advocate in denying any tiny space for Tâi-gí’s existence in the name of oppressing aborigines. In the debate on the establishment of Tâi-gí Channel on 20 December 2018, Ali followed Lo’s assertion and claimed that aboriginal languages are the true Tâi-gí. She claimed that compared to aboriginal languages and Hakkas, Tâi-gí is actually a sustainable majority language. See Fu (2018).

7 One example that illustrates this well is the Dintao (陣頭) performance, a common folk religious dance/parade in Taiwan. Through the popularity of the movie, Din Tao: Leader of the Parade, Dintao is made to signify Taiwanessness. However, this Tâi-gí based cultural practice is faced with extinction as the younger generation can no longer speak Tâi-gí and therefore, unable to continue or inherit this cultural practice which requires a good command of the language. I would call this phenomenon the logic of the zoo, following Judith Williamson (1986) in that when animals are killed near extinction, they are then placed in the zoo for display and consumption. Similarly, Tâi-gí culture is demolished to near extinction but they come back alive as spectacle in popular culture for consumption. This is also the logic of cool capitalism or what George Yúdice (2004) calls, “the expediency of culture,” from which lived experiences of the marginalized are used for profit-making.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fang-chih Irene Yang

Fang-chih Irene YANG is a professor in the Department of Taiwanese Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. Her research focuses on the intersection of national identity, ethnicity, class, and gender politics in East Asian popular culture, in particular, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese TV dramas in Taiwan. She is currently working on a book project about the cultural politics of TV drama productions after 2000 in Taiwan.

Sam L. M. Mak

Sam L. M. MAK is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Taiwanese Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His current research focuses on the interaction between Taiwan and Hong Kong cinema in the Cold War.