Events & Calendars "Unsettling the Sinophone Periphery: An Indigenous Critique of Modern Taiwanese Literature"

Yuting Huang, Mellon-Keiter Postdoctoral Fellow and visiting assistant professor of English and a candidate for the position of assistant professor of Chinese, will deliver a job talk entitled "Unsettling the Sinophone Periphery."

At the periphery of modern Chinese literature, Taiwanese literature has increasingly embodied a distinct local culture which expresses its identity around the islands of Taiwan, its Hoklo- and Hakka-dialect-speaking majority, and their unique colonial and postcolonial experiences. While scholars mostly celebrate Taiwan’s local articulations, however, this talk re-examines the center-periphery dynamics among Chinese and Taiwanese literatures through the lens of Indigenous critique and settler colonial analysis. Through close reading of two literary texts from Taiwan, this talk demonstrates how Taiwanese literature’s localization also carries with it dominant settler ideologies in relation to Taiwan’s indigenous Austronesian peoples, and that both Taiwan’s peripheral status and its settler history are foundational conditions for its literary culture. The talk will eventually explore how such attention to settler hegemony in the Sinophone periphery may, in turn, point to hitherto under-examined settler colonial dynamics in the larger field of modern Chinese literature as well as in the transnational literature of the Chinese diaspora.