Title

Re-Memory of Taiwan’s Japanese Period in Recent Fiction: The Instance of Counter-Memory, Identity, and Hybridity in Passion Foods and Routes in the Dream

Author

Liou, Liang-ya

Genre

Article  

Pages

457-486

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese  

Key words

recent Taiwanese fiction, Taiwan’s Japanese Period, re-memory, counter-memory, identity, hybridity

Abstract

      Under martial law, most memories about the Japanese Period (1895-1945) had to comply with the KMT’s Chinese nationalist narrative and its anti-Japan or Japan-bashing discourse in order to get published. Seeing Taiwanese as enslaved by Japanese colonialism, the KMT repressed and negated memories about the Japanese Period; consequently, the return of the repressed assumed different aspects in different times in the post-war era: anti-Japan mostly with some delineations of identity conflict from the 1970s to the late 1990s, and pro-Japan in juxtaposition with anti-Japan and split identity since the late 1990s. This paper deals with the re-memory of the Japanese Period in recent fiction by studying as an instance the complicated relationship between counter-memory, identity formation, and hybridity in Li Ang 李昂’s shortstory collection, Passion Foods《鴛鴦春膳》, and Wu Ming-yi 吳明益’s novel, Routes in the Dream 《睡眠的航線》. All set in the 1990s, these works explore rememories of the Japanese Period in comparison with post-war memories under the KMT. I will discuss the following questions: How does counter-memory entail politics of national identity? How does cultural hybridity brought about by Japanese colonial modernity affect identity formation? Does it problematize or complicate identity? How does counter-memory deploy hybridity as a basis for new politics of national identity? I maintain that both books transmute the sadness of counter-memory into a recognition that the cultural hybridity formed during the Japanese Period serves as a basis of Taiwanese identity.