Shaping Taiwan’s History through Non-human Agents

Abstract

In the field of postcolonial Taiwanese literature, a literary tradition that an author follows often consists in contextualising issues of political identity, historical representation or social struggle via the narrative account of a human protagonist. This paper examines Wu Ming-yi’s postcolonial ecological novels, Shuimian de hangxian 睡眠的航線 [Routes in a Dream] (2007) and Danche shiqieji 單車失竊記 [The Stolen Bicycle] (2015), which not only break with this literary norm, but further invite readers to pay attention to the involvement of non-human agents in Taiwan’s colonial history. With an ecocritical reading of Wu’s works, the paper investigates the siginificant role of these non-human agents—including butterflies, elephants, a bird, man-fish and a bamboo forest—and further demonstrates that a non-anthropocentric narrative offered by these non-humans are also powerful in the shaping of historical representations and political identities of Taiwan.