Independence's Others: Decolonial Taiwan in the Transpacific
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Chang, Yi Ting
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 25, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Claire Colebrook, Major Field Member
Shuang Shen, Outside Unit & Field Member
Mariana Ortega, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Hester Blum, Major Field Member
Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Tina Goudie, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- Independence
Taiwan
Transpacific
decolonial
island
Asian America - Abstract:
- Independence, an expression of sovereign rule and freedom from external control, has been valorized by many postcolonial nations as the end of colonization. As a totalizing presence, independent state-building limits how one imagines the expressions, practices, and implications of decolonial work. “Independence’s Others: Decolonial Taiwan in the Transpacific” responds to this problematic by investigating independence of various forms while engaging creative expressions of the decolonial. Central to this investigation is the premise that the desire for national independence is inseparable from the desire for self-possessive personhood and epistemological certainty. These desires have their own history and demand that we think together the categories of national, personal, and critical independence, as well as their attendant ideologies of (self-)determination, mastery, and completion. Grounded in an archive of Taiwanese and Taiwanese American literature, “Independence’s Others” looks to the politically indeterminate site of Taiwan and the transpacific networks of relations to pose four pressing questions: 1) Whose voices and perspectives are erased in order to enable the self-determination of a certain population? 2) What possible futures are foreclosed so that a progressive, self-determined future can be reached? 3) What kinds of truths or sense-making are silenced to legitimize a master narrative? 4) And finally, what forms of knowledge and knowledge-making are abandoned for the fear of epistemological uncertainty? The answers to these questions are expressed by independence’s others. They are the peoples, communities, lands, temporalities, ways of relating and being that the master narrative of independence does not have a language to describe. While independence projects a desirable feeling of completion and determinacy, independence’s others turn our attention to indeterminacy, fragments, and loss as a way to reconfigure interdependent yet difficult relationalities. From these relationalities emerge creative expressions of the decolonial—expressions that allow one to live simultaneously within and beyond the bounds of independence.