From Realistic Style to Magical Realism | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 11/03/2019

From Realistic Style to Magical Realism, from Literary Works to Cultural and Creative Industries: The Features of Indigenous "Literature" is a lecture given by Dr Chih-Fan Chen at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London on 21 February 2019. Find out more at http://bit.ly/2HsPxdK
The question of how indigenous peoples understand and use the concept of “literature” is an interesting concern. Oral folklore is an important basis of indigenous peoples’ literary creation in a traditional way, which reveals cultural contexts with tribal memories, ceremonies, and customs. However, the rise of genre of “indigenous literature” in Taiwan was closely related to the social movements by the indigenous peoples since the 1980s. Accordingly, the indigenous peoples had sought to publish their own newspapers and magazines to build platforms for public discourses; and, Chinese was a tool for them to communicate with the outside world and an essential foundation to construct pan-indigenous identity. With this regard, indigenous writers had started conversations with the public through literature awards and publications, and then developed more creative connections with other industries such as music, dance, and video/audio products. Therefore, this lecture intends to introduce the historical background and representative works of the indigenous literature in Taiwan since the 1980s. From realistic style to magical realism, this talk would like to demonstrate different strategies of using both Chinese and ethnic language for indigenous writers to present the central concept of “home-turning”; subsequently, their works skillfully extend concerns to the tradition fields, land justice, social changes in tribes, revival of cultures, and gender issues. Moreover, this lecture also wants to explore the relationship between literature and so-called cultural and creative industries; by doing this, this lecture would suggest some social effects of the indigenous “literature” as it keeps on crossing different boundaries. 

Speaker Bio
Dr Chih-fan Chen is currently an assistant professor of Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University, an advisory committee member of the NTHU Indigenous Students Resource Center, and an executive committee member of the Center for World Austronesia and Indigenous Peoples, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTHU. Chen had been invited as a visiting scholar by the Institute of Ethnic Literature, CASS, participating in the project of interviewing writers of the minority groups in China. Furthermore, as the editor of Mountain and Sea Culture Magazine Publications, Chen had taken part in projects such as “Taiwan’s Aboriginal Literature Digital Archive” and “Translation and Publication of Indigenous Literary Selections and Poetries during the Mind Dynasty, the Ching Dynasty, and the Japanese Colonial Period”.

Chen’s research interests contain ethnic literature and culture, Taiwanese indigenous historic data, and field studies of 19th-century Taiwan by westerners. She is the author of the Special Issue for the Exhibition of Indigenous Images and Historical Materials over the 100 Years in Taiwan (2011) and the co-writer of the Anthology of Taiwan Indigenous Literature: 1951-2014 (2015). In recent years, Chen’s research projects have focused on where literary works stand for indigenous peoples to engage in the contemporary political and economic contexts, and to employ literature as a medium to respond to diverse survival issues, ranging from urbanization, religious conversion, gender equality, cultural identities, to cultural revival.