Reconstructing Taiwanese Indigenous Literary History

Although Taiwanese Indigenous literature has a long history, the first monograph to consider it, Pasuya Poiconu’s (浦 忠 成) Literary History of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples, was not published until 2009. This book represents a significant attempt at deconstructing Chinese/Taiwanese literary history while simultaneously constructing a pan-Indigenous literary history. How might we understand the dual implications of construction and deconstruction at play in Indigenous literature as formulated by Poiconu? What specific historical conditions shaped its emergence? What is its relationship to Taiwan literature? How is Indigenous literature presented as an organic whole? How does chronology become a transformative element in the writing of Indigenous literary history? To answer these questions, this study begins with a basic overview of “literary history” as a concept, followed by an analysis of the innovations and limitations of the theories and methodologies at play in Poiconu’s Literary History of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples.