Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film by Bert Scruggs (review)

Bert Scruggs's Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film is a welcome and substantive contribution to the evolving field of postcolonial cultural and literary studies in general and scholarship on Taiwan in particular.

In recent years, we have seen several books dedicated to Taiwan as a site for inquiry into postcolonial and transnational literary and cultural productions. As in Korea or Hong Kong, the aftereffects of colonialism still reverberate and rightly draw scholarly attention. Taiwan's role in academic research has evolved through distinct stages over the last half century. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the island state served as a stand-in for the inaccessible China, a place where Western scholars went for a firsthand experience of traditional Chinese society. In the 1970s and 1980s, Taiwan's rapid economic development drew attention as one of the Four Dragons of Asia, where Confucian discipline merged with Western entrepreneurship. It was often held up as a successful model for economic transition into a developed state.

The end of martial law in 1987 and the democracy movement that sought not only civil rights but also a recovery of the local Taiwanese identity have fostered a genuine Taiwanese nationalism. This period coincided with the rise of studies on colonialism and postcolonial globalization in the 1990s. Taiwan's half-century of colonial rule under the Japanese empire was for the first time studied objectively as an academic subject. In the new millennium, a series of books has emerged exploring the complex politics of assimilation, linguistic identity, literary production, and the transnational circulation of texts in the Japanese empire.¹ This body of scholarship reexamines colonial Taiwan and other Japanese colonies, focusing on language policy and cultural practices (such as assimilation, intimacy, and so forth), as well as textual production and circulation within the empire. It directs attention away from the military, political, and economic history of the empire, to focus on the empire's implications at the level of the individual subject, in an attempt to recover the nature of life in the colonial era.

Scruggs's book does provide information about the authors and writings of the colonial period, but his primary focus is on the reception of this period and its products in the postcolonial era. Thus, one of his interests is in the production and consumption of modern translations of colonial-period texts; another is movies made recently that are set in the colonial period. Scruggs argues that our understanding of the colonial period has been shaped by these postcolonial prisms, which inevitably interpret the past in what he calls the "creation of the colonial by the postcolonial" (p. 9). In analyzing these postcolonial reconstructions of the colonial past, Scruggs discerns five factors that he claims de-center the late modern subject: Marxism, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, discourse analysis, and feminism. These lenses, Scruggs claims, "afford a wealth of possibilities for understanding both colonial and postcolonial Taiwanese subjects" (p. 6). Since the general reader's understanding of colonial Taiwan is indeed primarily through the lens of translations of fiction (either in Chinese or English) written in the colonial period and films made in the postcolonial era about that time, the role of these mediators and creators looms large in the construction of (post)colonial Taiwan.

In his examination of postcolonial interventions, Scruggs pays particular attention to the issue of translation, specifically translations of texts by colonial-period writers such as Wang Changxiong, Wu Zhuoliu, and Zhang Wenhuan. In fact, what makes Scruggs's research fresh, and distinct from other inquiries into colonial Taiwanese literature, is his attention to the process of translation from Japanese into Chinese. Scruggs makes a contribution to the dialogue on Japanese colonial power with regard to its colonies by transcending the simplistic binary power structure of the colonizer and the colonized and plunging into the particular linguistic environment of Taiwan. Previous scholarship on (post)colonial Taiwanese fiction and film, stressing...