差異／交混、對話／對譯－日治時期臺灣傳統文人的身體經驗與新國民想像(1895-1937)

Abstract

In 1895, Taiwan became a colony of the Japanese Empire, just as the world was entering the transition from the old to the new, at the turn of the century. How did Taiwanese view the spiritual reactions brought about by the shocks of coloniality, nativity and modernity? As they experienced the conversion of identity from ”people of China” to ”citizens of new Japan,” what was in their minds as their thinking changed? Were there any dialectical relationships between these thoughts and the newly introduced modern civilizations? This paper discusses first the early phase and gradual emergence of Taiwanese modernization based on traditional writers' experiences of the body, and from this examines the imagination of the ”new citizenship.” In this way it will observe the history of human body experience as it changed according to varying social circumstances Methodologically, because of the involvement of state power, the body narratives of ”new citizenship” are apt to result in ambiguity and difficulty of evaluation of national and ethnic identity. In order to avoid treating the questions of identity in the dualistic way of resistance/cooperation, this article will especially borrow Homi K. Bhabha's concept of hybridity, along with the discourse on difference used in Edward W. Said's explication of Orientalism. It will not only analyze the rich cultural meanings of the new hybrid spaces formed by the contact between the colonizer and the colonized, but also construe the critical times, issues and discourses of the contact between them, in order to understand what kinds of thinking resources would be quoted, translated, appropriated and seized from each other. Especially, for purposes of mediation, which native knowledge and culture resources did Taiwanese people emphasize or pay attention to? Such an analysis opens a useful way of comprehension differing from past efforts, outside the purview of ”identity.” The content of this article touches upon various kinds of body posture of the traditional writer, from 1895 to 1937, including the body of the remnant, the body of the new citizen, the tamed or educated body, the reveling body, etc., to unfold the cultural phenomena and deep meaning in the synchronic and diachronic social processes.