White Terror Research Articles

The photobook phenomenon: from the perspective of Taiwan photography history

This paper treats “photobook” as a metaphorical composition that implies the role of photographer-auteur, the juxtaposition of text and image, the editor’s decision on layout and sequence, as well as the designer’s and publisher’s performance on printed material. Such an approach of treating “photobook” as a visual account of history is closely linked to the distinct cultural background of Taiwan. As an island located in the centre of the East-Asian island arc, the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, and the southeast coast of the continent of Asia, Taiwan, also known as “Ilha Formosa”, has been governed by different colonial regimes in different periods of time, including the Netherlands, Spain, the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Japan, and the Republic of China. The production of photobooks in Taiwan history was inextricably intertwined with the cultivation of Taiwanese subjectivity that represented the shift from the colonialists’ perspective of this island to the diverse and multi-layered self-awareness. To identify the factors that led to these essential variations over the history of Taiwan photography, a chronological approach is imperative. Based on this insight, the discussion of this essay is chronologically structured in four parts: (1) from pre-1895 to the Japanese rule period (1895–1945); (2) from the great retreat to the White Terror (1945–1987); (3) from the lifting of martial law to the millennium (1987–2000); and (4) the 2000s and after.

The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919–1921. By Béla Bodó. Mass Violence in Modern History. London: Routledge, 2019. xxv, 333 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Figures. Maps. $124.00, hard bound.

The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919–1921. By Béla Bodó. Mass Violence in Modern History. London: Routledge, 2019. xxv, 333 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Figures. Maps. $124.00, hard bound. - Volume 80 Issue 4

White Sands

White Sands KJ Cerankowski (bio) Most people wouldn't think of southern New Mexico as a place a person might go to lean into their queerness. San Francisco or New York, Paris or Berlin, certainly, but an alabaster expanse of Southwestern desert that abuts a U.S. military missile range? Seems unlikely. Yet, drifting among the white sands of the arid New Mexican desert was exactly where I found myself when I—I suppose—"found myself." Though to be clear: this is not a saccharine story of coming out or embarking on some self-discovery journey in the wilds of nature to test my mettle, emerging from the brush as a more evolved or enlightened version of myself. For sure, I knew I was queer long before I set foot in any desert, or forest, for that matter. Hell, anyone could take one look at me and know it. I just didn't yet know what new shapes that queerness could take. This is more a story of happenstance, of the overlay of landscape and body and history, and the worlds of possibility that materialize in our intersubjective becomings. ________ Let me begin this tale at an entrance: "One adult and one child?" the park ranger asks as J pulls her station wagon up to the window of the entrance booth at White Sands National Park. (Technically, it was still a national monument at the time of our visit, and key to this entry point to the story is the fact that the entrance fee was calculated per person rather than per vehicle, as it is now, under the dictates of the National Park Service). I no longer remember the exact fees, but it was something like five dollars per adult over the age of sixteen and free admission for anyone under age sixteen. I sit quietly in the passenger seat, smiling to myself, knowing the ranger perceives me to be a child of the age sixteen or younger. Most likely, I imagine, she thinks I am a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy. Both J and I being broke graduate students, I am admittedly thrilled at the prospect of saving the five-dollar fee. That could go a long way toward cheap beers at the dive in Las Cruces later. But following my parsimonious glee, another pleasure hums through my veins. She thinks I'm a boy, I think to myself. A boy. J looks at me. I grin at J. She then sighs heavily and turns back toward the window. "Two adults," she asserts, with a hint of irritation in her voice. The woman shrugs, takes our money, hands us some park maps and brochures, and off we go. We enter the park just as the visitor center is closing, the sun purpling the sky on the horizon, the white dunes sprawled out before us. It is mid-July. The only comfortable time to visit the dunes in the summer months is within those few hours between the time the sun starts dropping in the sky and the hour after sunset when the park closes and the rangers sweep every last vehicle from the pullouts along Dunes Drive. It also happens to be the time you would be most likely to sneak a sighting of the "white dread" or "white terror," sometimes called "Pavla Blanca" or "La Pavura Blanca," the ghost of [End Page 54] a woman named Mañuela who, adorned in her bridal gown, scours the mounds of sand in search of her lover, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Luna, who set off from Mexico City in 1540 in search of cities of gold and streets of jewels to the north. After the expedition failed to turn up any riches to claim as their own, de Luna and his thieving crew turned back south, where they met with Apache resistance to the sprawl of Spanish colonization across the region, staunch refusal to simply turn over the land for settlement and capital trade. As the white dust settled in the aftermath of the battle, de Luna's bones, too, settled amongst the fields of white grain. He died trying to stake a claim on what was never rightfully...

Localization and culturalization for a history-based game

Abstract Released in 2017, the game Detention by the Taiwanese indie developer Red Candle Games gained great domestic success and made a name for itself among gamer communities worldwide. Providing an English-language localization upon its release, the 2D point-and-click horror game is set in the 1960s during Taiwan’s “White Terror” era. The story follows a ghost girl bound to the school she attended and unravels her tragic story. With such a specific temporal and spatial background, the game has a wide range of cultural references, potentially preventing non-Taiwanese players from being immersed in the game. This paper aims to examine industry practices within the theoretical framework of translation studies and understand, with the case of Detention, how culturalization operates at different levels. Through the lens of loss and gain, this paper also discusses how certain cultural connotations are lost in localization to retain the immersive game experience as an overall gain.

Taiwanese Identity – Past Factors and Present Circumstances

Abstract Taiwan is an island that off the coast of China. To say that Taiwan is a country is to offend the Communist People’s Republic of China which claims sovereignty over the island and markets it to the world as a “renegade province” which must be re-united with the mainland, by force, if necessary. For people who know very little about Taiwan and its big neighbour across the Taiwan Strait this may even sound convincing, but the truth is more complex. In 1949 the nationalist government (Kuomintang or KMT) having lost the Chinese Civil War retreated from the mainland; the communists have never ruled the island. The settling of the Republic of China’s government in Taiwan and the era of “White Terror” was another one in a series of historical events that were fundamental in forming the modern Taiwanese identity. Whatever the proponents of “one China” claim, the truth of the matter is that there is a shift in attitudes of the inhabitants of Taiwan in how they feel about themselves (Taiwanese, Chinese or both). This is a crucial fact that will have to be acknowledged in the cross-strait relations. The identity argument as such, is independent of any historical claims. And this Taiwanese identity has been evolving and will continue to do so, shaped by the past and the most recent events like the Hong Kong protests, the pandemic, politics and the military aggression and intimidation by the People’s Republic of China. This article will examine these factors in turn.

Editor’s Plaisance

Editor’s Plaisance

Towards a contemporary queer pop theater in Taiwan: the feminine fascinations of Dress in Code

ABSTRACT Premiered in 2016, Ear East Ensemble’s Dress in Code sets its stories across the late Ming Dynasty, the White Terror period, and contemporary Taiwan, weaving together issues of queer and national disidentification. Critics question the legitimacy of actress Ying-Xuan Hsieh playing a cross-dressing male Kuomintang detective, arguing that her comedic dansō reijin performance eclipses the themes of political and sexual violence as imposed by authoritarian regimes and patriarchy. Yet this essay argues that her presentation ironically enables the theatricality of a multilayered gender performance to reach its climax through the feminine fascinations mobilized by the audience and the performer and, simultaneously, activates wild femininities that problematize the logocentric progressivism promoted by pro-China officials since 1949. Specifically, this essay investigates the theatrical and the performing texts, as well as analyzing the ways in which the multilayered gender performance, as a parodic tactic, protests a possible contemporary queer pop theater that not only amplifies the diverse critiques of queer studies but also responds to the current impasse of feminist movements in Taiwan.

Reactionary Technopolitics: A Critical Sociohistorical Review

This paper outlines a critical social history of reactionary media, political, and information networks—what I refer to generally as technopolitics—in the United States and their significance to the hostility towards truth and fact that is a central feature of our political present. I begin with a critical review of the unique right-wing media and political ecosystem that emerged from the alliance between neoliberalism and social conservatism in the twentieth-century. In the second section, I focus on digitization, Trump, and the alt-right, and discuss the historical tethers connecting the latter to the cyber-libertarians and white supremacists operating on the early internet. Next, I take stock of the history covered in the paper, and argue that we can see three general sociopolitical tendencies emerging from our current juncture: something like a paleoconservative hardening of the Republican Party’s base; the degeneration of the core alt-right into white supremacist terrorism; and the rise of an “intellectualist” reactionary assemblage epitomized by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). I provide a brief analysis of the IDW and discuss its chief political and social significance in the post-Trump, post-alt-right social landscape of what Jodi Dean describes as communicative capitalism.

Punitive Policy of North-West Army and Its Implementation on the Approaches to Petrograd in Autumn of 1919

The article analyzes the information about the punitive practice of the North-West Army in autumn of 1919 on the outskirts of Petrograd. Comments are made on the events that took place in the largest Petrograd suburbs - Gatchina, Pavlovsk, Detsky Selo and other closely located settlements after their transfer to the control of the White Army. It is noted that it was there that mass cases of capital punishment were recorded. The dynamics of the White repressions during the offensive on Petrograd is traced. It is reported that cases of release at the request of the local population were recorded. The novelty of the study is seen in attracting new sources to write the article. The article is based on the materials of a special commission to identify cases of white terror, recollections of residents of cities and military units, orders of the white command. Quantitative data on cases of white terror revealed at that time are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the facts of violence against the Jewish population. Statistics on the use of the death penalty are provided. The conclusion is made that the punitive practice of this period was carried out by the military courts, and to an even greater extent - through unprotected executions by the officers.

A Study on Art as a System in the Intervention of the Culture ofRemembrance

The commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Formosa Incident was held in the Jing-Mei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, an institution remodeled from the Jing-Mei Detention Center. The Formosa Incident happened in December 1979, when editors, among other staff, of the Formosa Magazine, a banned journal, which nevertheless printed and circulated four issues, were arrested from their gathering for the International Human Right Day. The 61 defendants were tried in courts-martial and put in prison (PTS News Network 2010). In the park, a public art installation by Yu Wen-Fu was vandalized by human right activist Chen Chia-Chun, who asserted that the installation was honoring the White Terror perpetrator Wang Hsi-Ling. Yu’s installation was a meadow of white grass with several doves perching over it. This meadow surrounded the housing unit of Wang where he has living under house arrest. But Wang was not a victim like the others incarcerated in this former detention center; he has a high-ranking officer of the secret service and was imprisoned because of a scandalous assassination he had been involved in. The dispute over the appropriateness of such a peaceful-looking artwork drew the attention of artists as well as the public at large. A question was raised: What is the role of art in helping us to understand history?

When protests and daily life converge: The spaces and people of Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement

Social scientists are prone to define social movements as something extraordinary, existing outside the mundane world of daily routines and lives. However, as the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong has illustrated, protest and daily routines often overlap. This is due in part to the decentralisation of protest events geographically and the mobilisation of conventional life spaces and cultural repertoires as protest tactics. When protests become daily events and daily events become protests, ordinary people can no longer maintain ‘neutrality’ by claiming that they are just ‘distant spectators’. They are turned into witnesses of history, forced to make a moral judgment and take a stand. The situation also creates new roles for those not directly involved in the movement to participate in the movement. At the same time, this ‘invasion’ of the ordinary and the local by the harbingers of political conflict, has bred fear and white terror among neighbours in local communities.

Humanitarian Encounters: Charity and Gender in Post–World War I Jewish Budapest

Across East Central Europe, World War I and its violent aftermath impacted Jewish perspectives on home and homeland and forced many Jews to reconsider, reformulate, and at times even discard previous beliefs about the idea of national belonging. In Hungary, the White Terror of the early 1920s set off shock waves among the population of mainly urban Hungarian Jews, who until then had imagined themselves relatively safe. As social exclusion entered public and domestic life, it deeply influenced the way Jews imagined themselves at home in postwar Hungary. This article examines the ways in which Jewish women navigated the transitional period between war and peace in Hungary, and asks how the postwar years affected their sense of belonging and notions of home. Apart from being catapulted into public life, how did women navigate the intersection of antisemitism, physical violence, and displacement? How, for instance, did Jewish women react to the influx of Jewish refugees from Galicia, among them many children, who arrived in Budapest in great numbers seeking shelter and aid? Did the displacement of East European Jews affect existing notions of charity and Jewish identity among the women involved in humanitarian aid? And finally, how did war, revolution, and violence change Jewish women’s sense of identity as Hungarian?

The Southern Side of Chicago: Arnold R. Hirsch and the Renewal of Southern Urban History

This essay maintains that Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago must be viewed as critical to the evolution of Southern history. The author shows how Hirsch’s handling of white anxiety, racial terrorism, and state actions in the preservation of racial segregation helped move Southern historians to adopt a comparative and structural approach to racial politics and metropolitan life. It also encouraged them to abandon interpretive frameworks that treated the South as exceptional, thus proving critical to the development of “Sunbelt” urban history. The fact of Hirsch’s own residing in the South and his collaborations with Southern historians during the publication of Making the Second Ghetto offers additional context to explain the book’s resonance in Southern historiography.

The Red and White Terrors: Civil War and Political Savagery in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Red Terror and White Terror are terms referring to the unspeakable rear-guard atrocities that were committed by both sides during the Spanish Civil War that engulfed Spain between 1936-1939. In For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway creates two unforgettable scenes depicting this political savagery—Pilar’s story of the massacre by the peasants and anarchists from her town of their fascists-supporting neighbors and Maria’s recounting of her rape and the murder of her parents and fellow townspeople by Franco’s forces. This article examines these two scenes within the narrative of the Red and White Terrors in order to more fully appreciate their rich detail and historic accuracy.

An Ideology Online: Explaining the Causes and Proliferation of White Supremacist Terrorism

An Ideology Online: Explaining the Causes and Proliferation of White Supremacist Terrorism

New Negroes Versus the New South: African American Cultural and Intellectual Resistance to White Supremacy

New Negroes Versus the New South: African American Cultural and Intellectual Resistance to White Supremacy Jane Dailey (bio) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin, 2018. 296 pp. $30.00. There was no “South” before the Civil War. There were slaveholding states, but there was no unitary region described as “the South” before the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. It was “the conflict with the Yankee that created the concept of the South as something more than a matter of geography,” southern chronicler and armchair regional psychologist W. J. Cash observed in The Mind of the South (1941).1 According to Cash, a coherent regional collective identity was forged for the first time out of opposition to the victorious “North,” a term that stood for the Union Army, emancipation, and Reconstruction. The “South,” in other words, was everything the North was not. A notion of southern distinctiveness antedated the rise and defeat of the Confederacy, but the development of a narrative of southern distinctiveness was a post-emancipation phenomenon forged out of the ashes of what white southerners experienced as a catastrophic military defeat. Declensionist narratives of cultural destruction and existential peril have driven political transformation in the South at every stage since Appomattox. After the Civil War, such narratives about Reconstruction became a leading southern export, designed to convince the rest of the country that the war had been a tragic error, emancipation a mistake, Reconstruction a folly, and the Jim Crow South of legalized racial hierarchy and segregation a necessity. This “tragic era” story of the postwar South swamped competing narratives of the reconstitution of the Union and the incorporation of black men into politics and governance, and was used to justify the white terror and election fraud that was necessary—from the white point of view—to achieve disenfranchisement and American apartheid. Recognizing the narrative warfare of white supremacy, Henry Louis Gates notes in Stony the Road that “each generation of black people needed to invent their own New Negro” (p. 232) to further black goals and detach a growing cadre of elite African Americans from the masses of the freedpeople. Gates [End Page 264] focuses on his longtime fascination with the New Negro, which existed both in the form of actual people and as a representation, an argument against the destruction of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. “[T]he New Negro,” Gates argues, “is one of the most important legacies of the Reconstruction era” (p. 231). His book, he explains, “is a close reading of the history of the use of this imagery in the larger war to kill Reconstruction through the end of the nineteenth century, and of the imagery embodying the counternarrative by black people” (p. xviii). The New Negro was intimately tied to political competition. Gates recognizes the fluidity and competitive nature of the world of late-nineteenth-century southern politics. The “Redeemers,” white supremacists who ripped political power from the freedmen in the 1880s and 1890s, focused instantly on black voting and its consequences. The importance of black male enfranchisement, and disenfranchisement, cannot be overemphasized. Frederick Douglass identified the stakes in May of 1865, less than a month after Confederate surrender at Appomattox: “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot” (p. 24). The catastrophic consequences of disenfranchisement for southern blacks cannot be overstated. In the spring of 1867, less than one percent of black men could vote. By December, over 80 percent could.2 By the 1880s, more than two-thirds of all adult southern males still voted. That proportion rose to nearly three-quarters in the 1890s in states that had not yet limited the franchise. By the early 1900s, fewer than one man in three, white or black, voted in the South.3 As intended, voting restrictions had a hugely disproportionate effect on African Americans. If black men could not vote, they could not be elected to office; if they could not be elected to office, they could not shape or administer the laws that governed them. Sixty-four African Americans sat in Mississippi’s state legislature in 1873: none sat...

Taiwan's Reckoning with the White Terror

Taiwan's Reckoning with the White Terror

Subversive song: Imagining Colossians 1:15–20 as a social protest hymn in the context of Roman empire

A connection exists between the Christological hymn of praise and protest in Col 1:15–20 and popular protest music. The connection is the lyrical ability to transform political and socio-cultural realities, as well as to empower and mobilize protest and resistance against imperial power and coercive structures of domination. A special focus is on Billie Holiday’s song, “Strange Fruit,” a contemporary model of a protest song in comparison to Col 1:15–20. In the comparison, the Colossians hymn draws upon the political ideology and imagery of the Roman Empire in the form of a counter-discourse, as was Jewish resistance poetry, in ways analogous to how Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” evokes the imagery of white racial terror for the sake of raising political consciousness.

Paramilitarism, politics and organized crime during the Greek civil war (1945–1949)

The historiography of the Greek civil war has made significant progress during the past decade, but the origins, role and activities of paramilitaries remain under-researched. Most studies have focused on the period of the ‘white terror’ and explored the collusion between the state and the paramilitary groups. Although such studies have advanced our understanding of this turbulent period, they have not discussed important issues such as the motivation of the rank and file members, the sociopolitical networks used to recruit and mobilize support and the diverse conditions under which militias emerge. The article will address this lacuna and provide new insights into the origins, development and legacies of paramilitarism.

리앙(李昻)의 『화장한 피의 위령제(彩妝血祭)』를 통해 본 애도의 정치

“A Powdered Bloody Sacrifice for Departed Souls,” Li Ang’s novella published in 1997, is a narrative of mourning for the victims killed in the February 28th Incident of 1947 and by the subsequent white terror. At the same time, it is a narrative of consolation and hope for the survivors burdened to mourn the departed. We find two axes in the story. A family memorial service for consoling the souls is one axis, and the pain and discord surrounding the family history of Mother Wang who leads the opposition is the other. The juxtaposition of a “private” family memorial service and a “public” sacrifice for the departed souls of the “February 28th” victims is related to the narrative structure that employs two narrators: the main narrator and a co-narrator. It is also related to the “death photos” that exist only as hearsay. The truthfulness of the photos is emphasized more by not turning up, and that leads to a realization that the truth remains placed in an oppressive environment. This helps foster the spirit of resistance and solidarity. The suicide of Mother Wang in “A Powdered Bloody Sacrifice for Departed Souls” can be seen as the result of the remorsefulness for not having protected her son from the violence of the powerful, and of the double guilty conscience about her husband and her son. She casts her body as an expression of her wishes that the lamp that bears three names, those of her diseased uncle died in the February 28th, of her husband and her son killed in the white terror, may drift afar. This demonstrates her wishes for the realization of justice and the revelation of historical truth. “A Powdered Bloody Sacrifice for Departed Souls” by Li Ang is consistent with Judith Butler’s idea for transforming the sorrow of a community into the power of political activity. Mourning for the departed in a world of violent oppression is bound to be postponed indefinitely. It might even be said that the mourner becomes the object of the mourning. The sorrow that can be expressed only by suicide calls for a clearer, louder voice of the community. “A Powdered Bloody Sacrifice for Departed Souls” is a response to such a calling.