Reconciliation Otherwise: Intimacy, Indigeneity, and the Taiwan Difference

This essay analyzes two Taiwan differences in East Asia—the presence of an indigenous population and its alleged pro-Japan sentiments— and examines how indigeneity and intimacy offer the potential to rethink questions of reconciliation outside of the state-centric model of political negotiation in post–Cold War postcolonial East Asia. The Japanese novel Exceedingly Barbaric (2008), by Tsushima Yuko, and the Taiwanese film Finding Sayun (2010), by Aboriginal filmmaker Laha Mebow (Chen Jie-Yao), are analyzed as rehabilitations of colonial wounds outside of the normative politics of recognition. They are, instead, fictive articulations of intergenerational intimacy that displace historical colonialism as the primary site where an alternate and nonstatist reconciliation can take place.