Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film by Bert Mittchell Scruggs
2017; Harvard–Yenching Institute; Volume: 77; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/jas.2017.0045
ISSN1944-6454
Autores Tópico(s)Subtitles and Audiovisual Media
ResumoReviewed by: Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film by Bert Mittchell Scruggs Ping-hui Liao Translingual Narration: Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film by Bert Mittchell Scruggs. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. Pp. x + 205. $65.00. Erratum: This book review referred to the Taiwanese film director Hong Zhiyu 洪智育 as Hong Zhuyi 洪祝一. HJAS regrets the error and has corrected the online version. Over the years, Bert Scruggs has been a dedicated translator of modern Taiwan literature, undertaking the almost impossible task of rendering texts previously relatively unknown from Japanese into English. His recent book Translingual Narration provides a most revealing interpretive account of major films and works of fiction produced on the [End Page 570] island during the Japanese period (1895–1945), especially focusing on the two decades when the Japanese empire tightened control over its colonial subjects as it prepared to invade China and make war across the Pacific. Translingual Narration’s six chapters trace the trajectory of identity formation and cultural agency, offering a transnational, translational, and postcolonial perspective on a wide range of literary or filmic texts. Drawing on humanist and symptomatic reading strategies of cultural translation, as well as international and comparative area studies perspectives, these chapters consider place and ethnicity in works by Weng Nao 翁鬧 (1908–1940), Wang Changxiong 王昶雄 (Wang Ch’ang-hsiung, also Oh Shō-yū, 1916–2000), and Wu Zhuoliu 吳濁流 (1900–1976), class consciousness in anticolonial proletarian fiction by novelists Yang Kui 楊逵 (1905–1985), Wang Shilan 王詩瑯 (1908–1984), Yang Shouyu 楊守愚 (1905–1959), and Zhu Dianren 朱點人 (1903–1949), and female roles and body politics in short stories by women writers Zhang Bihua 張碧華, Ye Tao 葉陶 (Yeh T’ao, 1905–1970), Huang Baotao 黃寶桃 (fl. 1930s), and Yang Qianhe 楊千鶴 (Yung Chiang Ho, 1921–2011). On several occasions, we have male authors masquerading as women. The book concludes with a succinct discussion of films about postcolonial nostalgic memory and solastalgic yearning, directed by Wang Tong 王童 (b. 1942), Hong Zhiyu 洪智育一, Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢 (b. 1947), and many others. Albeit short (with only 140 pages), this book offers an embarrassment of riches. The overarching framework is a concern with the multiple contours of indigenization. It examines identity formation in response to colonial modernity, as expressed in the constitution and mobilization of local and transregional agencies—linguistic, material, moral, political, spiritual, and so on. In many respects, the book is an indispensable reference for Taiwan and postcolonial studies; it is certainly a welcome addition to the emergent field of inter-Asian cultural studies. Even though Scruggs proposes to read texts along the lines advocated by Lawrence Venuti1—that is, combining humanist with symptomatic methods to enable “strategic intervention” (p. 139)—Scruggs is mostly using “metaphrase” and “paraphrase” as ways to retell [End Page 571] historical contexts, biographical sketches, and ideological “theses” or messages. In the comparison of Yang Kui with other writers of his time, Scruggs states Yang Kui’s stories “engage real proletarian issues”; Yang Kui is the only author to come up with “real” theses, whereas the others are presenting agendas “far removed from the social strata” that they seek to help (p. 86). On gender roles and mixed feelings about marriage responsibilities, Scruggs also criticizes Yang Qianhe for failing to configure a position that is less tantalizing: Rather than conclude the text with an anguished Huiying seeking an identity at work or among social circles, the narrative comes to an end as the unmarried girls play with a newborn baby and learn from their newly married friend that delivery and nursing are not as painful as she had imagined. … “When the Flowers Bloom” does not offer a denouement. Like Wang Changxiong’s “Torrent,” there are no easy answers for the characters; however, unlike Wang’s work, Yang Qianhe’s text offers only ambivalence. (p. 108) In fact, the ambivalence, gap, contradiction, and frustration about “real” politics here may help complicate and deepen thinking about life potentials or about human capabilities to realize utopian visions—to join a transregional brotherhood to fight capitalist and colonial exploitation or decide to settle for marriage and family obligations? In Yang Kui’s “Paperboy,” the narrator returns to Taiwan at the end of the story to...
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