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Title |
Ecological and Gender Implications in Local Writings from Remote Islands: Chen Shu-yao’s Daily Journal Entries and Ikegami Eichi’s Kajimaya |
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Author |
Chu, Huei-Chu |
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Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, National Chung-hsing University |
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Abstract |
This article deals with two novels by writers from Penghu Islands and Yaeyama Islands, remote islands of Taiwan and Japan, and explores the ecological and gender implications in the local writings featuring solar terms, traditional festivals and folk beliefs in agricultural society. In the local cultural movement in Taiwan and in Okinawa, how are the sexualized local imaginations constructed through agricultural lifestyle, spiritual beliefs, folk dialects, and village communities? How do the ecological and gender implications in the novels expose the mutual construction process between the female/local image, nation-state’s modernization project, and local patriarchy? The discussion in this article shows that, a postmodern subject and relation reconstruction cannot view women, nature, and voice as “pure essence” unpolluted by modernity or as dehistoricized and decontextualized concept of hybridity. Instead, we should explore how capitalist modernity forms a complex relation of alliance and competition with local patriarchy, and legitimizes its authority and logics of dominations by produces various “locality” through inclusion and exclusion of its Others. |
