This article examines how Han Taiwanese myths and urban legends have been associated with the environment and native fauna in the best-selling popular non-fiction publication Monstrous Taiwan and the hit horror film The Tag-Along. This article also looks at how these works can be considered within the framework of settler colonial studies in East Asia. Both works are interested in intervening in popular culture and genre cinema while reframing the horror or supernatural genre as particularly Taiwanese, drawing on urban legends and traditional folk tales. However, the creators of these works persistently characterise Han Taiwanese legends as interchangeable with the native fauna of Taiwan. This move positions Han Taiwanese as inheritors of the natural environment of Taiwan while minimising or, in some cases, tokenising the presence of indigenous Taiwanese people.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Andrade, Tonio (2008) How Taiwan became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, New York: Columbia University Press.
Brown, Melissa J. (2004) Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Byrd, Jodi (2011) The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chang, K-Ming (2020) Bestiary, Toronto: Hamish Hamilton.
He, Jingyao (2017) 妖怪台灣:三百年島嶼奇幻之妖怪神遊卷 [Monstrous Taiwan: Three Hundred Years of the Island Fantastic—Volume on Monsters and Gods], Taipei: Lianjing chuban.
Hirano, Katsuya; Veracini, Lorenzo; and Roy, Toulouse-Antonin (2018) ‘Vanishing natives and Taiwan’s settler-colonial unconsciousness’, Critical Asian Studies 50(2): 196–218.
Hu, Zhixi (2020) ‘2000年代前後至今臺灣「魔神仔」影視形象轉變之探析: 以電影《魔法阿媽》和《紅衣小女孩》為中心’ [An analysis of Taiwan’s changing media representations of mosina from 2000 to the present day: Centring on movies Grandma and Her Ghosts and The Tag-Along], Xinbei dashixue 26: 15–54.
Hu Pegues, Juliana (2022) Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Lee, Hunju (2015) ‘Transformations of the monstrous feminine in the New Asian Female Ghost Films’, Diogenes 62(1): 100–114.
Lin, Zhi-an (2015) ‘一個社會如果不會面對恐懼,才會存在禁忌。金鐘獎團隊立志打造代表台灣的恐怖片’ [If a society cannot face its fears, then it will create a taboo: Golden Bell nominee aims to create a representative Taiwanese horror film], The Newslens, 6 October. Retrieved 20 June 2023 from https://www.thenewslens.com/article/25059.
Mackenthun, Gesa (1998) ‘Haunted real estate: The occlusion of colonial dispossession and signatures of cultural survival in U.S. horror fiction’, Amerikastudien/ American Studies 43(1): 93–108.
Munsterhjelm, Mark (2014) Living Dead in the Pacific: Contested Sovereignty and Racism in Genetic Research on Taiwan Aborigines, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Murray, Robin and Heumann, Joseph K. (2016) Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Payne, Christopher (2019) ‘In/visible peoples, in/visible lands: Overlapping histories in Wang Chia-hsiang’s historical fantasy’, International Journal of Taiwan Studies 2(1): 3–31.
Scherer, Elisabeth (2016) ‘Well-travelled female avengers: The transcultural potential of Japanese ghosts’, in Peter J. Bräunlein and Andrea Lauser (eds), Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond: Narratives, Cultural Contexts, Audiences, Leiden: Brill, 61–82.
Shih, Shu-mei (2016) ‘Theory in a relational world’, Comparative Literary Studies 53(4): 722–746.
Sugimoto, Tomonori (2018) ‘Settler colonial incorporation and inheritance: Historical sciences, indigeneity, and settler narratives in post-wwii Taiwan’, Settler Colonial Studies 8(3): 283–297.
Zhang, Jiya (2017) ‘插繪者後記’ [Illustrator’s postscript], in Jingyao He, Monstrous Taiwan: Three Hundred Years of the Island Fantastic—Volume on Monsters and Gods, Taipei: Lianjing chuban, 25–26.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 635 | 590 | 81 |
Full Text Views | 30 | 28 | 3 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 226 | 220 | 8 |
This article examines how Han Taiwanese myths and urban legends have been associated with the environment and native fauna in the best-selling popular non-fiction publication Monstrous Taiwan and the hit horror film The Tag-Along. This article also looks at how these works can be considered within the framework of settler colonial studies in East Asia. Both works are interested in intervening in popular culture and genre cinema while reframing the horror or supernatural genre as particularly Taiwanese, drawing on urban legends and traditional folk tales. However, the creators of these works persistently characterise Han Taiwanese legends as interchangeable with the native fauna of Taiwan. This move positions Han Taiwanese as inheritors of the natural environment of Taiwan while minimising or, in some cases, tokenising the presence of indigenous Taiwanese people.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 635 | 590 | 81 |
Full Text Views | 30 | 28 | 3 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 226 | 220 | 8 |