Paul D. Barclay. Outcasts of Empire

Indigenism is one of the keys to understanding the political, social, and cultural conditions of Taiwan following the democratization movement, which attempted to shift Taiwan’s ideological base from Sinocentrism to cultural pluralism. Questioning this strong theory seeing indigenism as a postwar development, Paul D. Barclay suggests, in Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945, that “nationality, internationalism, and indigenism were mutually constituted formations, rather than sequentially occurring phenomena” (2). Despite its significance, there has been a paucity of studies on the modern history of Taiwan’s indigenous groups, especially those written in English. Indeed, indigenous studies of Taiwan were rooted in Japanese colonial times and closely associated with Japanese governmental rule. Moreover, Taiwan’s indigenous studies of that time were dominated by anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology, which have greatly shaped the scholarly discourse up to the present time. Thus, Barclay’s historical study is a most welcome contribution to the field of Taiwan studies.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonial rule · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Ideology · Immigration · Indigenous · Nationality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies