Romancing the Formosan Aborigine : colonial interethnic romance and its democratic revision in postwar film and fiction

In the first section of the present chapter, I examine the Chinese nationalist romance of the Formosan Aborigine in the 1950s and 1960s and, then again, after a decade’s absence, in the 1980s. In the second and third sections, I look at deconstructions of the nationalist romance paradigm in the 1990s written by a critically-minded Chinese writer and by aboriginal writers. I describe the earlier period as colonial and the latter as democratic. But Taiwan may be both democratizing and still in some sense colonial. In the conclusion, I will speculate on what democratization means to an aboriginal woman writer, a girl who declines to be romanced.