2024 Theses Master's

Unsettling Taiwan’s Settler Narratives: A Decolonial Analysis of Museums as Sites of Political Redress for Indigenous Taiwan

Hughes, Sarah

This paper utilizes a decolonial lens coupled with qualitative critical discourse analysis to examine the capacity for political redress for Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples within Taipei’s museums. Recognizing the multiple layers of colonial encounters, of settler colonialism, external imperial regimes and contemporary neo-colonial threats – it analyses how the island chooses to portray its complex history in museums regarding Austronesian identity.

Examining Indigenous representation within the context of Taiwan’s semi-sovereign reality, this paper emphasizes how settler narratives in museums continue to reduce and appropriate Indigeneity to legitimize the ROC distinct national identity as a multi-cultural liberal democracy. Understanding the colonial and nationalistic underpinnings of Taiwan’s museums, I argue that while a comprehensive decolonizing would require deeper interrogation – there is room for a radical imagining of what a museum of Indigenous redress could like in contemporary Taiwan.