Negotiate and Resist from the Margin: Contemporary Cultural Representation and Material Agency of Indigenous Struggles in Philippines and Taiwan

Panel Convenor(s)

• CY

  Chen Yi-Fong

  National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan

Panel Chair(s)

• CY

  Chen Yi-Fong

  National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan

Presenter(s)

• CY

  Chen Yi-Fong

  National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan
• SY

  Shau-lou Young

  National Taiwan University, Taiwan
• SL

  Sera Mika Lin Yen-Ling

  National Taiwan University, Taiwan
• YT

  Yi-jen Tu

  National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

This panel examines four examples of indigenous and marginal resistance to injustice in various colonial systems. We intend to present a preliminary framework and narrative for the re-consideration of the important entanglements of space, mobility, identity, and colonialism, as those discussed actors negotiate their everyday realities of resistance and representation from socially marginal positions. The common experience of colonialism- though in various forms, temporalities, and spatiality- encountered by marginalized groups manifests a similar subjective formation process and socio-political vulnerability. We explore a variety of materials and issues in four papers, including textiles, podcase programs, hydropower infrastructure, mobility, and boundary-crossing/building, as critical sites of resisting, representing, and negotiating from the margin to enrich the theorizations of coloniality and its resistance.

Shau-lou Young uses the textile woven by the Ifugo people in the Philippines as the material with an agency to represent their ethnic identity and negotiate its boundaries with the dominant Filipino national narratives. TU Yi-jen demonstrates how indigenous youths in northern Taiwan employ social media to articulate and actively voice their ethnic identity and decolonize the mainstream cultural interpretation. Sera Mika (Lin Yen-ling) situates her inquiry within Indigenous community to examine the complex entanglement between mobility, identity and commodity to enhance our understanding of decolonizing cultural interpretation. Chen Yi-Fong’s research focuses on big infrastructure located within the traditional territory of Indigenous Sediq in Taiwan as a symbol of the neo-colonial development legacy, to serve as material agencies to incorporate energy transition into the discourse of environmental justice.
Being in a marginal/resistance space provides us with critical sites of, and situates our intellectual and political inquiries within multiple decolonization frameworks. Through fieldwork both in the Philippines and Taiwan, and the panelists’ analytical examination of boundary construction and deconstruction between modernity and indigeneity, identity and location, mobility and quiescence, technology and tradition, and colonial representation and decolonial resistance (against big infrastructure). This panel aims to make contributions to our spatial and temporal rethinking of complicated Indigenous struggles along the road to negotiate and regain control of their boundaries within modern nation-states.

Presentations:

• 11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)

  Place-based Environmental Activism in Resisting Large Infrastructure: Decolonization, Resistance, and the Limits of Energy Transition in Taiwan
  

  Presenter: Chen Yi-Fong – National Dong Hwa University
• 11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)

  Interwoven Identities: Negotiating Space through Weaving Practices among the Ifugao People in the Philippines
  

  Presenter: Shau-lou Young – National Taiwan University
• 11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)

  Place in practices by mobility: A Case Study of the Lohok Tribe in Taiwan
  

  Presenter: Sera Mika Lin Yen-Ling – National Taiwan University
• 11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)

  Reviving Taiwan Indigenous Culture: Empowering the Marginalized Youth Ketagalan through New Media Narratives
  

  Presenter: Yi-jen Tu – National Taiwan Normal University