Linguistic Sovereignty on Screen: The Politics of Aboriginal Speech in Taiwan New Cinema

The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Dr Yuan Li to discuss the politics of aboriginal speech in Taiwan New Cinema. 

This talk offers a critical reassessment of Taiwan New Cinema (TNC), which has been primarily celebrated in major scholarly discussions as an 'alternative cinema' to earlier state-sponsored Mandarin-language film. Whilst recognising the aesthetic and cultural legacies of TNC, Li will examine the significant linguistic limitations that persist within this ostensibly progressive film movement. 

Despite the multilingualism widely represented in TNC, including Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese Hakka, Taiwanese Mandarin, English, Japanese, and other languages, aboriginal languages remain conspicuously muted or marginalised in this internationally acclaimed body of work. Tracing indigenous cultural representation from The Second Spring of Lao Mo (1984) to Connection by Fate (1999), this study will analyse how TNC filmmakers portrayed Indigenous communities both visually and sonically. 

Li will argue that whilst the use of Taiwanese Hokkien represented an act of reclaiming linguistic sovereignty from the state, TNC ultimately failed to extend this same sovereignty to Indigenous communities. Through close analysis of portrayal—or absence—of Aboriginal audiovisual languages in these films, Li demonstrates how TNC reinforced a Han-centric power structure, revealing the limits of its political project and challenging conventional narratives of the movement's cultural progressiveness.