This contribution comparatively analyses two contemporary novels that memorialise Taiwan’s White Terror by integrating national history with family memories and fictional narratives. Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island (2016) and Gu Yu-ling’s 顧玉玲 Yu di 餘地 (Margins, 2022) both focus on the legacy that family secrets and family traumas –tied to the experience of political persecutions during the White Terror– have brought to the next generation, affecting family relations and characters’ identity constructions. While different in form, style, structure, and even language, the two texts explore similar issues, such as: the way memory –especially in the form of inherited trauma– is carried through intergenerationally and transnationally; how family memory –which here is articulated in the form of absence, silence, and secrecy– brings about doubts and ambiguities that directly challenge institutionalised forms of memorialisation; how the institutionalisation of memory alone ultimately fails to offer a credible re-telling of the past, especially to the generations that have not lived through it. In this paper, while delving into all these aspects, I will also consider the contribution that the family novel, as a literary genre, can bring to the reconstruction of national history, and how literature can be made part of a public commemoration process. This paper is part of a bigger project on contemporary Taiwanese literature and the re-elaborations of White Terror from a transgenerational and transnational perspective.

Chair: Irmy Schweiger

ZOOM: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/69748044723

To attendants from outside the Department: Please pre-register with the chair, Irmy Schweiger (irmy.schweiger@su.se), to allow access to the venue.