Taiwan, which experienced roughly four decades of totalitarian oppression until democratic reforms dramatically changed the political climate, enacted multiple laws to address the calamitous and fatal consequences of the White Terror. However, these laws were limited in scope and only provided compensation for individuals and exoneration for the political victims. Unlike the perpetrators of genocide in other places, among them the Cambodian Genocide and the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda, wherein the perpetrators have been found and incriminated, there is a perplexing phenomenon in Taiwan: at least 10,000 victims of Taiwan’s White Terror can be found, but not a single perpetrator, as Naiteh Wu points out. Existing studies of White Terror fiction and films also place great emphasis on victims and survivors, exploring ethical issues as well as the limits of artistic representation. Yet, in their treatment of the perpetrators, they often refer to so-called “national violence” or “government atrocities” without exploring the agents of this violence on the individual and group levels. I will therefore concentrate on the representation of perpetrators from the macro to micro levels in selected Taiwanese literary and cinematic texts. Its methodology and theoretical background are inspired by, and developed from, existing scholarship on perpetrators and their aesthetic representations in other geohistorical contexts.

Meng-Hao Li was born in Taiwan and is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich. He is a visiting researcher at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies until summer 2024, funded by the UZH Doc.Mobility Fellowships.

To attendants from outside the Department: Please pre-register with the seminar organizer, Jaqueline Berndt (jberndt@su.se), to provide access to the venue.