This dissertation concentrates on the discourse of the term "barbarism" retrospectively within the context of modernity, and how the meaning of this word transfers, is recognized, is narrated, and established. Barbarism has long been considered as an antonym to civilization, and long associated with its history of being suppressed, conquered, or eliminated. As Walter Benjamin once indicated in Theses on the Philosophy of History: “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” The relations between barbarism and civilization is always complex and dialectical.
Taiwan has endured a complex historical progression, and its documents of civilization have been repeatedly established on governed and domesticated barbarism. Throughout its history, civilization is always accompanied by colonialism or even war. This is what Walter Benjamin indicated, we should reconsider the linear history with its idea of progress, and rethink the relations between primitive and progress, tradition, and modernity.
During the period of Japanese rulership (1895-1945), the colonists brought modern progress to Taiwan. The governing knowledge was based on the research of anthropology, botany, museology, and modern literature. This colonial “database of natural history” (自然史資料庫, Wu Ming-Yi’s words), paradoxically, provides important historical materials and references to researchers nowadays. Base on this, the dissertation especially focuses on the conflicts caused by colonialism and the aboriginal tribe such as Truku War (太魯閣事件, 1914), Wushe Incident (霧社事件, 1930), Takasago Volunteers (高砂義勇軍, 1942), and the post-war Lanyu (蘭嶼, 1988).
In the 1980s-1990s, numerous discussions of post-colonial criticism were introduced to Taiwan. Taiwanese novelists like Wu He (舞鶴), Shih Shu-Ching (施叔青), Syaman Rapongan (夏曼.藍波安), use literature forms such as post-colonial text and auto-ethnographic expression to continue to debate the boundaries between civilization and barbarism. These novelists condemned the violence of modernity through their works and tried to reverse barbarism as learning of critical thinking. This dissertation brings out how the concept of barbarism is represented in the text of colonial modernity by tracing back to historic periods and how the term is used in contemporary literature narrations.