Ecological redistribution and historical sustainability in wu ming-yi’s two novels

This paper discusses how literary imagination reflects on and intervenes in the discussion of sustainability and makes Taiwan studies sustainable on a global scale in Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s two novels, The Man with the Compound Eyes (Fuyan ren) and The Stolen Bicycle (Danche shiqie ji). Drawing on contemporary theories of ecocriticism in conjunction with French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s theorization of “redistribution,” this paper argues that The Man with the Compound Eyes performs an act of “ecological redistribution” through which it not only actively engages in global production of environmental literature but also critiques the Han-centered historiography and settler multiculturalism in the local context of Taiwan. Furthermore, by re-conceptualizing interethnic representation in The Stolen Bicycle and placing this novel into integrated world history, I contend that Wu’s novel challenges the colonial hierarchy structuring the relationship between the anthropologist and the ethnographic object by depicting an interethnic encounter between a Han novelist and an indigenous photographer. In so doing, The Stolen Bicycle demonstrates the potentiality of “historical sustainability” by revisiting the period of World War II in order to show the complexity of Taiwan’s history and its multiple connections with world history, or more precisely, Taiwan’s “sustainable relations” with the world. Thus, in Wu’s literary imagination and intervention, the relationship between Taiwan and the world is always in the process of becoming, always resilient, renewable, and sustainable.