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[REVIEW] “An Oceanic Taiwan: Niki J. P. Alsford and Ti-Han Chang’s Reorienting Taiwan” by Lu Feng

Niki J. P. Alsford and Ti-Han Chang (editors), Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific, Brill, 2025. 237 pgs.

Writings on the history, culture, and identity of Taiwan, whether popular or scholarly, have long been overshadowed by the archipelago’s complex relationship with China. As cross strait relations have grown increasingly tense this year, Taiwan is frequently invoked in global geopolitics as a contested province of China, an island under constant territorial threat from the mainland. Such framing reflects the mounting difficulty for Taiwanese people, in the words of Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te, to “defend [their] democracy” and sovereignty. It is against this charged global backdrop that a new collection of essays seeking to redefine Taiwan’s position in the world and its identity emerges as a timely intervention.

As its title suggests, Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific, edited by Niki J. P. Alsford and Ti-Han Chang, adopts an oceanic approach to reframing the narrative of Taiwan. Acknowledging the intimate connections between landscape and identity, the volume foregrounds Taiwan’s islandness and oceanic ecology. It conceptualises Taiwan as an oceanic space and understands Taiwanese identity as shaped by “the constant dialogue between the island’s natural endowments and the diverse communities that inhabit it” (p. 3). Importantly, the book highlights Taiwan’s unique role in the history of Austronesian culture and society, namely “the cradle of Austronesian expansion” (p. 7). In doing so, Taiwan is no longer positioned as a peripheral island tethered to the Asian continent and overshadowed by China. Rather, as the point of origin for a rich tapestry of Pacific societies and cultures, Taiwan emerges as a centre in its own right, endowed with a distinctive identity and global significance, and as an integral part of the Pacific world. The volume thus initiates a paradigm shift that remaps Taiwan’s regional and global position and calls for “an appreciation of the vast physical scale, ever changing nature, and remarkable environmental diversity of the Pacific Ocean to fully grasp Taiwan’s role within it” (p. 7).

A productive starting point for such oceanic remapping, as demonstrated in Part I, “New Waves of Oceanic Thinking,” is Indigenous perspectives. Comprising four parts in total, Reorienting Taiwan opens with two essays that explore the oceanic culture of the Amis (Ameizu 阿美族), one of the sixteen Indigenous groups in present day Taiwan who have long inhabited the Pacific coast. DJ W. Hatfield’s chapter examines how three contemporary Amis artists regard the ocean as a teacher in distinct ways within their creative practices, while Alsford’s contribution focuses on barkcloth making, a culturally significant Amis practice, tracing the migration history of barkcloth production from Taiwan to the Pacific. Together, these essays demonstrate not only the intricate relationships between Taiwan and its oceanic environment but also how the ocean offers a mode of thinking, feeling, and knowing that can untangle the “layered, complex, and interwoven fabric of colonialism in Taiwan” (p. 5) and thereby contribute to the decolonisation of the archipelago.

The following two parts shift attention to Taiwanese oceanic literature and visual art respectively. Part II, “Oceanic Writing and Translation in Literature,” consists of three essays that examine how the sea is written and translated within and beyond Taiwanese literary contexts. Pei-yin Lin’s essay explores how contemporary Taiwanese writers, including Han writers such as Lü Zezhi and Liao Hung-chi, as well as the Indigenous writer Syaman Rapongan, articulate diverse modalities of oceanic writing that collectively contribute to a reimagining of Taiwan, delinking it from multiple land based epistemologies. Gwennaël Gaffric offers a close reading of Syaman Rapongan’s reconceptualisation of oceanic literature, one that challenges Western traditions of writing the sea and translates the marine environment into “a new language and a new lexicon” (p. 85) for constructing a new Taiwanese identity. Antonio Paoliello-Palermo and Mireia Vargas-Urpí also engage with translation, albeit from a more literal perspective, analysing the Catalan and Italian translations of Wu Ming-yi’s novel Fuyanren (2011). They demonstrate how the novel’s oceanic elements function as an effective vehicle through which translators introduce Taiwan’s emergent oceanic identity to Mediterranean readers, thereby facilitating cross continental cultural exchange.

Part III continues this exploration of cultural representation with a turn to visual media. Norbert Danysz delves into Taiwan’s burgeoning comics scene, highlighting the central role of the sea and the island across diverse works by Taiwanese artists, which collectively exhibit the hybridity and plurality of Taiwanese identity. Kuei-fen Chiu and Hsing-juh Lin present an insightful analysis of Taiwan’s eco documentaries through a comparative study of two works produced a decade apart. Situating these films within their respective social and political contexts, Chiu and Lin identify a significant shift in how Taiwan’s ecological future is imagined, underscoring the growing importance of the ocean and a broader paradigm shift in conceptualising Taiwan itself. Their analysis also points to the urgent need to integrate natural scientific knowledge amid competing environmental visions.

Chiu and Lin’s discussion of algal reefs, while illustrating the ocean’s complex materiality shaped by deep geological histories, paves the way for the book’s final part, “Oceanic Entanglements: Encounters of the Human and Nonhuman Worlds.” In this section, the three contributors reconceptualise Taiwan as more than a landmass with clearly defined boundaries separating it from the sea. Scott E. Simon, for instance, envisions Taiwan as “a node in an oceanic entanglement of lives” (p. 162). By tracing avian migration routes, he reveals dynamic relationships between humans and birds across four locations, three in Taiwan and one in Guam, exposing oceanic connections that carry layered histories of militarism and colonialism. Similarly, Julien Laporte advocates a relational and holistic understanding of Taiwan that encompasses its entanglements with nonhuman species such as fish, drawing on his embodied experience of learning to dive and spearfish with the Tao people on Pongso no Tao, or Orchid Island. Futuru C. L. Tsai also centres fish in her discussion of the relationship between coastal Amis communities and reef species in the context of spearfishing. By highlighting how fish are personified and how ecological knowledge about fish structures the social organisation of the Amis community, Tsai further advances a beyond human approach to understanding Taiwan’s diverse cultures.

The book concludes with two essays, one by the aforementioned writer Liao Hung-chi, reflecting on his activism in whale and dolphin conservation and the development of Taiwan’s own whale watching culture, and another tracing the trajectory of Taiwan studies in the United Kingdom, particularly at the University of Central Lancashire. Together, these essays bring the volume to a satisfying close. While diverse in disciplinary scope, spanning geography, anthropology, literature, art, and biology, the ten chapters form a coherent whole. They demonstrate how Taiwan’s long standing and evolving relationship with the ocean provides a powerful lens through which to rethink its history and culture and to imagine a renewed identity for the archipelago’s future.

In this regard, the volume opens up possibilities for reinterpreting Taiwan’s traumatic past through an oceanic lens. Several contributors note that public access to the sea and coastline was strictly controlled during the period of Martial Law from 1949 to 1987, owing to national security concerns. This era, also known as the White Terror, witnessed severe political repression, during which thousands of dissidents and others accused of communist sympathies were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured to death. It was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that the idea of an oceanic Taiwan entered the public sphere and began to gain momentum. As a result, the essays in Reorienting Taiwan focus primarily on post martial law cultural responses to the sea, leaving the White Terror, an extremely traumatic period that has profoundly shaped Taiwanese identity, largely unexplored. Implicitly, the volume seems to suggest that the rupture between the martial law era and the post martial law period, marked respectively by the authoritarian Kuomintang regime and its predominantly land based ideologies, and by Taiwan’s democratisation and subsequent oceanic turn, is as great as the divide between land and water. This framing risks naturalising a historical discontinuity, as if political repression and its afterlives were sealed off on one shore of history, while oceanic imaginaries could only emerge on the other.

However, if the ocean indeed encourages “a reimagining of Taiwanese history” (p. 77), as Pei-yin Lin suggests, and if water constantly remakes the island’s shorelines and redraws the boundaries between past and present, as scholars in the Blue Humanities argue, one may ask what an oceanic rewriting of the White Terror might look like and how such a reframing could reshape discourses of national trauma and, in turn, Taiwanese identity.

In this context, one might consider Dameng 大濛 (A Foggy Tale), a Taiwanese film that has recently garnered multiple Golden Horse Award nominations for its innovative revisiting of the White Terror. Set in the 1950s, the film follows a young girl travelling north from Chiayi to Taipei to retrieve her elder brother’s body. As one film critic has noted, water imagery recurs throughout the film, signifying the murkiness of memory and history, as well as the continuity and vitality of life. This aquatic symbolism receives a fully realised visual expression in the illustrated film poster by the artist Jui-Hung Ni. In the poster, the brother A Yun sits at the top, surrounded by clouds of smiling faces, a visual pun that resonates with the meaning of his name, “cloud.” Below, colourful rain falls onto his younger sister A Yue, who stands at the centre against a backdrop of azure sky and green rice paddies. Echoing this sky, the poster is framed in turquoise blue and bears a couplet adapted from a line in the film: “Your friend became rain last night and fell into the Pacific Ocean. In doing so, he completed his task, to become the landscape of a certain moment, of a certain place.” At the bottom, a shorter line in larger type serves as a heading, accompanied by a large drop of water on the right: “After all, we all are part of the landscape in the eyes of others.”

Evidently, this poster offers yet another example of how the ocean has become integral to Taiwanese identity, as Reorienting Taiwan compellingly demonstrates. It also suggests how an oceanic turn might help re engage with Taiwan’s traumatic past and imagine alternative futures for the archipelago and for the world beyond it.

How to cite: Feng, Lu. “An Oceanic Taiwan: Niki J. P. Alsford and Ti-Han Chang’s Reorienting Taiwan.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Dec. 2025, chajournal.com/2025/12/20/reorienting-taiwan.

Lu Feng is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick, where she researches rivers and late imperial Chinese worldmaking. Her research interests encompass cultural geography, cartography, environmental humanities, global history, and world literature. Outside her academic work, she enjoys drawing, dancing, running, and writing short stories. Her work has appeared in Shima and Annulet, and she can also be found on Instagram at @lufeng_june.