Talk by Yu-ting Huang, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University.
Thursday, November 20, 2025
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Bunche Hall 10383
When and how did Asians become settlers? This talk traces the literary emergence of Han Taiwanese settler subjects since the 1970s, arguing that Asian settlerhood—as both a political identity and a subject position—is a relatively recent discursive invention in the postwar Pacific. It examines how Han Taiwanese authors’ attempts to narrate their colonial subjugation simultaneously produced narratives of settler belonging, exposing a paradox at the heart of contemporary Asian political formation.
This talk focuses on two major works. Li Qiao’s Wintry Night Trilogy (1979-82) adopts the form of the anti-colonial historical novel to naturalize Han settler relation to land as ontological, primordial, and timeless, weaving Indigenous histories into a Han-centered saga of anti-imperial endurance and resistance. Li Ang’s Lost Garden (1991) critiques patriarchal nationalism and U.S.-led transpacific capitalism, yet her vision of feminist renewal still depends on appropriating Indigenous difference as a symbolic resource. Read together, these works reveal how emancipatory discourses were retooled to produce new settler subjectivities, even as they challenge other axes of domination.
This analysis emerges from a broader comparative project on Asian American and Taiwanese literature, which shows how writers across the Pacific drew on frontier memories and global languages of resistance to forge new political imaginaries. By situating Taiwan within transpacific debates on race, empire, and indigeneity, the talk demonstrates how settler relations persist as contingent and protean assemblages that continuously reinvent themselves across historical moments and national contexts.
Yu-ting Huang is an assistant professor in the College of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on Asian-Indigenous relations across the Pacific, as articulated in contemporary literature by both Indigenous and settler authors in Sinophone and Anglophone contexts. Her book manuscript, The Making of Asian Settlers: Frontier Memories, Radical Politics, and Forms of Desire in Postwar Chinese American and Taiwanese Literature, reframes Asian settlerhood as a discursive and ideological formation emerging in literature since the 1970s. She co-edited Archiving Settler Colonialism (Routledge, 2019). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from journals including Modern Fiction Studies and Verge, as well as in collections of essays.
Graduate students lunch from at 12pm in Bunche Hall 10383 will be available for RSVP later.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Pacific Center, Taiwan Studies Program, APC