英文摘要
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Taiwanese literature in the late 90s was enriched by a group of indigenous writers coming from several different tribes. However, the greatest and foremost difficulty indigenous writers have to face during literary creation is the language problem. There exist a number of cultural differences between Chinese and the languages of indigenous people. When using Chinese in writing, writers from an indigenous background cannot help being influenced by the dominant ideologies in Chinese culture. Therefore, when writing in Chinese, unless these writers incline toward the hegemonic center at the expense of their own cultural origin, in other words a full imitation of the hegemony, they inevitably have to ”write back to the center” by re-adapting their writing in the context of their own culture, to redefine themselves and through various writing strategies reclaim the center. How do indigenous writers express themselves in Chinese without compromising their writing integrity during the process of writing back? And how do they, under the current Chinese linguistic structure, bring out the essence of indigenous culture, and its features? This article applies Bill Ashcroft's and others' concepts of appropriation in postcolonial writing to the study of Husluma Vava's ”The Soul of Yushan” published in 2006, in order to find out how Vava, through the process of writing back, carry out the decentering in indigenous writing. Vava in his book writes about his own people, a writing back in the Chinese language, under the Chinese power structure, without sacrificing the linguistic essence of the Bunun people. It offers an insight into the history of indigenous people, and a reconstruction of their cultural world, while at the same time, it displays the most charming elements of their culture.
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