From visual fantasies to bodily trajectories: The insular epistemology of around-the-island journeys in Taiwan cinema

Through the lens of the around-the-island journey, this study articulates the geopolitical and sensory turns in contemporary Taiwan, inspecting how the new modality of feelings connotes different political declarations and epistemological paradigms from those in the past. From the Qing Empire, through the Japanese colonial period and to the early martial law period, the island of Taiwan was visually discovered and imagined by exterior political regimes. These foreign travellers’ around-the-island journeys ‘virtualized’ the geographical knowledge through visually syndicating the island and the suzerainties’ political centre into a single entity: either prolonging it as the extended territory of imperial Japan or conflating it with the continent of China. However, the current fetish of around-the-island trips arising in the 2000s represents a tendency of bypassing such visual domination and instead demands a traveller’s poignant bodily engagement and sensory explorations to ‘actualize’ the material knowledge of the island. Through comparing around-the-island movies in the martial and post martial law periods, this study examines how insular epistemology is produced and national identity is generated in sensorium cinema.