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Paper short abstract

The presentation frames Indigenous Taiwan as a colonial boundary space, showing how Japanese and postwar regimes governed internal frontiers through exceptional rule, denying full political belonging while sustaining colonial power, inequality, and contested memory beyond decolonization.

Paper long abstract

This presentation conceptualizes Indigenous Taiwan as a colonial boundary space produced through Japanese imperial governance and sustained across political ruptures. Rather than viewing Indigenous peoples as marginal to colonial modernity, the study reframes Indigenous territories as internal frontiers where sovereignty, racial hierarchy, and state power were continuously negotiated. Under Japanese rule, these regions were incorporated into the empire through military pacification, ethnographic knowledge production, and assimilation policies, transforming them into liminal spaces that were formally inside imperial territory yet governed through exceptional regimes of violence and surveillance.

The author argues that Indigenous Taiwan functioned as an unstable boundary zone in which colonial authority was asserted precisely through the denial of full political belonging. Practices of classification, labor mobilization, and cultural regulation rendered Indigenous bodies legible to imperial power while maintaining their status as objects of governance rather than rights-bearing subjects. Crucially, these boundary-making practices did not end with the collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945. Instead, they were reconfigured within postwar state structures, allowing colonial logics of differentiation and control to persist under new political regimes.

By framing Indigenous Taiwan as a boundary space, the article challenges nation-centered narratives of Taiwanese history and highlights the continuity of colonial forms of power beyond formal decolonization. In dialogue with borderlands and postcolonial studies, it demonstrates how internal frontiers remain central to the production of inequality, memory, and contested belonging in East Asia.