Repair through empathy: narratives of reconciliation in two white terror memorial parks in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Taiwan has emerged from its authoritarian past into a democratic present, bearing the scars of traumatic and violent historic events. As symbols of repressive histories, penal museums in Taiwan stand at the center of questions about how traumatic pasts can be reconciled and justice sought for victims of previous regimes. By close semiotic examination of two museums that served as sites of incarceration during the White Terror period (1949–1987), this study uses multimodal discourse analysis to understand how these places are used to construct narratives about transitional justice. Hardship, control and human rights narratives are used to construct empathy, conducive to the acceptance and deepening of transitional justice efforts in post-authoritarian Taiwan. These museums help to recover the truth of the authoritarian past and place the experience of Taiwanese political prisoners in the larger context of global human rights and transitional justice narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• transitional justice
• reconciliation
• penal museums
• human rights
• White Terror

Acknowlegdements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the anonymous reviewers’ careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This term refers to Han Chinese who immigrated to Taiwan after 1945, in particular the biggest wave of immigrants who came with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 due to the Civil War between the KMT and the Chinese communists.

2 Li Teng-hui was elected President by the National Assembly in 1990 and elected President in the nation’s first ever direct presidential election in 1996.

3 Between 1965 and 1972, the prisoners were sent to Taiyuan Prison (泰源監獄) located on the Taiwanese mainland, before being sent back to Green Island due to rioting for Taiwan independence.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen Murphy

Helen Murphy completed her Ph.D. at James Cook University, Cairns, Australia, investigating the relationship between educational tourism and Indigenous development aspirations. She has published research on Australian Indigenous approaches to social and economic development including social enterprise development in remote regions, educational tourism, Indigenous participation in payment for ecosystem services markets, and Indigenous representations in museums. She is an Assistant Professor at Ming Chuan University, Taiwan, where her current research interests include heritage tourism and national identity, in particular sites of trauma and their representations in contemporary Taiwan. Her most recent publications focus on investigating these representations in penal museums in Taiwan. Correspondence to: [email protected].

Ya-ling Chang

Ya-ling Chang is an Assistant Professor at the National I-lan University, Taiwan. She gained her Ph.D. from Lancaster University, UK, in 2008. Her Ph.D. research focuses on indigenous language policy, language maintenance and shift, and bilingual education. She has published work on indigenous language ideology, aboriginal classroom discourse, and indigenous language maintenance and shift in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Heritage Language Journal and International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning. She is currently investigating discourse and semiotic approaches to the texts of images in print in relation to the cultural and social aspects of indigenous people in Taiwan.