Last November anthropologists attending the AAA business meeting in Denver voted by an astounding 1040-136 to endorse the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions, but this was just a resolution to put the boycott to a vote, not an actual endorsement of that boycott by the entire AAA membership. The actual voting takes place by electronic ballot starting today, April 15th, and lasts until May 31. For this reason it is crucial that all AAA members, whether or not they support the boycott, vote to make their voices heard in this historic decision.

While we have been posting extensively about the boycott here on Savage Minds, so far none of the full-time contributors have expressed their personal opinions on the matter. Over the next few weeks I hope to do just that, starting with a post about my own experience growing up as a Reform Jew in New York City. I have at least two more posts planned as well, including one on boycotts as a political strategy and another in which I try to round-up and summarize some of the writing which I have found most persuasive on the topic.

What follows is a very personal statement and intentionally avoids most of the issues that have already been discussed elsewhere. For those wanting more information I recommend looking through our own archives on the subject, or exploring the blog maintained by Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions, as well as the anti-boycott blog. But, above all, I recommend you read this post on “Myths and Facts About the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions,” Dialogue vs. BDS, and the Report on Israel/Palestine (PDF) prepared by the AAA task force.

David vs. Goliath

I was raised as a Reform Jew in New York City in the eighties and the Judaism we were taught at Hebrew School was little more than Zionist propaganda. As Lisa Goldman recently put it,

for Jewish-Americans, more so than ever for Jews in Israel, Zionism is a crucial element of their identity. The most important element is neither God nor religion but the Holocaust, with its heavy legacy of trans-generational trauma. The lesson of the genocide, many believe, is that Jews need a safe haven. A state of one’s own.

During my weekly Hebrew school classes, as well as related weekend activities and camps, we almost never discussed Jewish religion, ethics, or philosophy.¹ Instead, we were taught to think of ourselves as victims of historical persecution stretching back to the dawn of time. We were taught the importance of maintaining our ethnic identity in the face of this persecution.

Even as young children, we were encouraged to think of ourselves as little David’s standing up to Goliath. The holidays we celebrated were similarly built around such David and Goliath narratives: Purim celebrates the story of Esther who triumphed over the evil Mordecai Haman,² and Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of the Maccabees over the forces of Antiochus.

Only as we got older did we learn of stories in which the Jews failed to triumph against overwhelming odds: the Spanish Inquisition, Eastern European pogroms, and, of course, the Holocaust. Yet even when learning about war and genocide, there was always the promise of a new David emerging that might once and for all put an end to such historical defeats: muscular Jewish nationalism. The Warsaw Uprising may not have succeeded, but the Six Day War and the raid on Entebbe were another story. Israel’s success meant that Jewish children could sleep peacefully at night. It also meant that Isreal was all that was standing between us and the abyss.

I never went on any of the trips to Israel organized by the school, but we watched films about the wonders of life on the kibbutz. (We were, of course, carefully warned away from socialism with stories about the horrors of collective family life.) I also helped raise money to plant trees in Israel. We were told that the Arabs had not cared for the land properly, turning it into a desert; the implication being that they did not deserve the land because they had been poor caretakers. Such stories of neglect by indigenous inhabitants will be familiar to scholars of all forms of settler colonialism. (I have since heard ethnic Chinese say much the same thing about indigenous Taiwanese.) At the time, however, it evoked a powerful image of Palestine as a desert which was only able to bloom once the rightful owners had returned.

When I was twelve they took us on a weekend retreat where we watched the movie Ticket to Heaven about a man who gets “brainwashed” by a cult and has to be “deprogrammed” by his parents. But unlike that film, unlearning Zionism was not a simple process involving being locked in a room with a professional “deprogrammer.” It took years of reading, questioning, and talking to people who actually knew something about life under the occupation. Thanks to patient friends in college and graduate school, I began to question the simple narrative by which the Holocaust served to legitimize colonialism. I learned about the Nakba by which “led to the expulsion and displacement of the Palestinian Arab population.” I learned how life in Gaza was like living in a giant prison. I began to question the logic of the two state solution. I learned about the rise of right wing extremism in Israeli politics. And slowly, bit by bit, the stories I had learned as a child began to unravel a the seams, creating space for a much more complex story to take its place.

Even as I began to question my Zionism, however, certain habits and reflexes of thought still remained. I would find myself instinctively grasping at straws to support claims I had already come to realize were unsupportable. Recently I encountered similar reflexes while teaching here in Taiwan. We are starting to get exchange students from China and during one lecture, after I said something mildly critical of China, one of these students spoke up to challenge what I said. I was actually quite happy about this because Taiwanese students are usually so passive in class that actually getting challenged by a student felt refreshing. But after the lecture the student came up to me and introduced herself. She said that she actually agrees with what I had said about China and that she’d come to Taiwan precisely to get exposed to more critical views, but that defending China’s honor had become a reflex for her so she’d spoken up without thinking. Nationalism works upon is in very deep ways which talk of “imagined communities” often fails to grasp.

Zionist reflexes are not unique to Jewish kids from NY. They seem to exist at a more general level in European and American public discourse as well. I see non-Jewish politicians, media personalities, and even academics reflexively defending Israel, portraying anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism, unquestioningly accepting the necessity of a two-state solution, and refusing to engage in any way with Palestinian political aspirations. It is as if the slightest break in our collective resolve would open the door to the ultimate evil. “Never again” means you are either “with us or against us” and the failure to be “with us” is too horrible to contemplate.

At a very basic level I supported the boycott resolution because I felt that it would open up a public space that would allow for questioning of these deeply ingrained assumptions. I don’t expect those people on Facebook who write “Disgusting” every time I post about the boycott to change their minds, but my public support of the boycott, and of the BDS movement more generally, has already sparked dozens of conversations with people who are genuinely curious and open-minded. In this sense the boycott resolution and the resulting discussion have already done a lot of the work I hoped they would, but I still think AAA members should vote for the boycott. In my next post I will try to explain one reason why I think an actual boycott, and not just this discussion about the boycott resolution, is still important.

Who is the audience for academic knowledge? When does that audience include not just fellow academics, but also the public? These questions are harder to answer than they should be. Our courses require enrollment and tuition. Our writings require effort to find and afford and read. Our conferences tend to be closed to outsiders and sometimes even to other scholars. As a profession, we simply do not have spaces where we regularly talk with an interested public about our research.

This is a story about academics silencing a public audience. It is about Ivory Tower condescension and how I once defended Adam Yauch’s right to ask a question. Here is what happened:

In April 2002, I participated in a conference on Tibet and the Cold War at Harvard University featuring distinguished scholars of China, India, and Tibet. The conference was a perfect fit with my research on Tibet and the CIA and was fantastic in many ways, until it wasn’t. 

Around 100 Tibetans attended the two-day conference. These were regular community members of all ages, college students and older people, whole families even, and they outnumbered the “academic” audience. For me, it was an unexpected but welcome opportunity to present my research to an audience composed of both academics and the general public. Yet there was discomfort from a handful of other participants about having a non-academic audience. Why was this? Did they think a section of the audience was going to start yelling “Free Tibet” and rush the stage?

Cold War Tibet is a political topic, and sparks flared up periodically between panelists. For their part, the audience—Tibetans and non-Tibetans, academics and the general public—respectfully engaged the presenters, asking questions and offering comments. Then on Day Two controversy arose when a member of the audience asked a question of the panelists. The audience member was Adam Yauch and his question was relatively simple. Why, he wanted to know, did the Chinese care so much about Tibet. “I know why Tibet is an emotional issue for Tibetans,” he said, “but why is Tibet such an emotional issue for the Chinese?”

Who is Adam Yauch? I’m not sure if many of the conference participants knew who he was. In the context of the conference, it didn’t really matter. But it mattered to me. While to my Tibetan friends, Adam Yauch was often simply “Adam,” to me he was MCA of the Beastie Boys.

I was in high school when the Beastie Boys’ debut album Licensed to Ill came out in 1986. In the twenty-five years since, the Beastie Boys have been a consistently incongruous and fun part of our musical and cultural landscape. In the 1990s, Adam Yauch became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. He co-founded the Milarepa Foundation to support Tibetan artists, and also started the hugely successful Tibetan Freedom Concerts that ran globally from 1996-2003, raising money for and generating awareness about Tibet among young people and musicians. His sincere participation in the Tibetan community extended to his attendance at the Harvard conference. He was there anonymously, not in any sort of “Sabotage”-style disguise, but just incognito as himself at an academic conference. He was quiet until close to the end when he posed his question.

Before anyone on the panel could reply, one of the conference organizers—a Harvard professor—stood up and said forcefully that this was an “academic conference” and that “emotional” questions would not be entertained. He made it clear we were here to discuss real politics in an academic, dispassionate manner. That is: in discussing politics we were to be apolitical.

This was wrong on so many levels.

1. It was the bluntest academic putdown of the public I have ever personally witnessed, an appalling example of academic snobbery.

2. It was also flat-out incorrect; Adam Yauch’s question was entirely academic. It was a question about nationalism, the über-topic of the 1990s, including for cultural, historical, and political scholarship on both Tibet and China.

3. It was an abdication of the political, of the responsibility to speak to difficult issues. And, it was a renunciation of our responsibility as scholars to dialogue with an engaged public.

Immediately after the organizer’s dismissal of the question, I and several other panelists spoke up: the question from the audience was legitimate, this was something scholars absolutely do study, and about which we had things to say. Despite our comments, something had shifted. The audience had been disciplined and spoken down to; the message was ‘you can listen, but we might not let you speak if we don’t like what you have to say.’

At the next break, I went over to Adam Yauch and introduced myself, apologizing for what had just happened and saying that his question was indeed academic, an important and legitimate query, and a question that scholars also ask. He was incredibly gracious, saying he hadn’t meant to cause any friction. We chatted for a short while, talking about China, Tibet, and the value and politics of audience participation in academic conferences. It was a serious and thoughtful conversation with someone who in that moment was simply a member of the public audience, not a famous musician.

This incident has bothered me for a long time. Dismissing individuals who turn to us as experts for answers to their questions is not right. We have multiple spaces where academics can and do speak privately amongst ourselves, and these are important spaces. But we need also to speak publicly. We need to create and embrace occasions to speak directly with communities interested in our research. We need to do this even if it feels uncomfortable; we need to do it especially if it feels uncomfortable.

Ten years have passed since the Harvard conference. I had not planned on writing about what happened there; it was an ugly side of academia and involved a celebrity; the whole thing had felt surreal. Then word came on Friday that Adam Yauch died of cancer after three years fighting the disease. I thought of his music and his commitments, and about his question about people’s attachments to things, about China’s attachment to Tibet, and about our responsibilities as scholars, and I decided it was time to write. This post is a tribute to someone who was our perfect public audience member. Interested in the topic, he came to the conference. Curious to learn more, he asked a question. Committed to the issue, he pressed on after the conference, for as long as he could.

RIP Adam Yauch (August 5, 1964-May 4, 2012).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado and author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010). She wrote this post while listening to Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication.

Seediq Bale is often described as a shi3shi1 史詩 – an “historical poem” – the typical Chinese translation of “epic.” The original epics were oral historical poetry, but orality and poetry are no longer essential features of epic. Maybe history isn’t essential either; epic is sometimes used with the simple meaning of “grand.” But I’ll be assuming a more complicated and interesting definition “a grand, repetitive mytho-historical narrative of conflict that begins in the middle (in medias res) captures the imagination of posterity because it bears on identity, both individual and collective.” It seems to me that Seediq Bale articulates an epic identity at odds with our modern notion of personal identity.

The most obvious meaning of epic is simply very long, and Seediq Bale is indeed very long. At four and a half hours, it is the longest Taiwan feature film by about half an hour. (Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer’s Day, to my knowledge the second longest, was a very different kind of film!). At a budget of 25 million USD it is the largest Taiwan production ever. The director Wei Te-sheng has plans for a three part epic treatment of Taiwan’s Dutch era (1624-1661), from Dutch, Chinese and Siraya plains aboriginal points of view. This would be another eight hours of epic filmmaking. After the theatres take their share of the gross, Seediq Bale is likely to remain in the red by a few million USD, so it’s not clear whether Wei Te-sheng will get the chance to make another epic film.

Seediq Bale also has many large battle scenes, involving large numbers of actors. The large battle scene is one of the defining features of the film epic. The way the battle scenes are filmed reflects an epic contrast of perspectives. Now we see the scene as a whole, from an objective perspective, now we switch to a close up in the heat of the action, from the perspectives of an individual hero.

Epics involve “epic machinery,” the world of gods above the world of men. In oral epic, the spirit world can be powerfully evoked, but film deals in images, and images of the numinous can be fantastical or just plain silly. It is usually better to suggest, not directly represent, the otherworld in a film. Seediq Bale tends to represent the spirits directly. Sometimes this works, as in the duet between Mona Rudao and the spirit of his father at the waterfall. Sometimes it does not work, as when the host of dead warriors appear walking on a rainbow cloud near the end of the film, first in profile, then head on. The CGI in the film, especially the animals, is generally pretty good, but the awfulness of the cloudborn warriors scene is universally acknowledged. The world of the gods in Seediq Bale is inhabited by the ancestors, which provides a justification for all seemingly objective shots, which is to say shots that do not represent the subjective POV of some character or other.

Like an oral epic, in which the same epithets are applied ad infinitum to fill out the metrical form, Seediq Bale is extremely repetitive. The violence of the film is repetitive, as in Homer’s Iliad. One could also complain about the repetitiveness of the (excellent) score and of the imagery. Mona Rudao’s CGI bird familiar appears half a dozen times, for instance. I don’t know how many times Mona Rudao mentions the rainbow bridge across which true men, men who have headhunted, can cross to reach the rich hunting ground of the afterlife – a dozen times at least. Repetitiveness is not necessarily a flaw in a work of art; it is arguably a feature of the epic form, especially since epic tends to be oral. Films are more oral than novels, and we tend to tolerate oral repetition more than we do in writing.

Starting in medias res is one of the defining features of the narrative structure of an epic. The Iliad starts not with the beginning of the war or the causes of the war but with the theme of Achilles’s wrath in the final year of the story. Seediq Bale starts in medias res with a scene in which Mona Rudao hunts a wild boar. But this scene is near the beginning; the only flashback is when Mona Rudao remembers his father teaching him about the traditional beliefs. Otherwise, the narrative structure of Seediq Bale is temporally straightforward. The action sometimes divides into several strands, but these strands proceed together in time and are linked by crosscutting.

Epics are stories of conflict that seem significant to posterity because of the role they play in identity construction. Conflict is after all a wonderful catalyst for identity, because it forces one to take sides. Some war stories are no longer significant for identity construction, because they seem somehow too far away, yet they still capture the imagination. The Spartan resistance to the Persian advance at Thermopylae, the story of 300 defending a pass against an army of thousands, is a good example. The most recent retelling of this story is the film 300. This film seems to have a lot in common with Seediq Bale. Like 300, Seediq Bale is a film that aestheticizes violence (by juxtaposing the breathtakingly beautiful sakura bloom with images of gore, for instance) and which was adapted from a comic book (see the cover of the comic book which inspired Seediq Bale below). I think Seediq Bale even alludes to the Spartan resistance. The Japanese general who leads the reprisal is stunned that three hundred indigenous warriors could resist thousands of highly trained troops of a modern army with planes, Howitzers, and poison gas.

But like an oral epic, and unlike a purely commercial film like 300, Seediq Bale seems to have a contemporary meaning. That contemporary meaning has to do with identity construction, both individual and collective.

First, what does the film say about individual identity? Mona Rudao’s concept of identity has a wonderful simplicity: he has an unambiguous external marker of his individuality. Like Odysseus, Mona Rudao bears a scar, a scar on his cheek as a result of a hunting accident. This serves as visual proof of his identity for everyone he meets. It allows the audience to identify Mona Rudao as a young man and a middle aged man – he’s played by two actors. His scar reminds me of Erich Auerbach’s great essay “Odysseus’s Scar.” Auerbach argued that identity in Homeric epic is externalized, in contrast to the internalized identity of Biblical narrative. Odysseus returned home after years of wandering and was recognized by his wet nurse because of the unambiguous mark on his thigh. Classicists and biblical scholars debate Auerbach’s interpretation; but it seems to me that “an unambiguous externalized identity” applies to Mona Rudao.

For Mona Rudao does not just have a single scar. He also has the scars of the tattoos on his chin and forehead. These scars attest to his status as a “real man,” a seediq bale, a person qualified to cross the rainbow bridge into the happy hunting grounds of the afterlife. These scars mark his status as an adult male, a warrior. How easy it is to tell a real man from a child, in Mona Rudao’s world!

In this respect Mona Rudao is an impressive but ultimately rather uninteresting character. His concept of identity is more status than identity. It’s either/or, and it’s externally marked. In Seediq Bale Mona Rudao relates to the child warrior Bawan Nawi that he visited Japan in the 1900s. He seems to have returned to Taiwan with only a technological concept of modernity. He knew the Japanese had powerful weapons, but didn’t get any idea of psychological modernity. His sense of himself remained ancient. According to Wei Te-sheng, he lauched the attack on Wushe as a headhunting ritual for a generation of young Seediq men who had not had the chance to become bale.

Mona Rudao’s concept of identity as externalized status is juxtaposed in the film with a more modern concept of personal identity. The most interesting example of a modern identity in the film is the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers, especially the elder brother Dakis Nobin or Hanaoka Ichiro. The brothers suffer from a more modern complicated idea of self. Born Seediq, they were educated to be Japanese. They were caught between Japanese modernity and Seediq tradition. In the film they are bullied by their Japanese colleagues and rejected by their own people. In this scene at the waterfall, Mona Rudao asks the elder brother to choose: are you going to the Shinto shrine when you die, or will you walk across the rainbow bridge?

Conflict catalyzes identity because it forces a person to choose, as if who you are is which side you’re on. The brothers want to claim both Seediq and Japanese identities. Nobody lets them. For them, the conflict becomes psychological, internal. In the end brothers can’t choose which side they are on. The brothers let Mona Rudao launch the attack against the Japanese at Wushe but don’t participate in it. They commit suicide together, one by seppuku, the other by hanging, the one according to Japanese, the other according to Seediq tradition.

Together they embody a modern psychological conflict. Alongside Mona Rudao’s unambiguous, lofty, epic concept of identity is a more confused, conflicted, contextualized idea of identity. The psychological conflicts of the brothers, which are conflicts of identity, enrich Seediq Bale. Yet they are not typical of epic. Epic conflicts are between sides or within a side, not within the individual. In the Iliad the Greek side spends most of the time fighting amongst themselves before they finally get their act together and defeat the Trojans by stealth. This might be called epic identity construction.

The notion of epic identity construction brings me back to the issue of Taiwan identity. The reader will recall that The Economist linked the film to Taiwan identity. It’s indisputable that the film is about identity. It even advertises itself as a comment on identity. The preview released at the end of August tells us right off the bat that we’ll be transported back to “an era of confused identities” (認同混淆的年代). People who know the story will think of the Dakis/Hanaoka brothers. They each had a confused identity. It’s clear that the film is commenting on individual identity. Is it also commenting on group identity, in particular Taiwan identity?

I think so, but in this respect Wei Te-sheng deserves credit for some degree of subtlety. Previous filmic or fictional treatments of Wushe have often overtly linked Wushe to Chinese and Taiwanese national identity. In his A History of Pain, the scholar Michael Berry has shown how Chinese nationalists saw Mona Rudao as participating in the national Chinese resistance against Japan (抗日), while Taiwanese nationalists viewed Mona Rudao as symbolically willing to defend Taiwan’s territory at the cost of his own life. Both kinds of nationalists identified with Mona Rudao and often inserted a Chinese or Taiwanese character who serves as Mona Rudao’s big brother or trusted adviser. In other words, in these works, there is Chinese or Taiwanese identification or close association with Mona Rudao and the Seediq rebels. This may remind students of American popular culture of the Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party and of James Fenimore Cooper’s oft-retold tale Last of the Mohicans. Americans also identified or closely associated with indigenous peoples, at an early stage of settler nation building.

There were Americans pretending to be ungovernable “revolting” Mohican Indians at the Boston Tea Party, and Leatherstocking, the main character in the works of Fenimore Cooper, America’s first national novelist, is bosom buddies with Chinggachgook. As the last of the Mohicans, Chinggachgook rather conveniently leaves the country to Leatherstocking’s people, the “Americans.” Seediq Bale, by contrast, is less overtly nationalistic. There are no Chinese or Taiwanese characters in Seediq Bale pretending to be Seediq or associating with the Seediq. In fact, there aren’t any significant Chinese or Taiwanese characters in the film at all.

That doesn’t mean that Seediq Bale doesn’t have anything to do with Taiwan identity. In the past two decades there has been an Wushe comic book and, inevitably, an album by the black metal band CthtoniC that went on to tour the States with Ozzy Ozborne. Both works come out of Taiwan nationalism, but in neither case is the link between Wushe and Taiwan identity made overtly within the work.

So what would a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation of Seediq Bale be like? The simplest nationalist interpretation of the film would be to identify Mona Rudao with a future Taiwanese leader and the Seediq rebels with this leader’s supporters. The Japanese would represent a potential invader. Let’s assume this invader is the PRC. To put it crudely or bluntly (and this is a crude and blunt interpretation) from a Taiwanese perspective, the film is, on this interpretation, saying that the Taiwanese people will defend their territory. They’d rather die than submit.

There are some problems with this interpretation. To begin with, if the Seediq in Seediq Bale represent the Taiwanese people, then the film seems to be saying that the Taiwanese public is hopelessly fragmented, because the Seediq in the film are hopelessly fragmented. Not everyone would rather die than submit. Mona Rudao was Seediq, but he didn’t lead a united Seediq resistance against the Japanese. Rather, he arranged a coalition of six Tkdaya Seediq tribal villages. Tkdaya is the name of a subgroup of the Seediq linguistic or cultural group. Mona Rudao was a leader of a Tkdaya village called Mahebo in alliance with other Tkdaya villages. Not all the Tkdaya villages participated in the Wushe Incident, only six of twelve. Other Seediq groups were antagonistic to the Tkdaya. The Toda Seediq, for instance, led in the film by Temu Walis, cooperated with the Japanese during the reprisal that followed the Wushe Incident. Not all of the Toda villages participated. The Japanese promised the participating Toda warriors so much money per Tkdaya Seediq head, and so the Toda went after the Tkdaya. In other words, Seediq Bale is a story about internal divisions more than an epic tale of anticolonial resistance.

Maybe the fragmentation in the Seediq body politic is not really an interpretive problem, because Taiwan’s body politic is hopelessly fragmented (which country’s isn’t?). At this point in the argument, some knowledge of Taiwan’s political scene is necessary. Identity, as opposed to social justice or the environment, has been the main political issue in Taiwan for decades, arguably since the Japanese period. After 1937 the Japanese implemented a policy of imperialization: everyone was taught to be an imperial subject. The KMT Chinese nationalist policy was similar: everyone in Taiwan was taught he or she was Chinese; the national myth was the reconquest of mainland China. Since the rise of a vocal Taiwan nationalism in the 1980s, identity confusion has become overt. There are some who feel they are Taiwanese and Chinese, some insist they are Taiwanese not Chinese. And with the missiles pointed at Taiwan, militant mainland Chinese rhetoric, and American vacillation, it’s not hard to see why identity is the main issue in local politics. If cross-Strait relations heated up, there would be a corresponding political polarization. At that time, through a process of “epic identity construction,” Mona Rudao’s either/or statement of status (“I am Seediq!) would come to seem even more compelling, and the Dakis/Hanaoka both/and idea of identity (“We’re both Seediq and Japanese…”) even more wishy washy.

Unfortunately, the ending of Seediq Bale does not give Taiwan nationalists cause for comfort. That’s the problem with choosing this particular historical incident as a nationalist myth, because the ending is predetermined by the history of Wushe: the Seediq lose. If we’re applying a Taiwanese nationalist interpretation to the film, whatever would this ending mean? In the film the warriors of the rainbow reunite in the afterlife; we see them striding on the clouds. This is hardly going to satisfy people for whom Seediq traditional belief is not a living religion. The fact is that almost everyone dies. Maybe like Achilles they die gloriously, but maybe it would be better not to die. Unlike Homer’s Iliad, Seediq Bale does not have a happy ending from the protagonist’s persective. And we can’t argue that Wei Te-sheng is telling the Taiwan people: this is what will happen to you if you don’t unite. If the Seediq in the film – all 12 Tkdaya tribes plus the Toda tribal villages – had united against the Japanese, the result would have ultimately been the same.

At the end of the film, four hours and twenty minutes in, we are reassured that the Seediq people have not been wiped out; they will recover. They will have Seediq children and those children will have children. But when you think about this, it’s not all that comforting. Those children would grow up under the Japanese and those grandchildren would grow up under the Chinese. Last time I checked Taiwan was not postcolonial from a Seediq perspective, because the Taiwanese people who like to identify with the Seediq – like the Americans who identified with the revolting Mohawks in 1775 – are running the island. So ultimately I still resist a Taiwan nationalist interpretation of the film. The Wushe Incident has to be understood in terms of 1930. I don’t think it has much to teach us about Taiwan identity today. The collective identity the film seems to express does not seem, as The Economist puts, empowering, certainly not in a contemporary context. There is a collective action in the film, but the action is doomed to failure and only half of the collective participates in it. Epic identity is impressive, but the modern, wishy-washy identity also has its place. Epic requires conflict; I pray for peace.

Maybe Wei Te-sheng does too. On a talk show Wei Te-sheng said he realized the film was about a conflict of belief, the people who believe in the rising sun and the people who believe in the rainbow bridge. What if the Japanese and Seediq, Wei naively wonders, had realized that the sun and the rainbow hang in the same sky, in the same heaven? Maybe it took the Wushe Incident for them to realize it. I hope it doesn’t take another incident for us to realize the same thing today.