Abstract
This paper conducts a contrapuntal reading of literary texts by Lu Ze-zhi (Penghu) and Sakiyama Tami (Yaeyama), and explores how ethnographic representations of folk beliefs, rituals, and customs are appropriated to expose the barren realities of the remote islands. Analyzing these literary productions as social criticism and social practice, I explore how the literary experiments of the authors function to challenge both the orientalist gaze of modernized societies and the self-orientalizing inclinations in local cultural movements. Defining the two works as counter-narratives of the linear progressive discourse of modernity, I discuss how modernist/postmodernist representations of auto/anti-ethnographic imagination from the islands can help us to interrogate the humanist fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy by exposing the wretched bodies of the islanders.
