The panel begins from a speculative thought experiment. Imagine an alien arriving on Earth and choosing Taiwan as its landing site. Unfamiliar with the human systems of literary prestige, translation hierarchies, and Western-centered literary value that structure the field of world literature, this visitor must learn about Taiwanese culture without relying on the usual frameworks of literary recognition. How might Taiwanese literature be introduced to such a reader? How might Taiwanese literature be understood through the lens of planetarity?
While scholarship on world literature has productively foregrounded literary circulation and translation (as in the work of David Damrosch) and the role of global literary capitals (as theorized by Pascale Casanova), it has also remained structurally tied to Western-centered systems of recognition and linguistic hierarchy. For literatures such as Taiwan’s, entry into world literature has often depended on translation into dominant European languages, endorsement by metropolitan institutions, and conformity to interpretive expectations shaped by colonial and postcolonial power. Building on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s distinction between globalization and planetarity, this panel engages the 2027 MLA convention theme of emancipatory narratives by challenging the Eurocentric foundations of world literature studies and proposing “planetarity” as an alternative critical orientation. Planetarity resists the homogenizing logic of globalization and instead foregrounds relational thinking grounded in alterity, ethical responsibility, and local knowledge. From this perspective, literature is valued not primarily for its mobility or translatability but for its capacity to articulate relational worlds across languages, histories, and environments.
Taiwan provides a particularly productive site for planetary thinking. Taiwan’s literary history unfolds through Indigenous Austronesian cultures, early modern maritime encounters, multiple colonial regimes, Cold War authoritarianism, post-martial-law democratization, migration, and ongoing geopolitical precarity. Taiwanese literature is profoundly multilingual, encompassing Mandarin, Minnan, Hakka, Indigenous languages, Japanese, and other linguistic traces. It is also shaped by ecological forces such as oceans, mountains, typhoons, forests, and nonhuman life. These historical, linguistic, and ecological conditions render Taiwanese literature irreducible to existing global frameworks and instead call for a planetary approach attentive to relational belonging and deep historical time.
The session will consist of a 5-minute introduction, four 10-minute presentations, and 20 minutes of open discussion. An additional 10 minutes are reserved to accommodate any unforeseen delays or adjustments. Michael O’Krent introduces the concept of the “reverse palimpsest” to interpret Chang Hsi-kuo’s science fiction as a planetary mode of historical imagination in which colonial, local, and cosmic histories accumulate beneath Taiwan’s literary surface. Alison Groppe examines Taiwan’s role as a creative and institutional hub in the development of Sinophone Malaysian literature, demonstrating how Taiwan has functioned as a planetary catalyst for peripheral literary production through networks of publication, education, and cultural exchange. Pei-yin Lin analyzes the bilingual fiction of Li Kotomi, arguing that her writing articulates a form of planetary consciousness that navigates difference within similarity across Taiwan, Japan, and China while foregrounding minority solidarity, linguistic experimentation, and queer critique. Wen-chi Li examines Yang Shuang-zi’s fiction through the concept of synchro-temporality, theorizing planetarity as a temporal condition grounded in the co-presence of heterogeneous historical times rather than in nationalist succession or circulation-based models of world literature. By bringing together scholars working across Taiwanese, Sinophone, and comparative literary studies, the panel highlights Taiwan as a generative site for theoretical innovation within contemporary debates on world literature and planetarity.