Overview
Liang Yu, also known as Leeve Palray, is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Cornell. As an Indigenous anthropologist hailing from ‘opohono community in Southern Taiwan, Liang Yu writes about entanglements of indigeneity, settler colonialism, and national belonging in Taiwan and the broader East Asian context. Given the unique positionality of Taiwan and its Indigenous peoples, Liang Yu’s research is driven by a set of empirical questions: How do Indigenous claims to justice and sovereignty confront not only settler-colonial denial but also the geopolitical demands of a nation that styles itself as postcolonial and perpetually under threat? What happens when indigeneity is conscripted by the settler state as a moral proxy against external invasion? And how are colonial histories remembered, refracted, or reconfigured through the language of Taiwanese nativeness?
Liang Yu’s dissertation, Being Indigenous or Being Native? Indeterminacy of Belonging in Taiwan’s Justicescape, interrogates the uneasy co-constitution of indigeneity and Taiwanese nativeness within a nation that presents itself as both a postcolonial victim and a liberal-democratic protagonist. In this framing, the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan negotiate the contradictions of being at once foundational to the state’s multiculturalist image and peripheral in its projects of national reconciliation. Through archival and ethnographic research, this dissertation examines how Indigenous actors engage both state-sponsored and self-organized justice mechanisms to challenge ongoing dispossession, reconfigure relations of recognition, and assert futurity. Historical justice, in this case, becomes a site of friction where the unresolved tensions since and before 1949 among settler claims, Indigenous resurgence, and national security are made visible and contested. By situating indigeneity as a political analytic shaped within and against structures of Taiwanese nativeness and sovereignty, this project offers a critical rethinking of decolonization, reconciliation, and justice in Taiwan. It argues that settler colonial mobilizations of belonging are never unidirectional impositions but contested terrains that Indigenous actors strategically navigate, repurpose, and disrupt.
Liang Yu’s dissertation project has received support from East Asia Program and Mario Einaudi Center for International Studie at Cornell University, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National ChengChi University, National Science and Technology Council and the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. Before coming to Cornell, Liang Yu earned her BA in political science at National Taiwan University, followed by a MA in anthropology from Peking University. In her master thesis, Liang Yu worked with the nomadic Kazakh community in Xinjiang to understand their social world and ecological knowledge through the practice of ethnic tourism, and to examine how the contemporary Chinese nation-state manages and imagines its frontier through translating settler colonization into liberative narratives.
Liang Yu’s current writing has appeared in venues such as: Remembering / Forgetting Koxinga amidst Taiwanese Settler Multiculturalism, The Cunning of Acknowledgement and the Reluctant Settlers, and The Han Fragility and Where to Find Them.