Literature and Human Rights Imagination Taiwan Literature Awards for Migrants

The paper explores the (im)possibility of human rights for Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan by looking at the intersection of literature and human rights with a focus on the Taiwan Literature Awards for Migrants (TLAM). Established in 2014, the TLAM has provided an important platform for Southeast Asian migrant workers to tell their stories of migration and labor. Often read as life experience of suffering and pain, the TLAM winning works witness the violation of human rights in Taiwan and narrate the myth of upward mobility through working abroad. The TLAM Board and participants claim that the writing of Southeast Asian migrants raises Taiwanese readers' awareness to the abuse of human rights and discrimination against migrant workers in Taiwan and enables a future of equality. By reading the TLAM paratexts (prefaces and afterwords) closely and unfolding the affective politics of pain and suffering articulated in the writing of the TLAM board members, this paper re-examines the founding of the TLAM as an agent to promote migrant workers' rights. The paper further studies the TLAM winning stories by foregrounding the linkage between migration, mobility, and the rights to development, and explores how those narratives create a new structure of feeling that challenges a formation of human rights culture based on citizenship and nation-building in Taiwan.