‘I’ve always thought that we are living on the cowhide’: Chen Li’s Edge as Method and Border-Queering in The Edge of the Island

The chapter provides a preliminary investigation of the poetry collection The Edge of the Island (2014) by Chen Li (1954–), an award-winning contemporary Taiwan poet, examining how his 1990s’ works about the island might illuminate our understanding of border as a critical conceptual tool of resistance and decolonization in an age of intensified border control and territorial contestation. Drawing upon Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s notion of ‘border as method’, the chapter shows how Chen’s poetry uses ‘edge’ as an epistemological approach to rework the borderscape into a multi-layered space of knowledge production. It begins by looking at the making of borders in Chen’s ‘Formosa, 1661’, exploring what I call the ‘cowhide intimacy’, the close-knit relationship between European imperialism and the material culture of seventeenth-century Taiwan. The second part turns to two other examples of border imagery in Chen’s ‘The Edge of the Island’ and ‘The Ropewalker’, investigating how the imagery of borders in Chen, while inscribing and embodying the geo-political instability and indeterminacy of the island, also holds world-making potential. The chapter argues that Chen’s edge aesthetics propels a queered mythical vision, in which the geo-political identity of the island might be radically regenerated through the reconfiguration of the borderscape.