Infrastructures of Activism and Surveillance | Prof. Wendy Chen

Speaker 👉Prof. Wendy Cheng (Scripps College)
Discussant 👉 Dr. Wen Liu (Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica)
Moderator 👉 Dr. Chih-Ming Wang (Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica)
📍This talk discusses Cold War and martial law formations of identity and consciousness among Taiwanese student migrants to the US. From the 1960s to 1980s, US campuses, particularly in the Midwest, became sites of ideological struggle and persecution and global political consciousness formation and activism. With a focus on heterogeneous archives, historical narratives and silences, and the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge, I detail processes of individual and collective consciousness formation as well as specific cases of student migrants who were surveilled, arrested, imprisoned, and even murdered by the KMT state. The activism and stories of this generation, when located in larger histories, reveal the ongoing global political dimensions and possibilities of Taiwanese/American history and experience.