Abstract

This dissertation brings into dialogue the sociological phenomenon of “activist burnout” and the emerging yet belated body of protest narratives in Taiwan and Hong Kong in a critical historical conjuncture: the 2014 wave of mass mobilization, especially the Sunflower Movement and the Umbrella Movement. Focusing on a contemporary (post-2014) corpus of literary and visual works by writers, artists, and sometimes demonstrators themselves, this project asks how literature and visual culture make movement trauma perceptible and publicly intelligible after the streets empty. These works show that protest does not end with street-level action, but persists in its afterlives through legal prosecution, affective exhaustion, and the slow attrition of everyday life. Building on trauma studies, affect theory, and hauntology, I attend to the formal ruptures through which movement trauma becomes legible: fragmented narration, spectral writing, body horror, and the intermedial “archivality” of literature and visual culture. Through these formal strategies, I theorize “movement trauma” as a collective, post-movement condition in which the affective, ethical, and temporal residues of social movements continue to shape subjectivity, social relations, and cultural form long after mobilization has receded. I argue that these creative practices and cultural works constitute “affective activism,” a second wave of political struggle in which survival, mourning, witnessing, narration, and care become integral to activism rather than supplementary to it. Movement trauma, moreover, is not only a representational problem but also an infrastructural one, shaped by the conditions through which feeling is mediated, circulated, and preserved. Although the corpus is contemporary, the movements it engages span a longer constellation of Chinese and Sinophone democratic struggle, including the Tiananmen Square protests, the Sunflower Movement, the Umbrella Movement, the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, and, briefly in the Coda, the White Paper Revolution. Against event-based models of trauma studies, this dissertation argues that post-2014 Taiwan and Hong Kong literature and visual culture furnish a theoretical vocabulary for understanding movement trauma as a slower, cumulative, and collective form of political suffering, one that resists reduction to individual pathology and refuses the teleology of protest as either “success” or “failure.” In doing so, it reads the protest afterlives of Taiwan and Hong Kong not as marginalized residues of failed political events, but as forms of public knowledge that engage enduringly with the questions of how to narrate, how to witness, and how to heal.

Committee Chair

Lingchei Letty Chen

Committee Members

Anca Parvulescu; Jianqing Chen; William Maxwell; Zhao Ma

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Chinese & Comparative Literature

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

4-15-2026

Language

English (en)

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Available for download on Tuesday, April 13, 2027

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