Cultivating Transnational Coalitional Subjectivity: Tension, Barriers, and Tactics in the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Movement
Join us for the 2022 Gibson Lecture. Sharon Yam will present: Cultivating Transnational Coalitional Subjectivity: Tension, Barriers, and Tactics in the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Movement
This talk focuses on a time of geopolitical tension, racial justice uprising, and grassroots resistance: while the U.S. and Chinese state governments criticize each other for human rights violations, Black and brown activists in the U.S. are rising up against systemic racism. Meanwhile, pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong are struggling against increased police brutality and Beijing’s draconian national security laws. Despite historical and cultural differences, activists have called for the cultivation of transnational coalitions between Hong Kong protesters and Black Lives Matters activists. The rhetorical work involved in building transnational solidarity, however, is fraught and underexamined.
Through what Wendy Hesford calls “intercontextual reading,” this talk will trace how the coalitional potential between the Hong Kong anti-authoritarian movement and the U.S. Black Lives Matter protests is eclipsed by appropriation, disinformation, and misalignment, fueled specifically by Beijing and apologists for authoritarian “communist” regimes, that pitch grassroots movements, activists, and potential allies against each other. I examine the rhetorical strategies deployed by Hong Kong public intellectuals who try to harness the “coalitional moments” between the two movements as they both struggle against state violence and police brutality. By doing so, I argue that as social movement discourse travels transnationally on digital spaces, we need to draw on methodologies in transnational rhetorical studies in order to fully contextualize the complex geopolitical, discursive, and political networks in which these rhetorical actions take place.
Read more about the Walker Gibson Lecture & Prize.