RTF Colloquium Speaker: Yen-Jen Chen

"Transvention in Space: Moving through Imperial Pressure in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Movement"

Intervention presumes a subject with the capacity to act upon someone or something. This presumption fails for marginalized communities that cannot unilaterally intervene against the powers that constrain them. How, then, might we conceptualize political action for communities caught between empires? Yen-Jen Chen’s dissertation, Transvention: Surviving in the Imperial Interstices, answers with transvention. By replacing the prefix “inter-” with “trans-,” the concept names the capacity of subjects positioned between empires to survive by moving through pressures they cannot resolve, navigating between resistance and accommodation. While the dissertation compares Taiwan and Hong Kong, this talk focuses on the spatial dimension of transvention in Hong Kong’s 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, which confronted pressure from both Chinese state surveillance and U.S. corporate platform governance. Though distinct in mechanism and accountability, these forces at times reinforced each other and at times left gaps that protesters could exploit. Drawing on digital archives such as the crowd-sourced protest map HKmap.live, the talk traces how protesters adapted their routes and forms of coordination as state violence and platform restrictions on information reshaped the conditions for collective action. As imperial powers become increasingly entangled, transvention offers a framework for understanding how subjects beyond Taiwan and Hong Kong survive in the interstices of empires.

About Yen-Jen Chen

Yen-Jen Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Media Studies at UT Austin. He aims to critically investigate the cultural and political implications of contemporary queer discourse to place media studies in conversation with diverse fields, including East Asia studies, critical theories, postcolonial studies, and oceanic discourse.