Echoes of History in Fiction: From the Sunflower to the Bluebird Movement

2024 ANU TAIWAN UPDATE

Echoes of History in Fiction: From the Sunflower to the Bluebird Movement
Ten years have passed since the Sunflower Movement. Even if they involved a new generation of younger activists, the recent Bluebird Movement protests proved in many ways a restaging of the preceding Sunflower Movement. Namely, the Sunflower Movement was often cited as an antecedent, oftentimes by individuals who had been too young to experience the movement directly themselves. But in other important ways, the Bluebird Movement was reacting to the history legacy of the Sunflower Movement, in attempting to be a very different kind of movement.

What does this tell us about how social movement history is documented, recorded, and passed down in Taiwan, whether from before the lifting of martial law to after democratization or in the short ten years between the Sunflower and Bluebird Movement? What does this say about the relation between movements? Though certainly not the only means by which this occurs, one important avenue for the transmission of experience proves to be historical fiction. This talk will discuss contemporary examples, many drawn from film and television, such as Island Nation, Days We Stared at the Sun, Wave Makers, Your Name Engraved Herein, the upcoming Zero Day, as well as literary examples as Hsu En En’s The Becoming or the speaker’s own forthcoming novel, Taipei at Daybreak.

Speaker
Brian Hioe (丘琦欣) is a writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ based out of Taipei. In 2014, he was one of the founders of New Bloom Magazine (破土), an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan that was founded after the Sunflower Movement. In his capacity as such, he helps run the community space for events that New Bloom runs in Taipei, DAYBREAK (破曉咖啡). He is currently a non-resident fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Research Hub.

Afternoon tea will be provided at 3:15pm. View the 2024 ANU Taiwan Update Program.

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation plan please contact ciw@anu.edu.au.

The ANU Taiwan Update is an initiative under the ANU Taiwan Studies Program 2022-25, which a partnership between the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University and the Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan).

Photo Credit: Brian Hioe.