Month: April 2021

Date: Wednesday, 28 April 2020
Time: 5 PM (GMT +8)
Speaker: Tsz-kit Yim, Ph.D. candidate in East Asian studies at Princeton University

To watch recorded seminar, please click here.

Today, what C.T. Hsia called “the classic Chinese novels” remain largely alive and kicking as not only literary translations, but also transmedial and transnational adaptations. Compared to Western literary canons which have been subject to postcolonial, racial, and gender critiques, it remains ambiguous what one should do with the ongoing afterlives of Chinese canons in, for instance, a Japanese video game, a Hong Kong soft-porn, a South Korean travel-reality show, or an Asian-American graphic novel. Through a survey of the field and selected case studies, this seminar proposes “affective network” as a lens to read Chinese classics and their transnational afterlives.

About the author:
Tsz-kit Yim is currently a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian studies at Princeton University, with B.A. (Comparative Literature & English) and M.Phil. (Comparative Literature) degrees from the University of Hong Kong. He works on classic Chinese novels and adaptations, intersecting broader inquiries of affect theory, gender and genre, as well as translation and world literature.

Moderator: Fiona Law, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: 27 April 2021 (Tuesday)
Time: 5:00 PM Hong Kong Time
Delivery: via Zoom

To watch the recorded seminar, please click here.

On March 16, 2021, a white gunman targeted three Asian owned businesses in Atlanta and murdered eight people, six of them Asian American women. Panelists will offer insights into what these killings reveal about the intersections of racism and misogyny. In particular, they will contextualize the impact of the pandemic on anti-Asian discrimination against broader histories of xenophobia, imperialism, and sexism linking the United States and Asia. Importantly, they will suggest ways in which these events in the United States are relevant for Hong Kong today.

Panelists:

Angie Baecker, Lecturer, Department of Art History, HKU

Puja Kapai, Convenor, Women’s Studies Research Centre; Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU

Grace En-Yi Ting, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, HKU

Moderator:

Alvin Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

All are welcome.

Date: Friday, 23 April 2021
Time: 10 AM (GMT +8)
Speaker: Dylan Suher, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

To watch recorded seminar, click here.

This talk will focus on the intersection between the evolution of the Chinese television industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the career of the countercultural writer and cultural entrepreneur Wang Shuo. By the late 1980s, the Chinese television industry had entered a period of crisis. A film-derived model of slow, individualized production was proving impractical for an industry trapped between rapidly increasing demand and a shortage of resources and skilled television workers. Facing these pressures, Chinese television producers and critics pushed for the adoption of a “studio drama” (shineiju) model: domestic dramas shot on one set with a multiple-camera setup in an arrangement designed to maximize production and minimize production schedules. Although Wang Shuo, a writer who had been mostly known for his subversive stories of the Beijing demimonde, might initially seem an odd fit for this genre, the shineiju allowed him to bring to the fore the undercurrent of domestic sentimentalism that had long run beneath his work. Wang initially enjoyed the wide audience and financial rewards provided by television, but he soon soured on the limitations of the industry, and would go on to write incisive deconstructions of the structure of feeling created by Chinese television. Examining this encounter reveals the intertwined ideologies and technologies underpinning the postsocialist shift in the People’s Republic toward the private home, dilemmas shared by television industries east and west, and the problems involved in building (and studying) a “popular culture.”

About the speaker:
Dylan Suher 蘇和 is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He is currently working on a book about how mainland Chinese writers, beginning in the late 1980s, articulated their anxieties over their changing professional identity through the media of television, film, and the internet. His areas of expertise include postsocialist mainland Chinese literature and film, Chinese television, and media theory. He has written essays and reviews of literature in translation for Asymptote, The White Review, and The Millions. For more information, please visit dylansuher.com.

Moderator: Claire Gullander-Drolet, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, HKU