Hsien-hao Liao｜Chair Jason McGrath｜Daughter of the Nile (1987): Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dark Pop Experiment Earl Jackson｜Monga (2010): Affect and Structure Darrell Davis｜True Emotion Behind the Wall (2017): Taste of Salty Chicken Carlos Rojas｜The Great Buddha+ (2017): Tracing the Limits of the Visible
This Webinar is held as part of the International Symposium on Taiwan Cinema 台灣電影線上國際研討會.
The International Symposium on Taiwan Cinema, organized by the Visual Culture Research Center at National Central University and the Centre for Film, Taiwan and Creative Industry at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, will proceed as a series of webinars on Zoom to be held from December, 2021 to April, 2022, in which contributing authors of the book 32 NEW TAKES ON TAIWAN CINEMA to be published by The Michigan University Press will be invited to present key points in their chapters. For more information please visit the facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/NCUVisual.
The symposium is co-organized by: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Minnesota – Twin Cities The Department of Filmmaking at Taipei National University of the Arts Institut d’Etudes Transtextuelles et Transculturelles at Université de Lyon (Jean Moulin) The Center for Taiwan Studies at University of California Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Saturday, 4 December 2021, 9:00am to 5:30pm (Hong Kong time), on Zoom
Qiu Miaojin: Textuality, Visuality, and Desire in Global Circulation
This conference engages with the literary works of Qiu Miaojin, a famous lesbian and queer writer of Taiwan whose premature death in 1995 marks a watershed moment in queer and literary discourses both in and out of Taiwan. Qiu’s queer classic Notes of a Crocodile (1994) centers on a lesbian protagonist who assumes a non-human alter ego of a crocodile in the narration. Showcasing the clever use of irony, sarcasm, and dark humor, Qiu’s first novel instantly became a defining work of lesbian queer fiction in Taiwan. Qiu’s writing career ended too early when she committed suicide at the young age of twenty-six, leaving us with her last work called Last Words from Montmartre (1996). Recently, filmmaker Evans Chan has also completed a full feature film called Love and Death in Montmartre (2019). This conference brings together scholars who are interested in the lifework of Qiu by considering the impact of her works across the fields of film studies, literary studies, affect theory, queer studies, animal studies, and translation theory. It takes the specific case of Qiu’s lifework to investigate how the mobility of queer desire enables a kind of cross-genre, transmedial, and transnational mode of textuality. Presenters will situate the cultural phenomenon of Qiu Miaojin in broader comparative and global perspectives. The conference brings together literary and cultural critics, a filmmaker, and creative writers from Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North America, and the UK.
*Film screening: Love and Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特之愛與死 (2019), directed by Evans Chan (Vimeo link will be sent to registrants prior to the event.)
9:00-9:15 am: Welcome and opening remarks: Nicole Huang (Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature); Alvin K. Wong
9:15-10:00 am Panel 1: Qiu Miaojin and Cinematic Representations A Discussion of Love and Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特之愛與死 (2019) Featuring: Gina Marchetti, Mike Ingham, Shi-yan Chao, and Evans Chan Moderator: Alvin K. Wong
<10 Minutes Break>
10:10-11:40am Panel 2: Body, Affect, and Pedagogy 1. Kate Costello, Teaching Translation to Students of World Literature: Notes of aCrocodile as a Case Study 2. Tze-lan Sang, How Far Have We Come?: From Notes of a Crocodile to Small Talk 3. T.M. Mamos, Emotional Vectors: Intertextuality in Qiu Miaojin’s Novels 4. Jenn Marie Nunes, The Motif of Writing and Queer Female Agency in 1990s Taiwanese Short Fiction Moderator: Pei-yin Lin
Lunch: 11:40am-12:45pm
12:45pm-2:00 pm Panel 3: Queer Literary Publics and Performance 1. Chi Ta-wei, Literature as a Public: Qiu Miaojin on Mental Disorders 2. Alvin K. Wong, Queer Minor Transnationalism in Qiu Miaojin and Wong Bik-wan’s Works 3. Fan-Ting Cheng, Performing Queer Intervulnerability Moderator: Calvin Hui
*This session will be conducted in Chinese 2:00pm-3:30pm Panel 4: The Legacy of Qiu Miaojin: Writers in Dialogue 1. Luo Yijun (駱以軍), “Portraits of the Young Artist” 青年藝術家的畫像 2. Lolita C.F. Hu (胡晴舫), “Dying Young and Withering” 早夭與凋零, excerpt from Anonymity《無名者》 3. Chi Ta-wei (紀大偉), “What is Love in Montmartre?” 愛是什麼？—看《蒙馬特遺書》 4. Li Kotomi, (李琴峰), “Situating Qiu Miaojin’s Novels in Japan: Notes on Qiu and Japanese Queer Literature” 邱妙津小說在日本：兼談日本同志文學 Moderator: Nicole Huang
<10 Minutes Coffee Break>
3:40-4:45pm Panel 5: Animality, Cultural Translation, and Queer Aesthetics 1. Yahia Zhengtang Ma, “Desire” as a Verb: Translating Same-Sex Desire in Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre 2. Ari Larissa Heinrich, Writing Your Own Obituary: Reception of Last Words fromMontmartre among English-language Readers (interview with Yahia Ma) 3. Carlos Rojas, Animality and the Limits of Language Moderator: Grace Ting
4:45-5:30pm Roundtable
Organized by: Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU The Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), HKU
For enquiries, please contact: Dr. Alvin K. Wong (akhwong@hku.hk)
Date: Wednesday, 1 December 2021 Time: 5:00 pm (HKT) on Zoom
In this talk, I engage with Huang Zumo’s (黃祖模) film Romance on Lu Mountain (廬山戀) (1980) to explore the consumption of romantic love (including the first representation of a kiss in the People’s Republic of China cinema), fashionable clothes, and petty bourgeois sensibility. I argue that the depiction of a female character and her fashionable clothes in Huang’s film can be regarded as a signifying site where the changing relationship between the libidinal and the political from the end of the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of China’s economic reforms is staged and dramatized. I also present the fashion shows, magazines, and television melodramas that accentuate the rise of this fashion consciousness. Taken together, I contend that de-sublimation of romantic love, the re-fetishization of gender, and the re-articulation of ethnicity and culture are ultimately a political process: in the 1980s, the political culture of revolution is replaced by the economic ideology of modernization and development.
Calvin Hui is a Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of William and Mary in the United States. His research focuses on modern Chinese humanities (film, media, and literature), Hong Kong studies, critical theory, and cultural studies, with particular emphases on Marxist theory, gender and sexuality studies, and post-colonial and transnational studies. His first book, titled The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China, was published by Columbia University Press in September 2021. Hui is a recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2019). He is also a recipient of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Research Grant (2020) and Scholar Grant (2016).
