April 2022 – CSGC

Speaker:
Qian Cheng, MPhil student in the Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Respondent:
Nicole Huang, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Thursday, April 28, 2022
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

Pema Tseden is the first Tibetan filmmaker whose feature films are recognized both domestically and globally. In this talk, I offer an analysis of his debut film The Silent Holy Stones (2005). The film juxtaposes the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West with its many modern adaptations and critiques the clerical institutions of religion in contemporary Tibet. With this film, Pema Tseden criticizes the traditions of Tibetan society and challenges the expectations of nativists. His cross-cultural background with proficiency in two languages and two medias allows him to inspect his home culture and compatriots at some distance. The emergence of Pema Tseden, whose stories often depict the transformations in current Tibetan society, is often generalized by scholars as an ethnic minority’s attempt to realistically document the invasion of modernity and lament the disintegration of traditions due to China’s ethnic policy. However, the minimal presence of the Han Chinese in his films indicates that he deliberately puts aside the controversial Sino-Tibetan relations. My research argues against previous scholarship’s reduction of Pema Tseden to a loyal representative of his ethnic community and highlights his intellectual ambition to situate Tibetan culture in a global framework.

Qian Cheng is an MPhil student in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include visual studies and modern literature in East Asia. She is currently working on Tibetan popular culture in contemporary China.

Enquiries: Georgina Challen – gchallen@hku.hk

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/

Speaker: Ying Xing, PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Supervisor: J. Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Respondent: Catherine E. Clark, Associate Professor of History and French Studies, MIT History

Date: Friday, April 8, 2022
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

In this talk, I engage with Dai Wangshu’s reading of André Malraux’s “Revolutionary China” to explore unorthodox leftists’ social and political situations during the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the escalating political extremism in Europe and China inspires them to learn from their remote counterparts and shapes their literary and political ideas. Despite being criticized for lacking revolutionary spirit by communists, French and Chinese unorthodox leftists insisted on the independence of literature from politics during the interwar period. Yet, by the late-1930s, both Malraux and Dai assumed a clear political standpoint when Stalin gained absolute power and Japan invaded China. Focusing on both writers’ literary and political activities, I present how the shift of unorthodox leftists’ attitudes to the literature-politics relationship occurs. Moreover, reading Dai’s translation of Malraux, I reveal how the nature of Chinese nationalism changes over time, from anti-imperialist salvation to anti-Japanese patriotism intertwined with vague anti-fascist internationalism.

Ying Xing is a second-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests cover modern European Intellectual history, transnational history, and postcolonial theories. She is currently working on the global spread of Maoism, with a focus on the entangled history between France and China in the 20th century.

Enquiries: Georgina Challen – gchallen@hku.hk

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/

Month: April 2022

Pema Tseden’s The Silent Holy Stones and Religion

André Malraux’s “Revolutionary China”: Shared Predicaments between French and Chinese Unorthodox Leftists, 1927-1945

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