Dr. Kathe Geist in conversation with Dr. Woojeong Joo
Date: Tuesday, February 28, 2023 Time: 9:00 am (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
This seminar presentation of a new book on famed Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu will feature an interactive discussion by the author, Dr. Kathe Geist, and Dr. Woojeong Joo, who has himself written extensively on the director. The talk will be illustrated with images from Ozu’s films, some from the book and others that could not be included for lack of space.
Kathe Geist is an art historian and the author of The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France to Paris, Texas. A Chinese version was published in Taiwan in 1993 and in mainland China in 2005. Dr. Geist turned her attention to Ozu in the 1980s and has been writing about him ever since. Ozu: A Closer Look draws on, modifies and amplifies her earlier work but is also the result of three years (2017-2020) of close, intensive analysis of all 34 of his extant films.
Woojeong Joo is a research fellow at the Center for Transregional Culture and Society, Nagoya University in Japan. His monograph, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday, was published by Edinburgh University Press (2017), and was also translated into Japanese, and published by the University of Nagoya Press (2020). Dr. Joo’s other research projects include the transnational coproduction between Japan and Colonial Korea in the 1930s and the early history of sound cinema in East Asia.
HKU Press has an exclusive offer of 40% off for purchases of Ozu: A Closer Look during the period 14 to 28 February 2023. The offer is available for purchases made through the HKU Press website (discount code HKUPP40) and in person purchases at the HKUP Bookshop, G/F, Run Run Shaw Heritage House, Centennial Campus, HKU.
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Speaker: Abolfazl Ahangari, PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Arash Davari, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota
Date: Friday, February 24, 2023 Time: 10:30 am Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
This seminar discusses the history of reformism in Islam and argues that the reform project is aimed at providing an answer to a secular need for historicizing the sacred, making it worldly, and reviving it in and for the present condition.
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Speaker: Gerry Simpson, Professor of Public International Law, LSE Law School, London School of Economics
Commentators: Marco Wan, Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong
Date: Monday, February 20, 2023 Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
“A sentimental answer thus does not answer to ‘what is to be done’ but rather to ‘how else might we experience’ an international legal conundrum.” (Sinja Graf, “A Style for the Human Heart”, 2022)
“I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean…” (Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”, 1992)
The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm’s, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways.
Gerry Simpson was appointed to a Chair in Public International Law at the LSE in January, 2016. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004), winner of the American Society of International Law Annual Prize for Creative Scholarship in 2005 and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007), and co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford, 2014) and (with Raimond Gaita) of Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash, 2016). His most recent book is The Sentimental Life of International Law: Literature, Language and Longing in Global Politics (Oxford, 2021).
Marco Wan is Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the intersections between law and the humanities, especially law and literature, law and film, and the ways in which perspectives from the humanities shed light on the legal regulation of gender and sexuality. His most recent book, Film and Constitutional Controversy (Cambridge, 2021) explores how constitutional debates are refracted in Hong Kong cinema.
Daniel Elam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Fordham, 2020) and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2020).
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Speaker: Dr. Jason E. H. Lee, Lecturer, Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University
Moderator: Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, February 13, 2023 Time: 4:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
This talk situates two cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet across overlapping local, regional and (inter)national imaginaries of Tibet and Kashmir before considering the possibilities of rendering the story and circumstances of Hamlet legible within these borderland contact zones. Set during the 1995 Kashmiri-Indian insurgency, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014) contests reductive depictions of Kashmiris as terroristic figures by narrating its title character’s search for his disappeared father while, in Hu Xuehua’s Prince of the Himalayas (2006), set in a fictional ancient kingdom in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, the Claudius figure is revealed to be Hamlet’s biological father, with the deceased surrogate father operating as a malevolent spirit bent on revenge. With their backdrop of snowy mountains and rugged frontiers, the two films’ implied rejection of revenge creates a troubling politics of appropriation of writing and performing Shakespeare in a region increasingly subject to assimilation policies by the continent’s two dominant powers. These directors’ attempts to ‘mobilise’ Shakespeare’s cultural capital to better mediate the symbolic cultural and geopolitical imaginary of these regions through their evocative natural landscapes are further complicated by the films’ reception by domestic and international viewers, given their placement within a heterogeneous ‘national cinema’ encompassing minority cultures in New Chinese Cinema and Bollywood, where they must negotiate with the spectre of Shakespeare’s contemporaneity as well as his problematic transmission from colonial to postcolonial, translocal and transnational contexts.
Jason Eng Hun Lee is a mixed British and Malaysian Chinese academic, creative writer and performer whose research and practice interests include global anglophone literatures, postcolonial and diasporic Asian writing, and global Shakespeares. His recent articles, reviews, and creative works have been published in Wasafiri, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Textual Practice, Moving Worlds and World Literature Today. He is a co-editor of Where Else: An International Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry (with Jennifer Wong and Tim Tim Cheng) and his debut poetry collection Beds in the East (Eyewear, 2019) was a finalist for the Melita Hume Prize. He is Literary Editor for Postcolonial Text and chief organizer for OutLoud HK 隨言香港, Hong Kong’s longest running English-language poetry collective. He holds a PhD from HKU and lectures in English and Comparative Literatures at Hong Kong Baptist University.
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Speakers: 何杏楓 教授 Prof. HOYAN Hang Fung Carole & 黃念欣 教授 Prof. WONG Nim Yan Moderator & Discussant: 林姵吟 Dr. LIN Pei-yin Date: February 7, 2023 (Tuesday) Time:16:30-18:30pm Language: Putonghua Venue:Level 2 Multi-Purpose Area (Ingenium), Main Library, Main Campus, HKU
講題一：「把我包括在外」： 張愛玲作為世界作家 Topic #1: “Include Me Out”: Reading Eileen Chang as a World Literature Author
Eileen Chang was enthusiastic to go into the world and to become a cultural mediator in her early years, expressing that it is important to get famous early. However, she led a reclusive life in her old age and would like to be included out. How do we understand her “hypercanonicity” in modern Chinese literature and her obscurity in world literature? This talk re-examines the case of Chang as a cultural translator and mediator with the notion of “world literature,” in order to open new discussion for the study of Eileen Chang and Sinophone literature.
Carole Hang-fung HOYAN is Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and Director of the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Re-investigating Eileen Chang: Adaptation, Translation and Research and Re-visiting Modern Chinese Literature: Close Reading, Data and Reception. She has recently focused on the study of the worlding of modern Chinese literature and has published various articles on Eileen Chang including “‘Include Me Out’: Reading Eileen Chang as a World Literature Author,” “Misplacement and Borrowing: Eileen Chang’s Clothing and Accessories” and “Finally, the Dim Sum Melted in the Coffee: Eileen Chang’s Food and Drink.
講題二：「中額」作家張愛玲與《天地》雜誌（1943-1945） Topic #2: The Heaven and Earth of a Middlebrow Writer: Eileen Chang and Tian Di magazine (1943-1945)
Tian Di (Heaven and Earth) magazine was established by Su Qing during the occupied era of Shanghai. Su made an impact on the literary scene with earthly everyday trivialities and women issues including sex, marriage, and work, to heavenly issues such as ethics, morals, and politics. Eileen Chang made a unique contribution to the magazine as well as the middlebrow culture it represents. Rereading Chang’s work and Tian Di help redefining the middlebrow at its best an excellent vehicle for an artistic critique of social and political life from a woman’s perspective.
Wong Nim-yan is an associate professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the director of the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has recently focused on the study of middlebrow literature and has written on the materiality of Eileen Chang’s works in various articles including “The Marginality of Eating and Writing of Eileen Chang’s Essays”, “Notes on Perfume-pairing Eileen Chang’s Novels” and “Eileen Chang’s and Middlebrow Culture in Hong Kong”.
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
Upcoming event of the lecture series:
Scholar Seminar Title: 上海和台灣報刊中的「張愛玲」想像 The Imagination of “Eileen Chang” by Newspapers in Shanghai and Taiwan Speaker:梁慕靈博士 Dr. LEUNG Mo-Ling, Rebecca (HKMU) Moderator: 黃心村 教授 Prof. Nicole HUANG Date & Time: March 8, 2023 (Wed) 16:30-18:00 Venue: CPD-1.21 Language: Putonghua
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Speaker: Professor Elmo Gonzaga, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
Discussant: Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, February 6, 2023 Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom and F2F
Writing about the vernacular emergence of a “cultural imaginary” of modernity in the Asian metropolis, Leo Ou-fan Lee highlights how an archipelago of multimodal archival materials could form “a contour of collective sensibilities and significations resulting from cultural production.” Advocating for a departure from an overarching unity or coherence in cultural analysis, Édouard Glissant suggests that archipelagic thinking could be used to uncover how “differences” might “interact, collide, and coexist” by “accident.” This talk will discuss the methods by which the forthcoming monograph “Monsoon Marketplace”(Fordham University Press) maps the contingent vernacular imaginaries of capitalist modernity and mass consumption in the divergent media cultures of archipelagic port cities Singapore and Manila during colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. It will explore how the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated print and audiovisual representations could trace the emergence of accidental affinities outside official discourses of progress.
Elmo Gonzaga is Associate Director of the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in the “Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,” “Cultural Studies,” “Interventions,” “Verge: Studies in Global Asias,” “South East Asia Research,” and the “Journal of Asian Studies.”
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Speaker: Simon Whitaker, PhD Candidate in the School of English, HKU
Respondent: Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU
Date: Thursday, February 2, 2023 Time: 12:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
This presentation compares Franz Boas’s conception of culture as an integrated “whole”, with Zora Neale Hurston’s approach to representing Black life in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston was a student of Boas in the late 1920s at the University of Columbia, and at this time collected folklore in historically Black communities in the US South under his guidance. But their approaches were fundamentally different, and I argue that this difference is at the centre of Hurston’s novel.
Whereas Boas posited a culture as an integrated, complete set of tightly interlocking “traits”, Their Eyes actively resists the possibility that the events of Black life which it presents could be drawn together into a similarly ordered totality. However, the novel represents its characters as actively drawing those same events together in and through lived encounters with each other. Through close readings of the novel, I suggest that Hurston thereby relocates Boas’s process of cultural integration into the encounter between people, and in this way renders it negotiable.
Simon Whitaker is a PhD Candidate in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. His dissertation argues that literary texts and social-theoretical writing were involved in competing attempts to formulate new concepts of the “social unit” in the early twentieth-century north Atlantic world. It highlights the literary works of Naomi Mitchison, Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston as offering very different approaches to the social unit which nonetheless share a sense that society is a radically more uncertain and open structure than major texts of social theory at the time seemed to be suggesting. Simon currently lives in Tokyo where he will be teaching at Sophia University from April.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
