Month: May 2023

Date: 19 May 2023 (Friday)
Time: 12:30pm – 1:45pm
Venue: CCT723, 7/F, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong (in-person only)

Abstract:
Significant interest of late has explored the utility and efficacy of discursively articulating international human rights with gay rights across the African continent with the intent to address sexuality-based discrimination in a range of countries. This presentation will first explore the utility of the deployment of such legal discourses to address sexuality-based discrimination before outlining, across three inter-related spheres, a series of challenges that can also emerge through such an approach. Such challenges, which pivot around concerns related to legitimacy, spatial inequality, and socio-spatial relationships potentially allow us to critically interrogate when and how human rights discourse may be effective or not based on the particularities of African development. Drawing on this framework developed in relation to human rights, this presentation then considers how the same three concerns may be effectively deployed to consider other internationally-derived approaches to support the needs of non-heteronormative groups on the continent, considering both their benefits, challenges, and potential trade-offs. To conclude, this presentation suggests that greater consideration can be given to the ways in which various international discourses and policy processes interface in different African contexts, and especially urban contexts. 

Speaker:Dr Andrew Tucker
Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town

Dr Andrew Tucker is an Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Prior to joining UCT, Tucker worked for a number of years on USAID-funded HIV programmes across the global South. He was earlier a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Jesus College, and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge. His work is currently exploring the relationships between international discourses and policy processes, sexuality and health, and African urban development.  

Chairs:
Professor Marco Wan
Professor and Director of the Law and Literary Studies Programme, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong

Dr Alvin Wong
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong

This event is presented by the Centre for Comparative and Public Law of the Department of Law and co-organized by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong.

For inquiries, please contact Ms. Phoenix To at pxto@hku.hk.

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Speaker:
Annie Pfeifer, Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University

Respondent:
Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, May 11, 2023
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (10:00 pm/May 10, New York)
Venue: On Zoom

To the Collector Belong the Spoils rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collecting and hoarding, this book traces the movement’s artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, modernist authors like Henry James and Walter Benjamin engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting’s long history in the spoils of war and conquest. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future.

Annie Pfeifer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. Her first monograph, To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation, was published by Cornell University Press in February 2023. She edited “Walk I absolutely Must,”a 2019 collection of essays on Robert Walser and the culture of walking. Her articles have appeared in The New German Critique, German Life and Letters, The Germanic Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) as well as the opinion section of The New York Times.

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ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Speaker:
Dan Vukovich, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong

Respondents:
Daniel Bell, Professor and Chair of Political Theory, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Simon Young, Professor and Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong

Date: Tuesday, May 9, 2023
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Face-to-Face and on Zoom

After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997-2019  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) offers a critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, including prior events like Occupy Central and the Mongkok Fishball Revolution, as well as their aftermaths in light of the re-assertion of mainland sovereignty over the SAR and the onset of what has been locally dubbed as the ‘second handover.’ Vukovich reads the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it as a spontaneous outburst of the desire for freedom from mainland oppression and for a self-explanatory democracy, on the one hand, and on the other hand of those who would dismiss  the protests in nationalistic or conspiratorial anti-imperialist fashion. Instead the book attempts to go beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle 2019’s and the SAR’s roots in the Basic Law system as well as in the colonial and insufficiently post-colonial contexts and dynamics of Hong Kong. Vukovich examines the question of localist identity and its discontents (particularly the rise of xenophobia), the problems of nativism, violence, and liberalism, the impossibility of autonomy, and what forms a genuine de-colonization can and might yet take in the city. A concluding chapter examines Hong Kong’s need for state capacity and proper, livelihood development, in the light of the Omicron wave of the Covid pandemic, as the SAR goes forward into a second handover. The book is an intervention into the study of Hong Kong and global politics as well as into critical theory and post-colonial studies.

Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of post-colonialism, politics, and critical theory in relation to the China-West relationship. He has worked at HKU since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program within the School of Humanities, and an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing (School of Marxism) and a virtual Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学). He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) and most recently After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In these and in other texts he is centrally concerned with the age-old  problems of representation, the politics of knowledge or discourse, and the dialectics of difference and universality.

Daniel A. Bell  (貝淡寧) is a Professor and Chair of Political Theory with the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He served as Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University (Qingdao) from 2017 to 2022. His books include The Dean of Shandong (2023), Just Hierarchy (co-authored with Wang Pei, 2020), The China Model (2015), The Spirit of Cities (co-authored with Avner de-Shalit, 2012), China’s New Confucianism (2008), Beyond Liberal Democracy (2007), and East Meets West (2000), all published by Princeton University Press. He is also the author of Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1993). He is founding editor of the Princeton-China series (Princeton University Press) which translates and publishes original and influential academic works from China. His works have been translated in 23 languages. He has been interviewed in English, Chinese, and French. In 2018, he was awarded the Huilin Prize and was honored as a “Cultural Leader” by the World Economic Forum.

Simon Young (楊艾文) is a Professor and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Law and Deputy Director for Education and Development of Research Integrity in The University of Hong Kong.  He serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law (Brill) and General Editor of Archbold Hong Kong (Sweet & Maxwell). His empirical and comparative law research has explored important aspects of Hong Kong’s constitutional order including the National Security Law, the Court of Final Appeal, the system of electing the Chief Executive, and functional constituencies of the Legislative Council.  He also writes on the human rights aspects of the criminal process and the use of civil processes to achieve criminal law aims, particularly in the areas of money laundering and the proceeds of crime.

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