Month: September 2023

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time (2:00 pm Lahore)
Venue: On Zoom

One of the oldest settlements in Karachi, Lyari has been the site on-going violence between political parties, criminal gangs and law enforcement agencies since the early 2000s. Due to this on-going conflict, Lyari has been labeled by law enforcement agencies and the media as one of several ‘no-go areas’ in the city. However, residents of Lyari tell a different story, referring to this area as ‘Karachi ki maan’ or the mother of Karachi. For Lyari’s residents, their locality has continuously shifted from being a space of protection against the hostile social and political environment of the city to a space of terror at the hands of local criminal gangs and law enforcement agencies. While the conflict has gradually subsided since 2013, the state-led Operation came with its own violence with many residents losing family members to extrajudicial killings (‘encounters’). Many others are still in prison for alleged involvement in the gangs. Furthermore, the roots of the conflict—poverty, drugs, and the conflict between political parties—remain factors that shape the area. Hence, while Lyari may officially be at ‘peace’, residents are aware the violent conflict may erupt at any time in the future. This documentary follows two residents of Lyari, both of whom have lost family members to gang violence and police encounters. Through telling their stories, the documentary sheds light on the on-going ramifications of violence and to question whether peace has truly been achieved for the people of Lyari.

Nida Kirmani – Producer
Professor Nida Kirmani is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is a leading, feminist public intellectual who has published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development, and urban studies in India and Pakistan.

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在樓窗的燈光裡：張愛玲的家居剪影──從《傳奇》增訂本展開

分享嘉賓 Speaker: 蘇偉貞 教授 Prof. SU Wei-chen

主持人 Moderator: 林姵吟 博士 Dr. LIN Pei-yin

日期時間 Date & Time: September 27, 2023 (Wed) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: Putonghua
地點 Venue: CBC, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU

摘要 Abstract:
1946年11月張愛玲出版《傳奇》增訂本。序〈有幾句話同讀者說〉、跋〈中國的日夜〉、現代人窺探晚清仕女家居封面，三方定位了書寫歷程及她的境況。〈有幾句話同讀者說〉針對她的漢奸冠名辨解，漢奸之名當然來自與胡蘭成婚配，她形容兩人關係，她像棵樹，往他所在的窗前長著，「在樓窗的燈光裡也影影綽綽開著小花，但是只能在窗外窺視」；〈中國的日夜〉附了張愛玲少見結合日常生活與愛情之詩作〈落葉的愛〉，並示意了現代人窺探晚清仕女家居封面營造出她希望的不安氣氛。上述組合不離「家」關鍵詞，形構一幅張愛玲的家居剪影。關於家居追求，張愛玲曾言想要「一明兩暗」的中國風味房。她雖喜歡「明間」，但寫作以來，一路婚姻、家居，輾轉於胡蘭成到頼雅、上海到香港、美國，連帶書寫始終糾結於自傳成分的《傳奇》、《流言》之記憶變體《小團圓》、《雷峰塔》、《易經》等，從結果看過去，《傳奇》增訂本序、跋、封面似已預示了她不安的日後。晚年的她「沒有家累，沒有牽掛」，與明室絕缘。她的一生及寫作，亦可作如是觀：整個世界為張愛玲闢出了一個時空，她筆下人物進出明暗房間，走的是通道，她則以小說穿越時代。

In November 1946, Eileen Chang released a revised edition of Romances. The preface “A Few Words to the Reader,” the postscript “China’s Day and Night,” and the cover featuring a modern person peering into the home of a late Qing dynasty woman offer insight into her creative process and personal circumstances. The preface serves as a defense against the label of traitor, while the postscript features a poem that atypically blends themes of daily life and love, evoking a sense of unease that she wished to convey through the cover. All of these revolve around the keyword “home”, revealing Chang’s interior aesthetic. Despite Chang’s expressed preference for Chinese-style “one bright two dark” rooms, her marriage, life path, autobiographical works, and late self-writing suggest otherwise. In hindsight, the preface, postscript, and cover of the revised edition of Romances appear to have foreshadowed her later years, which were marked by unease. Regarding Chang’s life and writing, this talk posits that the world provided Chang with a space and time where her characters could traverse bright and dark rooms through passageways, while she traversed different eras through her fiction.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
蘇偉貞，香港大學中文學院博士。1985年至2006年任職《聯合報》副刊，2007年起專任中國文化大學中文系、成功大學中文系等校，目前任教致理科技大學通職學部。80年代初期以《陪他一段》（1983）崛起文壇， 90年代以《沉默之島》（1994）獲《中國時報》百萬小說評審團大獎，已出版多部小說集和散文集，及學術專書《孤島張愛玲──追蹤張愛玲香港時期小說》(2002)、《描紅──台灣張派作家世代論》（2006）、《長鏡頭下的張愛玲：影像‧書信‧出版》（2011）、《不安、厭世與自我退隱──易文及同代南來文人》（2020）。

SU Wei-chen obtained her PhD from the School of Chinese, HKU. She worked at the United Daily News from 1985 to 2006. Since 2007, she has held full-time teaching positions at several universities, including the Chinese Culture University and National Cheng Kung University. Currently, she teaches at the General Education Division of Chihlee University of Technology. She rose to fame with her novel Be with Him for a While (1983), and in the 1990s, she won the China Times Literature Award for Best Novel with Island of Silence (1994). She is the author of more than a dozen volumes of fiction and nonfiction, as well as three scholarly books on Eileen Chang and one on the film director and screenwriter Yi Wen.

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)

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Speaker:
Christopher B. Patterson (aka Kawika Guillermo), Associate Professor, Social Justice Institute, University of British Columbia

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

Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (7:00 pm/Sep 19, Vancouver)
Venue: On Zoom

This talk catalogues the author’s writing process for their prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, using the concept of creative “self-referencing:” the way writers discover their multiple selves scattered throughout the world (and in art), and how they seek to reference them in their own work. Against forms of creative imagination that see writers as singular “voices” who express their individuality, self-referencing discloses the many others (authors, communities, kin) who influence an authors’ sense of self. For marginalized authors, self-referencing has become a resistant form of embodied cross-referencing that affirms the writer’s non-normative desires, experiences, and ways of being (and writing) by embracing their multiple points of (self)reference, and their multiple selves.

Kawika Guillermo is the author of Stamped: An Anti-travel Novel and All Flowers Bloom. Kawika Guillermo is the matrilineal name for Christopher B. Patterson, who is Associate Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and the author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games and Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific.

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