Month: January 2024

Speaker:
Professor Liu Dong, Department of Chinese and History, City University of Hong Kong

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

Date: Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Time: 10:30 am (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This lecture re-evaluates the literary phenomenon of the “Chinese Northeastern Writers Group,” a group of young writers who were both exiled from and wrote about Dongbei from the 1930s to the 1950s. Well-known group members include Xiao Hong, Xiao Jun, Duanmu Hongliang, and Luo Binji. Focusing on their moments of emergence into Chinese literary circles, this project intends to account for the astonishing similarities that exist in their literary debut and life decisions. Despite distinct upbringings and backgrounds, they all fell into the “rabbit hole” of the Chinese Communist Revolution (un)intentionally. Identifying them as biomarkers makes it possible to decipher the hidden networks that help channel the exchange among people and books, as well as the transmission of knowledge and information built by the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party, and its peripheral organizations. Narratives authored by Dongbei writers testify to the multi-dimensional interactions between the Chinese (also Global) left-wing literature movement and the Communist Revolution.

LIU Dong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and History at the City University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. from Peking University, where he was also awarded the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (2023). He specializes in the history of modern Chinese literature, while his research interests include Chinese leftist literature, Dongbei studies, and Sino-American cultural relations. He is currently working on his first project “The Cognitive Topos of the ‘Northeastern Writers Group’: Trans-local Circulations, (Inter-)nationalist Politics and Literary Production.” He is also compiling a collection of Hu Shih’s overseas correspondence.

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Book Talk by Kaitlin Chan

Date: Monday, January 29, 202
Time: 7:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

A slice of life graphic novel set in Hong Kong, Eric’s Sister explores creative doubt, the uneasy love between family members, and friendship as a salve in the aftermath of tragedy.

Lisa and her brother Eric are aspiring artists in their twenties. Lisa has always loved drawing, and Eric is a painter poised for a career breakthrough. But as they each struggle to make their mark, there is a disquieting undercurrent of what they can’t tell each other. Lisa has always played second fiddle to her brother, but how much longer can she feel like a supporting actor in her own life?

Kaitlin Chan is a cartoonist and gallery worker from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker online, The Economist, Catapult, Oprah Daily, The Margins, Popula, and elsewhere. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Cartoonist Studio Prize in webcomics. Eric’s Sister is her first book. https://kaitlinchan.com/

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Speaker:
Professor Shih-Diing Liu, Department of Communication, University of Macau

Moderator:
Dr. Daniel Vukovich, Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, January 26, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU, and on Zoom

The growing political conflicts unfolding in China provide an opportunity for rethinking the cultural politics of emotion. Although the political formations in the region can be laden with a multitude of emotions, they tend to be poorly understood. In their forthcoming book, Affective Spaces: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China, Shih-Diing Liu and Wei Shi explain why affect and emotion matter to politics from Mao Zedong to the present. The book investigates the dynamics of political passions and the contexts from which emotional subjects engage in hegemonic struggles through the creation of various cultural forms, including Maoist art and popular films. We argue that cultural feelings and emotional experiences are crucial for understanding political struggle, as well as debates about the cultural dilemma of the Chinese Dream.

Shih-Diing Liu is Professor of Communication at the University of Macau. His research has appeared in Positions, Social Movement Studies, New Media and Society, and New Left Review. He is the author of The Politics of People: Protest Cultures in China (State University of New York Press, 2019).

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