Month: November 2024

Speaker: Haiyan Lee, Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Stanford University

Respondent: Marco Wan, Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, HKU

Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, November 28, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower

Current events have pressed home the disconcerting truth that the law is not synonymous with justice, and that its apparatus is liable to entrench as much as curb systemic injustices. Nowhere is the discrepancy between law and justice more starkly on display than in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. A contemporary Chinese novel, Sunspots by Xu Yigua, transposes the fault line of the French novel to a society newly committed to the rule of law. Here three fugitives seek private redemption by pouring their hearts and souls into the raising of an orphan girl while quietly holding down menial jobs; a determined cop gets on their trail; when they are eventually ensnared by the net of law, the reader must grapple with the (mis)carriage of justice at the very moment in which justice is served. From this comparative reading, I launch into a broader reflection on why we love anti-heroes and why society cultivates the criminal imagination.

Haiyan Lee is the Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, and A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination.

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Speaker: Zifeng Liu, Department of History, Hong Kong Baptist University

Respondents:
Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Alicia Le, MPhil Candidate, Department of History, HKU

Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 417, 4/F, The Jockey Club Tower, HKU

This talk will provide some sketches of the Chinese arc of Black women’s internationalism. Using Shirley Graham Du Bois’s articulation of an Afro-Arab-Asian political imaginary as a case study, I will foreground the crucial role of Black left feminism in forging mid-twentieth-century anticolonial and nationalist solidarities and of interlocution with Chinese socialism in the midst of the Cold War and decolonization in shaping Africana radical traditions. The ways in which Black women radicals bumped up against, if not contested nationally and internationally dominant notions of race, gender, sexuality, and geopolitical order will also be explored.

Zifeng Liu is an intellectual historian of the twentieth-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. His current book project traces a history of African and African diaspora women radicals’ engagements with China in the age of Bandung. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University.

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Speaker: Zhun Xu, Lingnan College, Sun Yat Sen University

Discussant & Moderator: Daniel Vukovich, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower

After significant economic and social progress in the 1960s and 1970s, the prominence of the national question in the Third World largely diminished during the era of neoliberal globalization, leading to a decline in the significance of the Third World as a concept. However, the last two decades have witnessed a notable resurgence of national identity in the politics and economies of Third World countries, particularly as the BRICS nations have gained prominence. Our analysis of Third World trade reveals a marked decrease in dependence on the West, with these countries increasingly trading among themselves, both as buyers and sellers. Additionally, we observe that since the peak of neoliberalism, Third World elites have been more intentional in resource allocation and often exhibit a stronger commitment to national development. These developments strongly indicate a resurgence of the Third World on the global stage.

 Zhun Xu (许准) teaches economics at Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学), on leave from the City University of New York. His main research interests include the political economy of development, the Chinese economy, and economic history. He is on the editorial boards of Science & Society and the Journal of Labor and Society. He is the author of From Commune to Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and articles in numerous venues, including The American Journal of Public Health, Review of Radical Political Economics, and The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Format: Professor Xu will present his paper as part of his current work in progress on global political economy and the limits to China’s current use of global capitalism/world trade. Professor Vukovich will serve as discussant and moderator for a broad discussion of the global and political-economic conjuncture. As part of the background reading, we are making available brief, classic selections from Marx and Engels on trade as seen from the standpoint of the 19^th century. All are welcome to join the discussion.

This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.

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Speakers:
Christopher DeWolf, Managing Editor, Zolima CityMag
Billy Potts, Writer and Designer

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

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 6:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

When Henry Steiner moved to Hong Kong in 1961, it was only meant to be for nine months. More than 60 years later, he is the most important graphic designer in the city’s history. Henry Steiner’s Hong Kong, the first book in the new Zolimag Culture Guide series, explores the city through the lens of Steiner’s work, from the idea of East meets West, to the graphic identity of world-leading companies like HSBC, to Hong Kong icons like the Jockey Club, Hong Kong Land, Peak Tower, Ocean Terminal, Wellcome, Dairy Farm, Lane Crawford and more.

Christopher DeWolf has been writing about Hong Kong for nearly 20 years, earning a reputation as one of the city’s leading journalists on architecture, design, history and culture. The author of Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong (Penguin, 2017), DeWolf has been Zolima CityMag’s managing editor since its launch in 2015, and his award-winning work has also appeared in other magazines and books around the world including TIME, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Good Beer Hunting and Spacing.

Billy Potts is a Hong Kong-born writer and designer whose work offers a unique perspective shaped by his lifelong immersion in the city’s cultural landscape. His writing for Zolima CityMag explores the city’s hidden stories and design heritage, including traditional crafts, calligraphy and more. Potts’ in-depth design and research study on defunct and abandoned signage, Hong Kong Ghost Signs, has been backed by both the Design Trust and Lord Wilson Heritage Trust. Through his design studio Handsome Co., Potts has worked on projects involving Hong Kong’s iconic trams, the classic Camel flask and other renowned local brands including Cathay Pacific, Ascot Chang, and more. Billy has a Chinese-English background and is fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.

This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and Zolima CityMag.

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Speaker: James Marcus, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYU

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.

James Marcus is the author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024) and Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut (2004). He edited and introduced Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage (2010) and has translated seven books from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova’s The Duel (2010). His essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, VQR, The American Scholar, The Atlantic, and many other publications. He is also the former editor of Harper’s Magazine, and currently teaches at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

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Speaker: Jenny Chak, MPhil Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Cornell University
Moderator: Beth Harper, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Time: 9:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

The past decade has witnessed a “darker” shift in ecocritical interests, with a growing body of works examining the more disturbing aspects of the interactions between human and nonhuman nature. This trend is particularly evident in the expanding body of research seeking to theorize concepts such as ecohorror, ecophobia, and ecogothic. These ongoing discussions offer a fresh and robust perspective for the cross-cultural analysis of the works of Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640-1715) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), two esteemed writers renowned for probing into the unsettling facets of human experience that intersect with ecological concerns.

This talk specifically focuses on how the works of Pu and Poe exhibit a provocative sensitivity towards nonhuman animals, deviating from the prevailing ideas of interspecies reciprocity during early Qing China and nineteenth-century America. Through close readings of selected stories, I argue that they lay bare the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression of animals that underpin the anthropocentric idealism of absolute harmony between species. I also investigate the parallels between the concept of the “strange” (guai 怪) in Chinese “tales of the strange” (zhiguai 志怪) and the Gothic tradition in the Western world, entangled with the two writers’ comparable explorations of a wider, inscrutable ecology existing beyond human dominion.

Jenny Wan Ying Chak is a final year MPhil student studying Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include cross-cultural ecocriticism and Gothic theories, with a particular focus on the literary works of Pu Songling and Edgar Allan Poe in her current project.

Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023); Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015); The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

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