Month: September 2025

Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone

Speakers:
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Assistant Professor of English, Rice University
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm/29 Sep/Houston)
Venue: On Zoom

Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s Overdetermined explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English at Rice University. She is a co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (2023), author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (2025), and co-author of The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir (2025). Her book of essays on collectivity, What is We?, is forthcoming.

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 University Press, 2020) and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2020).

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Jack Halberstam, David Feinson Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and coeditor of the Perverse Modernities book series at Duke University Press, will share with us his experience of publishing with academic presses. For early-career academics, navigating the process from establishing initial contact with an editor, responding to reviewer reports, and revising the manuscript can be daunting. This workshop will demystify the process of book publication by sharing insights and strategies. Target participants are PhDs who just completed their dissertations and faculty members in the process of writing their first book.

Participants are strongly encouraged to submit a 2-page single-spaced prospectus of their book, including the book’s main argument, intervention, and potential audience and market. For further questions, please email Professor Alvin K. Wong at akhwong@hku.hk

Please submit your prospectus to Professor Wong by September 17, 2025, before 5:00pm.

Date: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 (postponed to Friday, September 26, 2025)
Time: 11:00 am to 12:30 pm

This event is co-organised by the Faculty of Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

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Speaker:
Jack Halberstam
The David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University

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

Date: Thursday, September 25, 2025
Time: 4:00 to 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time
New Venue: Room 3.04, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In this talk, Halberstam will explore the meaning of trans embodiment using a vocabulary borrowed from a 1970’s art collective called ‘anarchitecture’. The work of Gordon Matta-Clark represents the spirit and the intentions of this group. Halberstam believes one should use the language of anarchitecture to describe trans embodiment for a few reasons: First, trans bodies should not become legible within the system of gender that was constructed around its exclusion. In other words, if trans bodies violate binary gender, then they cannot seek to become ‘real’ through that same binary. Instead, they must and do threaten to unbuild the binary, and take apart the version of trans that the binary produces. Second, because anarchitecture delivers a version of transness that does not seek to become a new vehicle for capital, it offers an alternative to the process by which once excluded groups become new markets. Rather than becoming a new platform for neoliberal marketing, the unbuilding of the body opens onto a critique of capital, real estate, and the realities that subtend them. And finally, trans bodies, like the buildings that Gordon Matt-Clark opened up, represent an unworld within which representational systems can and do come apart. The trans body that can be glimpsed through Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural experiments is not figure but ground, not body but landscape, not building but demolition site.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012), and a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam  is now finishing a book titled Anarchitecture After Everything, which will be published by MIT Press in 2026. Halberstam was the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton in 2022 and he was named a 2024/2025 Guggenheim Fellow. 

This event is co-organised by the Faculty of Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), the Committee on Gender Equality and Diversity (CGED), and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

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Interactive Seminar

Speaker: Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University

Moderators:
Christine Walker, Associate Professor, Department of History, HKU
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, September 5, 2025
Time: 2:00 to 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430) 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
Language: English. The legal texts discussed during the seminar are available in Chinese only.
In-person event for HKU students.

During this interactive seminar, Professor Sommer will introduce three texts that illustrate different aspects of the Qing judicial system. The texts will be shared prior to the event to encourage questions and discussion.

Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. A social and legal historian of Qing dynasty China (1644–1912), his research uses original legal case records from local and central archives to explore gender, sexuality, and family. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the John Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.

This seminar is co-organised by the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law in the Faculty of Law, and the Department of History and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.

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Speaker: Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University

Discussant: Professor Bin Bin Yang, Associate Professor, School of Chinese, HKU

Chair: Professor Weilin Xiao, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU

Date & Time: September 4, 2025 (Thursday) 16:00-18:00
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Language: English
(In-person event)

Matthew Sommer’s new book The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China(Columbia UP 2024)considers a range of transgender experiences in Ming-Qing China, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular contexts and penalized in others.  This talk focuses on the crime of “a male masquerading in female attire” (男扮女裝), which was prosecuted by applying the statute against “using deviant ways and heterodox principles to incite and deceive the common people” (左道異端煽惑人民).  Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit — yet, suspected of sexual predation, they risked death if they came to official attention, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for years.  

Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. A social and legal historian of Qing dynasty China (1644-1912), his research uses original legal case records from local and central archives to explore gender, sexuality, and family. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.

This seminar is co-organised by the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law in the Faculty of Law, and the Department of History and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

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BOOK TALK

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

Respondents:
Lucetta Kam, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Travis Kong, Professor, Department of Sociology, HKU
Marco Wan, Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, HKU
Harmony Yuen, Assistant Curator, M+
Jamie Zhao, Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies, School of Creative Media, CityU

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

Date: Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In “Unruly Comparison,” Alvin K. Wong examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies, Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison—acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here, unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist, colonial, and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy, Chinese rule, or global capital. By foregrounding the friction, asymmetry, and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world, Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is also the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC). His research spans across the fields of queer theory, Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities. His book “Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone” was published by Duke University Press in Spring 2025.

A 30% discount code E25AKWNG can be used when ordering “Unruly Comparison” directly from the Duke UP website: https://www.dukeupress.edu/unruly-comparison

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

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