Speaker: Irving Goh, Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University

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

Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In this talk, Irving Goh will present on his latest book, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). He will share his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, failure as all negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress and ideologies of success and its accompanying notions of grit and resilience. It also registers, at the ontological level, the affective structure of existence. Irving will also discuss the literary texts that inform his work on failure.

Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, L’existence prépositionnelle (Galilée, 2019), The Deconstruction of Sex (with Jean-Luc Nancy, Duke UP, 2021), and most recently, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). His next book, Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit (Cornell UP), is appearing this summer 2026. For his current book projects, he is interested in the end(s) of work, world literature and the question of citizenship, and theorizing the Asian figure.

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蹦蹦戲花旦：張愛玲的「女明星學」

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Ms. LI Qing 李青 (專欄作家)

主持人 Moderator: Prof. Nicole HUANG 黃心村教授 (Department of Comparative Literature, HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: April 23, 2026 (Thu) 17:00-18:30pm (HKT)
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: CBA, G/F, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, HKU
講座模式 Delivery Mode: Face-to-face & Online (via Zoom)

摘要 Abstract:
在24歲，張愛玲寫下，「將來的荒原下，斷瓦頹垣裡，只有蹦蹦戲花旦這樣的女人，她能夠夷然地活下去，去任何時代，任何社會裏，到處是她的家」。恰似人生判詞，其後 50 載，她採不同身段、於不同時空「夷然地活下去」。她亦是少數去國後仍將寫作視為畢生志業的女性，早早具備「打造明星 IP」的先鋒意識，與李麗華、林黛等名伶花旦皆有點滴交集，從原鄉到異鄉，離散中，有人「夷然地活下去」，有人沒有。

講座圍繞張愛玲自我經營的「女明星學」，回溯她的粉墨登場與隱入塵煙，並嘗試以之為綫索，鉤沉「花旦們」歷史深處的容顏，也希望藉此度量她與她的時代，似近還遠「孜孜窺視」的距離。

At the age of twenty-four, Eileen Chang wrote what seemed a defining prophecy: “In the wasteland of the future, amid crumbling walls and debris, only a woman like a rustic ‘bengbeng’ opera starlet can survive with poise. She belongs to any age, any society; she is at home wherever she goes.” For the next fifty years, shifting her gesture to fit the changing times, she continued to “survive with poise”. She was a pioneer who possessed an early instinct for “star branding,” her life crossing paths with silver-screen divas like Li Lihua and Lin Dai. In an age of dispersal, some survived with poise; others vanished.

This lecture centers on Chang’s own practice of the “art of the diva”, tracing her grand entrance and her eventual final curtain. Using her as a guiding thread, we seek to unearth the faces of “divas” buried in history, measuring the distance between Eileen Chang and her era: a distance that is “so near, yet so far”—defined by a gaze of perpetual, longing scrutiny.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
李青  筆名「一把青」，畢業於華東師範大學中文系及香港中文大學性別研究專業。任職財經媒體，業餘專欄評論，文章見諸《新京報書評周刊》、《南方人物周刊》、《文匯報》、《印刻文學生活誌》、香港 01、《香港經濟日報》 等。喜風花雪月與故人故事。

LI Qing  Writing under the pen name “Yi Ba Qing”. Graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at East China Normal University, and later completed a postgraduate programme in Gender Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She works in financial media and writes film criticism and columns as a personal pursuit, with contributions to Beijing News Book Review Weekly, Southern People Weekly, Wen Wei Po, INK Literary Monthly, HK01, Hong Kong Economic Times and other publications. She has a fondness for vintage romance and good old days.

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:
Kirk Sides, Assistant Professor in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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

Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

Reading African literatures as environmental literatures, Environmental Entanglements offers an interventional step back beyond the mid-twentieth-century moment of political independence. Thinking about ‘entanglement’ as a way to represent relations ecologically, the book explores a form that it argues is an ecological imaginary animating many African literary and cultural repertoires. This ecological form gives story to experiences of transversal of (colonial and apartheid) boundaries, the movement of peoples, and the cultural and social relations enacted upon land. Focusing on literary and filmic texts, from the writers such as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje in the early twentieth century, to contemporary science and speculative fiction producers like Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu, Environmental Entanglements argues that cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological awareness that predates the moment of mid-twentieth-century decolonization. 

Kirk Sides is an Assistant Professor in English and an Affiliate Faculty Member of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kirk has worked at academic institutions in the US, the UK, and South Africa. His book, Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary (2025) from Oxford University Press, charts a long history of ecological thinking in African literatures from the start of twentieth century up to the present. He has recently begun a new research project, Narrative on the Edge, which looks at the relationship between environmental change and storytelling practices. 

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Speaker: Arnika Fuhrmann, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Discussant: Elmo Gonzaga, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK

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

Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In the Mood for Texture considers the revival of Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity in contemporary Southeast Asian cultural production, both virtual and material. Examining contemporary Bangkok’s architecture, design, fashion, and nightlife, the book shows how Chinese pasts are redeployed in contemporary film, literature, and hospitality venues to shape present visions of Asia. Attending to the textures of built environments and agentive female subjects, it demonstrates how Southeast Asian imaginations can challenge both domestic and regional narratives of identity and collectivity.

Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Teardrops of Time:Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong (SUNY Press, 2020), and In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2026).

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(Speculative Archival Reconstruction of a Latent Film)

Speaker: Pavle Levi, Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts and Chair, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University

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

Date: Thursday, April 9, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This presentation, based on recent archival discoveries, will introduce the never-before-seen material pertaining to Dušan Makavejev’s 1990s idea for a film about the war of Yugoslav disintegration. Bringing together visual and written threads pertaining to documentary war-photography, Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, human-animal relations, techniques of montage, and computer-generated imagery, the talk will aim to reconstruct a peculiar cinematic concept, which encapsulates the late phase of Makavejev’s work and deepens our understanding of socialist Yugoslavia’s break up in unorthodox ways.

Pavle Levi is Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts and chair of the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. He is the author of a number of books about film, including: Cinema by Other Means (2012), Jolted Images (2018), Miniatures: On the Politics of Film Form (2021), and Hypnos in Cineland (2022).

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Speaker: Winter Jade Werner, Associate Professor of English, Wheaton College

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

Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

How do we see more clearly the non-Western intellectual labor embedded in popular Victorian fiction? This talk proposes “citation chaining” as an archival methodology for that project, tracing how the penanggalan—a Malay vampiric figure—traveled from Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s 1819 description in a missionary periodical through colonial print networks to Bram Stoker’s research notes for Dracula, unattributed.

Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College and Visiting Scholar at Universiti Malaya. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ohio State UP, 2020), and her book in progress traces the entanglements of British missionary print culture and Victorian ideas of “world literature.” Her work is forthcoming or appears in ELH, Victorian Studies, Comparative Literature, and MLQ.

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Speaker: Christina Bezari, Senior Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Brussels

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

Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Time: 12 noon Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Recent studies have theorized the Mediterranean as a privileged site for the study of literary and geopolitical interactions in the twentieth century. Despite these advances, Southern Europe and the Maghreb have often been studied in isolation and have occupied a “peripheral” position with regard to the more “dominant” centers of political power. The main objective of this lecture is to shed light on Southern European and Maghrebi women’s participation in transnational anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements by analyzing their contributions as writers, journalists and editors of periodicals. Long regarded as “marginal actors” in the public sphere, women’s participation in the press and in transnational networks of solidarity has been obscured due to a long history of censorship, colonial domination and dictatorial rule on both sides of the Mediterranean. By considering women as cultural mediators and agents of resistance within a comparative, trans-Mediterranean framework, this lecture aims to challenge traditional Eurocentric narratives and examine women’s texts as sites of political engagement.

Christina Bezari is a senior post-doctoral fellow at the University of Brussels (ULB). Her research is located at the intersection of comparative literature, Mediterranean studies and women’s history. She is the author of Transnational Modernity in Southern Europe: Women’s Periodicals and Salon Culture (Routledge, 2023) and the co-editor of the special issue “Latinity and Modernity: Cultural Identities and Transnational Exchange in a Globalizing World” (2025). Her research focuses on transnational networks of writers, editors, translators and cultural mediators in Southern Europe and the Maghreb. She has previously co-directed an international project on the “imaginaries of translation” at Sorbonne University (Paris-IV).

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