Date: 16 November, 2020
Time: 5 PM (GMT +8)
Speaker: Nicholas Y. H. Wong, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, The University of Hong Kong
New concepts of play and labor emerged in the wake of geopolitical East Asia’s capitalist restructuring after the Pacific War and specifically, the rise of Hong Kong’s plastic toy manufacturing. This dominant export-oriented colonial-national industry, I argue, shaped a generation of writers’s experience of childhood and subsequent attempts to write for and about the child. Modifying views of children in modern Chinese literature as national but also individual figures of development, I propose a Hong Kong theory of the child from the angle of mass production and consumption of cute, gimmicky objects, and ponder how literary writing both depicts and assumes the unstable relation between commodity and play-thing.
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