Hong Kong, China, and New Orientalisms
Fourth Annual Postgraduate Student Workshop
14-16 November 2024 (Online)
Edward Said’s field-defining 1978 book, Orientalism, revealed how Western European scholarship on ‘the East’ created a homogenous and exotic world that legitimised Western European empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Said focused specifically on orientalist scholarship – now called ‘area studies’, of the ‘Middle East’ and ‘South Asia’ – we may productively extend his insights to East Asia, and most notably, China.
Despite China’s status as a global power in the twenty-first century, orientalist discourses have often undermined its position in international relations. At the same time, China has relied on these same orientalist narratives to assert its autonomy and difference from ‘the West’. The persistent binary of ‘East’ and ‘West’, as well as the hierarchies it produces, has been an obstacle to transnational cooperation in the face of the most pressing global challenges: climate change, war, political instability, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Since the nineteenth century, Hong Kong has been the place where ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ – or more accurately, where the two sides of orientalist discourse – meet. Hong Kong has wrestled with its many hybrid identities, colonial histories, and questions of political belonging. Extending the insights of Said’s Orientalism while remaining attentive to significant cultural, political and historical differences, we seek to critically evaluate new orientalisms of the twenty-first century and their various effects in China and Hong Kong.
The HKU Comparative Literature postgraduate workshop offers PhD and advanced MPhil students the chance to receive detailed feedback on their work in progress from their peers and senior faculty. The workshop is small (12-15 students) and the atmosphere is collegial. The three-day workshop is held over Zoom and we aim for geographical diversity.
The senior faculty respondents for the Fall 2024 workshop are:
Dan Vukovich 胡德 is Chairperson of the University of Hong Kong’s Comparative Literature department, and the Director of HKU’s China, Humanities, and Global Studies Research Hub. He is an inter-disciplinary scholar, trained in cultural studies and theory, and he specializes in colonialism/imperialism/politics in relation to the China-West problem.
Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures at the University of Melbourne. Her scholarship and teaching lie at the intersection of the following subfields: postcolonial literature and theory; decolonisation and the global Cold War in Asia; city literatures and the urban humanities; transpacific migration; and Marxism and critical theory.
Marco Wan is Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the intersections between law and the humanities, especially law and literature, law and film, and the ways in which perspectives from the humanities shed light on the legal regulation of gender and sexuality.
The HKU Comparative Literature postgraduate workshop offers PhD and advanced MPhil students the chance to receive detailed feedback on their work in progress from their peers and senior faculty. The workshop is small (12-15 students) and the atmosphere is collegial. The three-day workshop is held over Zoom and we aim for geographical diversity.
If you have any queries, please kindly email Lory Wong (u3009336@connect.hku.hk) or J. Daniel Elam (jdelam@hku.hk).
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Form / Function / Finitude
Third Annual Postgraduate Student Workshop
11-13 April 2024
What types of criticism are appropriate for a world defined by impending environmental catastrophe, widespread economic precarity, and ongoing global violence? Some critics have turned to formalist critique in order to account for literary structure as well as to foreground the pleasures of beauty and aesthetics. Other critics have argued that critique should concern itself with its political use. Other critics still have suggested that criticism itself has ‘run out of steam’ and hope to imagine ‘post-critique’ as the necessary orientation for our humanistic inquiry. We need not think of these critical attitudes as necessarily opposed to one another; rather, the urgency of our time requires us to locate our critical imagination at the nexus of these traditions. What are the legacies of modes of criticism and critique? What are the methods and commitments of criticism? How can we read criticism under the rubrics of its own method? This workshop welcomes papers that engage with these questions – especially when questions of critical method interact with the objects they purport to illuminate.
The faculty members for the Form/Function/Finitude 2024 Workshop are:
Robert Hariman
Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University
He is the author of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (with John Louis Lucaites; University of Chicago Press, 2016); No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, (with John Louis Lucaites; University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Political Style: The Artistry of Power (University of Chicago, 1995).
Caroline Levine
David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University
Levine 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.
Jean Ma
Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong
She is the author of At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (University of California Press, 2022); Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2015); and Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (University of Hong Kong Press, 2010). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press.
The workshop allows PhD students to workshop a work-in-progress – usually a dissertation chapter or a potential journal article – in a small and supportive setting, and with colleagues from around the world. The workshop is led by three faculty members who offer feedback and guide conversation over the course of the three days.
If you have any questions, please email Dr J Daniel Elam: jdelam@hku.hk
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Thinking China and Circulation:
Beyond Borders / In Translation / Across Adaptation
Dates of Workshop: October 20-22, 2022 (Thu-Sat)
Venue: Zoom
Circulations are at the core of globalization and speak to all fields, periods, and regions. They can be political, economic, cultural, geographical, social, communal, familial, or personal. They may involve the relocation of objects and images; translation, adaptation, and appropriation of texts; or trajectories of individuals. They may be influenced by diverse forms of media. They may be imposed and experienced by individuals, groups, or institutions. They may take place on an equal footing or reinforce power relationships. They may bring about understanding, transformations, creativities, or else misunderstanding, prejudice, and defiance. Circulations also entail a historical process of images, texts, and ideas changing over time.
This historical moment – global pandemic, changing geopolitics, the threat of economic sanctions, and renewed racism against the Chinese diaspora – is a good time to reflect on real-life and virtual circulations in the context of China.
The Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong invite graduate students working on China and the Sinophone world of the twentieth century to submit paper abstracts on the theme of “CIRCULATION”. We encourage people to interpret the theme in the broadest possible terms. We particularly welcome proposals that discuss circulations in relation to China in/and the world (in any language or across multiple languages). We hope to bring together early-career scholars working across disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, film and media studies, etc.
Please submit your abstract (up to 250 words) with a working title, and your CV to conf.complit.hku@gmail.com by September 1, 2022. Selected participants will be notified of their acceptance by September 5 and should submit the full paper by October 3. There are no fees to attend the workshop.
The graduate workshop will be held on Zoom October 20-22 HKT. Papers will be circulated in advance among all the participants. Attendees are expected to read the papers of their panel before the workshop and give feedback during the panels. Participants in Hong Kong are welcome for a dinner after the workshop.
Three faculty members will also give advice on each paper during the three-day workshop:
David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Wang’s specialties are Modern and Contemporary Chinese and Sinophone Literature, Late Qing fiction and drama, and Comparative Literary Theory.
Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research spans across the fields of Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, queer theory, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities.
Peng Hsiao-yen is research fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. Her publications include Dandyism and Transcultural Modernity: The Dandy, the Flâneur, and the Translator in 1930s Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris (Routledge, 2010).
If you have any queries, please kindly email Junlin Ma (jlma@connect.hku.hk), Ying Xing (yingxing@connect.hku.hk), or J. Daniel Elam (jdelam@hku.hk).
This conference is organized by Junlin Ma, Ying Xing, and J. Daniel Elam under the auspices of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at HKU.
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Comparing World Literatures in the Postcolonial World
15-17 October 2021
The Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong held an online graduate workshop, Comparing World Literatures in the Postcolonial World, from 15 to 17 October 2021. The workshop invited postgraduate (PhD and advanced MPhil/MA) students whose work takes theoretical approaches to the notions of national, world, comparative, postcolonial, and transnational South-South literature, to share their work and ideas with their peers.
Papers were circulated in advance and the focus of the three days was to workshop essays with an eye towards publication (either as a stand-alone journal article or as part of a larger project). The workshop was limited to fifteen people so that participants’ papers could receive close attention. Participants were expected to actively contribute and to offer detailed productive criticism.
Three faculty members also participated and offered detailed feedback over the course of the three-day workshop:
Baidik Bhattacharya, Associate Professor at CSDS (Delhi) and author of Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (Routledge, 2018).
Emily Sun, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Barnard College and author of On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Fordham University Press, 2021).
J. Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, and author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020).
For details, please email Abolfazl Ahangari (ahangari@connect.hku.hk) or Daniel Elam (jdelam@hku.hk).