Moderator: Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, July 3, 2023 Screening: 4:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Discussion: 5:10 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: Room CPD3.04, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU and ON ZOOM
This presentation examines the creation of Valerie Soe’s 2019 documentary film “Love Boat: Taiwan,” which looks at one of the longest-running cultural immersion programs in the world. The program, which is well-known in the Taiwanese American community, is sponsored by the government of Taiwan and takes place every summer in Taipei. Despite its high-minded aspirations that include classes in Mandarin-language study, martial arts, and brush painting, the program’s popularity stems from another source: its reputation as an excellent place for college-aged Taiwanese Americans to hook up and find romance. Because of this, although it does not take on a ship and is landlocked at a conference center in Taipei, the program is more commonly known by its romantic nickname – the Taiwan Love Boat.
Since its inception in the 1960s the Love Boat has served three purposes: as a propaganda tool for the Taiwanese government, as a site for romance for young Taiwanese Americans, and as a means for Taiwanese American parents to insure the preservation of Taiwanese bloodlines. Every summer this unique form of diplomacy gives young Taiwanese Americans a taste of global politics on an intimate scale. By looking at the ways in which a seemingly innocuous program can have wide-ranging political, social, and cultural repercussions, “Love Boat: Taiwan” explores the intersections of culture, politics, and history.
In addition to discussing and screening the film “Love Boat: Taiwan,” Valerie Soe will also talk about some of her award-winning short experimental films and documentaries that look at the experiences and concerns of Asian Americans.
Valerie Soe – Director, Producer & Writer Since 1986 Valerie Soe’s experimental videos, installations, and documentary films have won dozens of awards, grants, and commissions and have exhibited at film festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide. Her short experimental video, “ALL ORIENTALS LOOK THE SAME,” won Best International Video at the 1987 Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani, Torino, Italy, First Place, Experimental Category, at the 1987 Sony Corporation Visions of U.S. Festival, and Honorable Mention, Experimental Video, at the 12th Atlanta Film and Video Festival. Her feature documentary, “Love Boat: Taiwan,” was released in 2019 and won the Audience Award at the Urban Nomad Film Festival In Taipei, Taiwan, and has played to sold-out festival audiences across North America and in Taiwan. Her short experimental documentary, “Radical Care: The Auntie Sewing Squad” (2020), made in collaboration with Kronos Quartet and the Auntie Sewing Squad, won a Director’s Choice Award at the 2021 Thomas Edison Film Festival and the 2021 Best of Bernal Award at Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema. Her writing has been published in books and journals including “Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism;” “The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema;” “Amerasia Journal,” and “Asian Cinema,” among many others. Soe is the author of the blog beyondasiaphilia.com (recipient of a 2011 Art Writers’ Grant, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation), which looks at Asian and Asian American art, film, culture, and activism. She is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.
Speakers: Prof. Christopher LUPKE (University of Alberta) & Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan LI (York University)
Commentators: Dr. LIN Pei-yin & Prof. Nicole HUANG (HKU)
Date & Time: July 3, 2023 (Mon) 16:00-18:00pm Language: English Venue: Level 2 Multi-Purpose Area (Ingenium), Main Library, Main Campus, HKU
Topic #1: Ritual, Repression, Repetition, and Reproduction In the Fiction of Eileen Chang This presentation considers the fiction of Eileen Chang, especially her classic short story “The Golden Cangue” (1943) in light of the grammar of filiality in Chinese society and cultural representation. One might initially think, how does Eileen Chang’s work figure into the scheme of filiality? Narrowly understood, filiality primarily means respect for one’s parents, ancestors, and privileges the vaunted role of sons in the process of biological reproduction. But when we investigate filiality more deeply, we can see that it functions in Chinese society (and all of East Asia for that matter) as a sort of grammar that has loosely scripted consanguine relations for more than two millennia. But that all changed in the modern era when filiality became the battleground in the crisis between tradition and modernity. So, how does Eileen Chang fit in? Many of her works very consciously or even obsessively linger upon the questions of marriage, biological reproduction, and intergenerational relations. “The Golden Cangue,” a story in which the main character Qiqiao is forced into a loveless marriage of convenience by her relatives for monetary gain, is perhaps the best example in modern Chinese fiction of a person once persecuted who becomes the perpetrator, someone who was a victim of feudal values and social convention who returns at a later age to inflict on her own children the same sort of abuse that was visited upon her. This disturbing fact has created one of the most fascinating caesuras in modern Chinese literature and an endless point of speculation and discussion for scholars of the modern era. What do we do when the target of mistreatment and trauma becomes one of its most adroit and gruesome offenders? Eileen Chang’s work persists in haunting our thinking and discussions precisely because of its irremediable refusal to allow us to empathize with one of its most emblematic victims.
Christopher Lupke (Ph. D. Cornell University)is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and former Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies. A scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and cinema, his books include The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion and a translation of Ye Shitao’s monumental work, A History of Taiwan Literature, which one the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the translation of a scholarly book from the Modern Language Association. Christopher Lupke has edited or co-edited five books and five special journal issues, and is the recipient of the Michael Delahoyde Award for Distinguished Editing. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, boundary 2, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Chinese Literature, and numerous other publications. Lupke’s current research project is a book-length study of the Confucian notion of “filiality” in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone fiction.
Topic #2: Eileen Chang’s Works and Self-Translation Eileen Chang’s literary achievements are in part a result of her bilingualism and self-translation, which means that her work engages mainly with two languages and their related literary traditions, cultures, and critical traditions, although this point is overlooked in most studies of her works. As a Chinese and English bilingual writer and self-translator, Chang both preserves and transgresses the Chinese and English literary and cultural conventions that provide the larger context of this study. This talk focuses on Eileen Chang’s Chinese short story “Guihuazheng: Ah Xiao beiqiu” (1944), Chang’s self-translation into English, “Shame, Amah!” (1962), and its triangular English translation by Simon Patton, “Steamed Osmanthus Flower: Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn” (2000). Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan Li will examine the in-betweenness and an interdependent relationship among these texts. She argues that the combination of Chinese and English versions presents a better picture of both Chinese and Western perspectives on gender relations and life philosophy in early twentieth-century China.
Jessica Tsui-yan Li (Ph.D. Chinese University of Hong Kong; Ph.D. University of Toronto) is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University. She is Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. She has published on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese Canadian literature, film, drama, translation studies, gender studies, Hong Kong studies, and diasporic studies. She is the editor of The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019) and the guest editor of the special issues for the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée on “Engaging Communities in Comparative Literature” June 2017 44.2 and “Garnering Diversities in Comparative Literature” June 2018 45.2. She has published several articles on Eileen Chang Studies. Her essay, “Xunfang Zhang Ailing de Xingkong” (Seeking the Starry Sky of Zhang Ailing) published in Dang’an Chunqiu (Memories and Archives) in Shanghai in 2015 received the finalist award organized by Shanghai shi dang’an guan (Shanghai Municipal Archives). She is currently working on a monograph on the self-translation of Eileen Chang.
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)
A conversation between: Dr. Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Dr. Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Dr. Akshya Saxena, Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University Dr. Preeti Singh, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, Dartmouth College
Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2023 Time: 7:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
Isabel Huacuja Alonso is a historian of sound media and modern South Asia in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her book Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, January 2023) is a transnational history of radio broadcasting in Hindi and Urdu from the late colonial period through the early post-independence era (1920-1980).
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).
Akshya Saxena is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press, 2022) and the co-editor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, Practice (University of California Press, 2023).
Preeti Singh is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program at Dartmouth College. She researches and teaches postcolonial studies and world literature with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first-century South Asian and South Asian diasporic literatures and cinema.
Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar are currently creating the scaffolding of their newest book on histories and practices of documentary theatre in India. They understand this publication as an expansion of their own curatorial work into the field of writing. Therefore, the foundation of this publication is rooted in the act of curation. Curating a book—as opposed to Anthologizing—is open and shapeshifting without water tight dictums. In their volume multi-authored erotica performance texts sit just as comfortably next to academic essays. Similarly, a work-in-progress script and course curriculum occupy a harmonious space rather than a disparate one. For them curating is that delicate process of synchronous interrelation of thought, action, time, politics, and history.
While classical performance writing stays within the world of a single play, a curatorial approach is concerned with the orbit that lies outside the particular theatrical production. Together with an esteemed panel of theatremakers and editors, they want to discuss the question—What strategies and approaches might allow one to extend such a curatorial gesture into a book?
Panelists: Kai Tuchmann, Dramaturge, Director and Academic Anuja Ghosalkar, Writer and Director, Founder of Drama Queen Amitesh Grover, Associate Professor, National School of Drama (India) Nishant Shah, Professor of Global Media and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio, Chinese University of Hong Kong Arushi Vats, Writer Zhao Chuan, Theatremaker, Writer and Founding Member of the Shanghai-based Theatre Collective Grass Stage
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU
Date: Tuesday, June 20, 2023 Time: 5:00-6:30 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar are the co-curators of the first international workshop series on Documentary Theatre in India called Starting Realities that programmed artists like Gobsquad Collective, Boris Nikitin, Rimini Protokoll, Zhao Chuan through 2018-19. Collaboratively they curated a symposium on Documentary Theatre practices in India and Asia for the Serendipity Arts Festival in 2019 titled, Connecting Realities. They are co-curators of a VR based performance called, Look, Here is Your Machine, Get In! for the Serendipity Arts Virtual 2020. For the Brecht Festival, Augsburg 2022, they curated an experimental video work. In 2022 they designed and facilitated an online course curriculum on Digital Documentary Theatre for the Serendipity Arts Foundation. The duo has facilitated workshops and lectures at It’s the Real Thing, Basel, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, National School of Drama, New Delhi, Harkat Studio, Mumbai, Goethe-Institute Bangalore and Mumbai, Under The Mango Tree, Berlin, University of Music and Performing Arts, Frankfurt. Currently they are editing a book on the history of Documentary Theatre in India, that will be published in 2024 by Hong Kong University Press.
Kai Tuchmann Kai Tuchmann graduated in directing from Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. He works as a dramaturge, director and academic. As a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, he helped develop the curriculum for the BA Dramaturgy program there. Kai has also researched the history of dramaturgy as a Fulbright Scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University New York, and he is a Fellow of the Mellon School of Theatre at Harvard University. In his internationally shown documentary theatre works, Kai has explored the afterlife of the Cultural Revolution in contemporary China, the impact of urbanization on migrant workers in Europe and Asia, and the role of the body in the face of digital technologies. His stagings and dramaturgies were invited, among others, to I Dance Hong Kong, Zürcher Theatrespektakel, Festival d’Automne à Paris, and documenta-institute. His recent publication is the edited volume Postdramatic Dramaturgies-Resonances between Asia and Europe (transcript, 2022).
Anuja Ghosalkar Anuja Ghosalkar is the founder of Drama Queen—a Documentary theatre company, evolving a unique form of theatre in India since 2015. Her practice focuses on personal histories, archival absences and blurring the hierarchies between audience and performer—to extend the idea of theatre to create audacious work. Iterations around form and process, modes of (social) media, sites, technologies, reclaiming narratives on gender and intimacy are critical to her performance making and pedagogy. Her performances and workshops have been programmed by University of Oxford, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Sophiensale, Serendipity Arts Festival, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Forum Transregionale –ZMO, among others. As guest faculty at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, she leads practice based pedagogy. She has written on film and performance for Nang Magazine, Art India, Bioscope, Hakara, Outlook, and for an edited volume on Performance Making and the Archive for Routledge. She is the 2022 research fellow at the archives of the National Centre for Biological Studies.
Amitesh Grover Amitesh Grover (b.1980) is an award-winning director and artist. He is the recipient of the MASH FICA Award, Swiss Art Residency Award, Bismillah Khan National Award, Charles Wallace Award (U.K.), and was nominated for the Arte Laguna Prize (Italy), Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) and Forecast Award (HKW, Germany). With a background as a theatre director, he works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and concepts: an embodied practice that he calls performance in the expanded field. His work has been shown globally at venues like the Southbank Centre (London), Arts Centre (Melbourne), MT Space (Canada), HKW Berlin (Germany), Belluard Bollwerk International (Switzerland), The Hartell Gallery (U.S.), and in India at the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Chennai Photo Biennale, VAICA Video Art Festival, among several others. He has been curator for the International Theatre Festival of Kerala, Ranga Shankara (Bangalore), and Nove Writers’ Festival (Prague). He studied at the University of Arts London, and is a published author in several performance journals. Currently, he is Associate Professor at the National School of Drama (India). He is based in New Delhi, India, and his work and reviews are available online <www.amiteshgrover.com>
Nishant Shah Nishant Shah is a Professor of Global Media and the Director of the Digital Narratives Studio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After co-founding the Centre for Internet & Society (India) in 2008, he has since then, worked in various academic roles as the Director of Digital School at Leuphana University in Germany, and the Vice-President of Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts in The Netherlands. He is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a knowledge partner with Point of View (Mumbai), Digital Asia Hub (Singapore/Hong Kong), and Radboud Institute of Culture and History (Nijmegen). Nishant actively positions his work at the intersections of academic research, humanist traditions of story-telling and meaning making, and capacity development for hopeful change practice. His last two books Really Fake (University of Minnesota Press) and Overload, Excess, Creep: An Internet From India (Institute of Network Cultures / Leftword Books), are available for open digital access. His current preoccupations are about expanding and exploring the affordances of digital authorship, authenticity, and authority towards collective action.
Arushi Vats Arushi Vats is a writer based in New Delhi, India. She is the associate editor for Fiction at Alternative South Asia Photography, and the recipient of the Momus – Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship 2021, and the Art Scribes Award 2021. She has conducted workshops on writing for Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, Khoj International Artists Association, and Art Chain India. Her curatorial projects have focused on conceptions of image and power, and histories of resistance in South Asia.
Zhao Chuan Zhao Chuan, born in 1967, works across theatre, literature, film and contemporary art. He creates alternative and socially engaged theatre and is the founding member and mastermind of the Shanghai-based theatre collective Grass Stage (since 2005). For over a decade, as a theatremaker and writer, he has created a number of theatre works across China together with his collective Grass Stage. However, they are often unable to present these works in conventional theatres because of the issues they addressed and their non-professional set-up. The group encourages people from different backgrounds to consider human living conditions and historical issues and stimulates participators and audiences to respond to those issues through the creative process, rehearsals, performances and post-talks. Given its strong interest in social practice, the group’s theatre activities have often been considered too ideological, marginal and uncertain by the mainstream. From 2015 to 2019, Grass Stage supported industry workers to make their theatre pieces; From 2017 to 2019, in dialogue with young people from diverse backgrounds, the group developed stage plays on youth issues in today’s China. His theatre works include Geli Isle (2021), Wild Seeds (2018) and Social Theater Trilogy (2006–2017), comprising World Factory, The Little Society, Madmen’s Stories, Unsettling Stones (2012) etc. “Theatre of Contagion” is the new start of a series of works since the pandemic era in early 2020.
He has been awarded several international literary awards, including the Unita Prize for New Novelists (Taiwan 2001). His publications include fiction, essays and art criticism: On Radical Art: the 80s Scene in Shanghai (author, 2014), The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre (co-editor, author, 2013), Beyond the Stage: Zurich Sketches (author, 2021) and AnOther Gathering: Performance in Multiple Realities (co-editor, author, 2021). He is also the producer of an independent documentary titled Shanghai Youth (2015). He has been involved in many international art residencies, collaboration projects and teaching.
Speaker: Professor Theodore Huters, Professor Emeritus of Chinese, UCLA
Moderator: Dr. Daniel Vukovich, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, June 8, 2023 Time: 4:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom and Face-to-Face
The period between China’s defeat by Japan in 1895 and the New Culture Movement that gathered momentum after 1919 was marked by a great epistemic instability. Whereas there had been a number of efforts to accept certain Western ideas and technologies in the period prior to the war with Japan, even those who embraced those efforts were committed to the notion of Chinese cultural superiority. And following the May Fourth Movement and the reorganization of Peking University and the Commercial Press, there was general acceptance among the intellectual elite that the old Chinese order was not up to the challenge of the West. In the interim period, however, neither the Chinese nor the Western system was regarded definitively as having the upper hand: there was instead a nagging uncertainty as to which set of ideas was ultimately superior. Wu Jianren (1866-1910) was the novelist most acutely tuned into the political economy and intellectual wavering of the period, and his The New Story of the Stone, written in two distinct segments between 1905 and 1907, is his most complete interpretation of the various hard choices he saw as confronting China. While in the work he recognizes, often only indirectly, the power of Western science, after setting out China’s problems in the first half of the novel, in the second half he deploys the tropes of science fiction in an attempt to prove the superiority and potential of Chinese cultural values. The supreme difficulty of this effort is mirrored in the contradictions and inconsistencies that surface in the text.
Theodore Huters is Professor Emeritus of Chinese at UCLA and editor of the translation journal Renditions. He holds a PhD from Stanford University. His publications include Qian Zhongshu, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China, as well as numerous articles and edited books on modern and late traditional Chinese culture. He has translated a number of works by important Chinese intellectuals. His latest book is Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity, published in 2022.
Date: 19 May 2023 (Friday) Time: 12:30pm – 1:45pm Venue: CCT723, 7/F, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong (in-person only)
Abstract: Significant interest of late has explored the utility and efficacy of discursively articulating international human rights with gay rights across the African continent with the intent to address sexuality-based discrimination in a range of countries. This presentation will first explore the utility of the deployment of such legal discourses to address sexuality-based discrimination before outlining, across three inter-related spheres, a series of challenges that can also emerge through such an approach. Such challenges, which pivot around concerns related to legitimacy, spatial inequality, and socio-spatial relationships potentially allow us to critically interrogate when and how human rights discourse may be effective or not based on the particularities of African development. Drawing on this framework developed in relation to human rights, this presentation then considers how the same three concerns may be effectively deployed to consider other internationally-derived approaches to support the needs of non-heteronormative groups on the continent, considering both their benefits, challenges, and potential trade-offs. To conclude, this presentation suggests that greater consideration can be given to the ways in which various international discourses and policy processes interface in different African contexts, and especially urban contexts.
Speaker:Dr Andrew Tucker Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town
Dr Andrew Tucker is an Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Prior to joining UCT, Tucker worked for a number of years on USAID-funded HIV programmes across the global South. He was earlier a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Jesus College, and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge. His work is currently exploring the relationships between international discourses and policy processes, sexuality and health, and African urban development.
Chairs: Professor Marco Wan Professor and Director of the Law and Literary Studies Programme, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Dr Alvin Wong Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong
This event is presented by the Centre for Comparative and Public Law of the Department of Law and co-organized by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Phoenix To at pxto@hku.hk.
Speaker: Annie Pfeifer, Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University
Respondent: Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, May 11, 2023 Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (10:00 pm/May 10, New York) Venue: On Zoom
To the Collector Belong the Spoils rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collecting and hoarding, this book traces the movement’s artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, modernist authors like Henry James and Walter Benjamin engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting’s long history in the spoils of war and conquest. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future.
Annie Pfeifer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. Her first monograph, To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation, was published by Cornell University Press in February 2023. She edited “Walk I absolutely Must,”a 2019 collection of essays on Robert Walser and the culture of walking. Her articles have appeared in The New German Critique, German Life and Letters, The Germanic Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) as well as the opinion section of The New York Times.
Speaker: Dan Vukovich, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong
Respondents: Daniel Bell, Professor and Chair of Political Theory, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong Simon Young, Professor and Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Date: Tuesday, May 9, 2023 Time: 4:00-5:30 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: Face-to-Face and on Zoom
After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997-2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) offers a critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, including prior events like Occupy Central and the Mongkok Fishball Revolution, as well as their aftermaths in light of the re-assertion of mainland sovereignty over the SAR and the onset of what has been locally dubbed as the ‘second handover.’ Vukovich reads the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it as a spontaneous outburst of the desire for freedom from mainland oppression and for a self-explanatory democracy, on the one hand, and on the other hand of those who would dismiss the protests in nationalistic or conspiratorial anti-imperialist fashion. Instead the book attempts to go beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle 2019’s and the SAR’s roots in the Basic Law system as well as in the colonial and insufficiently post-colonial contexts and dynamics of Hong Kong. Vukovich examines the question of localist identity and its discontents (particularly the rise of xenophobia), the problems of nativism, violence, and liberalism, the impossibility of autonomy, and what forms a genuine de-colonization can and might yet take in the city. A concluding chapter examines Hong Kong’s need for state capacity and proper, livelihood development, in the light of the Omicron wave of the Covid pandemic, as the SAR goes forward into a second handover. The book is an intervention into the study of Hong Kong and global politics as well as into critical theory and post-colonial studies.
Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of post-colonialism, politics, and critical theory in relation to the China-West relationship. He has worked at HKU since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program within the School of Humanities, and an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing (School of Marxism) and a virtual Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学). He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) and most recently After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In these and in other texts he is centrally concerned with the age-old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge or discourse, and the dialectics of difference and universality.
Daniel A. Bell (貝淡寧) is a Professor and Chair of Political Theory with the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He served as Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University (Qingdao) from 2017 to 2022. His books include The Dean of Shandong (2023), Just Hierarchy (co-authored with Wang Pei, 2020), The China Model (2015), The Spirit of Cities (co-authored with Avner de-Shalit, 2012), China’s New Confucianism (2008), Beyond Liberal Democracy (2007), and East Meets West (2000), all published by Princeton University Press. He is also the author of Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1993). He is founding editor of the Princeton-China series (Princeton University Press) which translates and publishes original and influential academic works from China. His works have been translated in 23 languages. He has been interviewed in English, Chinese, and French. In 2018, he was awarded the Huilin Prize and was honored as a “Cultural Leader” by the World Economic Forum.
Simon Young (楊艾文) is a Professor and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Law and Deputy Director for Education and Development of Research Integrity in The University of Hong Kong. He serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law (Brill) and General Editor of Archbold Hong Kong (Sweet & Maxwell). His empirical and comparative law research has explored important aspects of Hong Kong’s constitutional order including the National Security Law, the Court of Final Appeal, the system of electing the Chief Executive, and functional constituencies of the Legislative Council. He also writes on the human rights aspects of the criminal process and the use of civil processes to achieve criminal law aims, particularly in the areas of money laundering and the proceeds of crime.
Speaker: Jing Peng, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Sangjoon Lee, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries (DA+CI), Lingnan University
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, April 28, 2023 Time: 6:00-7:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, and on Zoom
As the Korean War ended with an armistice in 1953, the Korean peninsula was doomed to the most confrontational years of the Cold War, and the divided Korea cast eyes abroad respectively to culturally define and show a promising Korea vis-à-vis the foredoomed other. Hong Kong, a site of coexistent but opposing ideologies on the one hand, and an influential pioneer in the Asian film industry on the other, became a “silver battlefield” of the cultural Cold War between the two Koreas.
This talk is an introduction to my chapter on South Korea-Hong Kong film co-production, which is part of my bigger thesis focusing on the ideological battle between North Korea and South Korea through the Hong Kong film industry during the height of the cultural Cold War. It will first introduce the brief history of South Korea-Hong Kong film co-production, then discuss the Hong Kong film industry as the “Hollywood of the East”, and finally politicize the favored pattern of both storytelling and casting in these co-productions that I originally term as “한남홍녀 / 韓男港女 / South Korean Man, Hong Kong Woman.”
Jing Peng is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are broadly on Korean and Hong Kong cinema during the Cold War.
Speaker: Junlin Ma, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Dr. Linshan Jiang, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University
Moderator: Professor Nicole Huang, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 26, 2023 Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time Venue: F2F and On Zoom
This seminar contextualizes and analyzes two Mandarin films in Li Xianglan’s (1920-2014) brief period in 1950s Hong Kong. A former actress, singer, and cultural icon of Manchukuo, Li Xianglan iterated in 1950s Hong Kong as both a reflection of the nostalgia for the prosperous wartime cultural production and a key feature in the narratives and self-justifications of those who came to Hong Kong from Japanese-occupied areas. I argue that her career and stardom reincarnated in 1950s Hong Kong through a deliberate process of adaptation, revision, and rewriting of her 1933-1945 Manchurian story. Through this process, Li Xianglan ensured her reinvented persona adhered to political norms while maintaining its commercial appeal among a postwar audience. Close reading selected works in 1950s Hong Kong, I examine Li Xianglan’s incarnations in and beyond characters and their reliance on the re-narration of wartime Manchukuo. Furthermore, I explore Hong Kong as a site accommodating contested creative and ideological impulses and a renewed cultural sphere sheltering the ongoing reincarnation of the Li Xianglan legend.
Junlin Ma is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese fiction and film, Sinophone studies, and cultural studies. She is currently working on transcultural figures and their literary and cinematic works in 1950s Hong Kong.
For registrants who select Zoom, we will send you the link prior to the event. For registrants who select Face-to-Face (F2F), we will write to you prior to the event with the venue location. There is a limited quota for F2F and we apologise if we are unable to accommodate all requests.
