Author: csgchku

Speaker:
Gerry Simpson, Professor of Public International Law, LSE Law School, London School of Economics

Commentators:
Marco Wan, Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong

Date: Monday, February 20, 2023
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom

“A sentimental answer thus does not answer to ‘what is to be done’ but rather to ‘how else might we experience’ an international legal conundrum.” (Sinja Graf, “A Style for the Human Heart”, 2022)

“I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean…” (Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”, 1992)

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm’s, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways.

Gerry Simpson was appointed to a Chair in Public International Law at the LSE in January, 2016. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004), winner of the American Society of International Law Annual Prize for Creative Scholarship in 2005 and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007), and co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford, 2014) and (with Raimond Gaita) of Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash, 2016). His most recent book is The Sentimental Life of International Law: Literature, Language and Longing in Global Politics (Oxford, 2021).

Marco Wan is Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, 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. His most recent book, Film and Constitutional Controversy (Cambridge, 2021) explores how constitutional debates are refracted in Hong Kong cinema.

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

Speaker:
Dr. Jason E. H. Lee, Lecturer, Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University

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

Date: Monday, February 13, 2023
Time: 4:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom

This talk situates two cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet across overlapping local, regional and (inter)national imaginaries of Tibet and Kashmir before considering the possibilities of rendering the story and circumstances of Hamlet legible within these borderland contact zones. Set during the 1995 Kashmiri-Indian insurgency, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014) contests reductive depictions of Kashmiris as terroristic figures by narrating its title character’s search for his disappeared father while, in Hu Xuehua’s Prince of the Himalayas (2006), set in a fictional ancient kingdom in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, the Claudius figure is revealed to be Hamlet’s biological father, with the deceased surrogate father operating as a malevolent spirit bent on revenge. With their backdrop of snowy mountains and rugged frontiers, the two films’ implied rejection of revenge creates a troubling politics of appropriation of writing and performing Shakespeare in a region increasingly subject to assimilation policies by the continent’s two dominant powers. These directors’ attempts to ‘mobilise’ Shakespeare’s cultural capital to better mediate the symbolic cultural and geopolitical imaginary of these regions through their evocative natural landscapes are further complicated by the films’ reception by domestic and international viewers, given their placement within a heterogeneous ‘national cinema’ encompassing minority cultures in New Chinese Cinema and Bollywood, where they must negotiate with the spectre of Shakespeare’s contemporaneity as well as his problematic transmission from colonial to postcolonial, translocal and transnational contexts.

Jason Eng Hun Lee is a mixed British and Malaysian Chinese academic, creative writer and performer whose research and practice interests include global anglophone literatures, postcolonial and diasporic Asian writing, and global Shakespeares. His recent articles, reviews, and creative works have been published in Wasafiri, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Textual Practice, Moving Worlds and World Literature Today. He is a co-editor of Where Else: An International Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry (with Jennifer Wong and Tim Tim Cheng) and his debut poetry collection Beds in the East (Eyewear, 2019) was a finalist for the Melita Hume Prize. He is Literary Editor for Postcolonial Text and chief organizer for OutLoud HK 隨言香港, Hong Kong’s longest running English-language poetry collective. He holds a PhD from HKU and lectures in English and Comparative Literatures at Hong Kong Baptist University.

世界的張愛玲與張愛玲的世界

Speakers: 何杏楓 教授  Prof. HOYAN Hang Fung Carole & 黃念欣 教授 Prof. WONG Nim Yan 
Moderator & Discussant: 林姵吟 Dr. LIN Pei-yin
Date: February 7, 2023 (Tuesday)
Time: 16:30-18:30pm
Language: Putonghua
Venue: Level 2 Multi-Purpose Area (Ingenium), Main Library, Main Campus, HKU 

講題一：「把我包括在外」： 張愛玲作為世界作家
Topic #1: “Include Me Out”: Reading Eileen Chang as a World Literature Author

摘要：張愛玲早年曾熱切走向世界，對成為文化中介充滿嚮往，並表示出名要趁早。然而其在晚年卻離群獨居，希望把自己「包括在外」。我們可以如何理解其於中國現代文學的「超經典」地位與其於世界文學版圖的朦朧位置?本講以「世界作家」的概念重探「文化譯介者」張愛玲的個案，以期為張愛玲研究以至華語語系文學研究帶來新方向。

Eileen Chang was enthusiastic to go into the world and to become a cultural mediator in her early years, expressing that it is important to get famous early. However, she led a reclusive life in her old age and would like to be included out. How do we understand her “hypercanonicity” in modern Chinese literature and her obscurity in world literature? This talk re-examines the case of Chang as a cultural translator and mediator with the notion of “world literature,” in order to open new discussion for the study of Eileen Chang and Sinophone literature.

簡介：何杏楓  香港中文大學中國語言及文學系教授、雅禮中國語文研習所所長。專著包括《重探張愛玲：改編‧翻譯‧研究》、《重訪中國現代文學：細讀‧數據‧接受》。最近關注「世界中」的中國現代文學，曾發表論文〈「把我包括在外」：張愛玲作為世界作家〉。其他與張愛玲相關文章包括〈錯置與暫借：張愛玲及其衣飾〉和〈最後，點心便在咖啡裏溶化：張愛玲的飲食〉等。

Carole Hang-fung HOYAN is Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and Director of the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Re-investigating Eileen Chang: Adaptation, Translation and Research and Re-visiting Modern Chinese Literature: Close Reading, Data and Reception. She has recently focused on the study of the worlding of modern Chinese literature and has published various articles on Eileen Chang including “‘Include Me Out’: Reading Eileen Chang as a World Literature Author,” “Misplacement and Borrowing: Eileen Chang’s Clothing and Accessories” and “Finally, the Dim Sum Melted in the Coffee: Eileen Chang’s Food and Drink.

講題二：「中額」作家張愛玲與《天地》雜誌（1943-1945）
Topic #2: The Heaven and Earth of a Middlebrow Writer: Eileen Chang and Tian Di magazine (1943-1945)

摘要：由蘇青主辦的《天地》雜誌在淪陷區的特殊環境下接通「天地」，以衣食住行、婚姻育兒、懷舊新知的內容，接上汪偽政權的頭號人物與權力論述，帶出政治與小市民之間不可分割的關係。張愛玲把這一重關係推演得極為深刻，重讀張氏於《天地》發表的作品，以及雜誌所創造的「中額」（middlebrow）定位，實有助理解與重估一向被視為保守、通俗與瑣碎的「中額文學」之政治意義。

Tian Di (Heaven and Earth) magazine was established by Su Qing during the occupied era of Shanghai. Su made an impact on the literary scene with earthly everyday trivialities and women issues including sex, marriage, and work, to heavenly issues such as ethics, morals, and politics. Eileen Chang made a unique contribution to the magazine as well as the middlebrow culture it represents. Rereading Chang’s work and Tian Di help redefining the middlebrow at its best an excellent vehicle for an artistic critique of social and political life from a woman’s perspective.

簡介：黃念欣  香港中文大學中國語言及文學系副教授，香港文學研究中心主任。著有《晚期風格︰香港女作家三論》、散文集《夕拾朝花》。最近研究女性文學與中額文化（middlebrow culture）的關係，對張愛玲的衣食住行與「物質性」深感興趣，曾發表〈食與寫——張愛玲散文中的飲食表述與邊緣性〉、〈一縷芳魂——張愛玲小說的配香筆記〉及〈張愛玲與香港的中額文化（Middlebrow Culture）〉等相關文章。

Wong Nim-yan is an associate professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the director of the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has recently focused on the study of middlebrow literature and has written on the materiality of Eileen Chang’s works in various articles including “The Marginality of Eating and Writing of Eileen Chang’s Essays”, “Notes on Perfume-pairing Eileen Chang’s Novels” and “Eileen Chang’s and Middlebrow Culture in Hong Kong”.

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)

Upcoming event of the lecture series:

Scholar Seminar
Title: 上海和台灣報刊中的「張愛玲」想像
The Imagination of “Eileen Chang” by Newspapers in Shanghai and Taiwan
Speaker: 梁慕靈博士  Dr. LEUNG Mo-Ling, Rebecca (HKMU)
Moderator: 黃心村 教授  Prof. Nicole HUANG
Date & Time: March 8, 2023 (Wed) 16:30-18:00
Venue: CPD-1.21
Language: Putonghua

Speaker:
Professor Elmo Gonzaga, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

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

Date: Monday, February 6, 2023
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom and F2F

Writing about the vernacular emergence of a “cultural imaginary” of modernity in the Asian metropolis, Leo Ou-fan Lee highlights how an archipelago of multimodal archival materials could form “a contour of collective sensibilities and significations resulting from cultural production.” Advocating for a departure from an overarching unity or coherence in cultural analysis, Édouard Glissant suggests that archipelagic thinking could be used to uncover how “differences” might “interact, collide, and coexist” by “accident.” This talk will discuss the methods by which the forthcoming monograph “Monsoon Marketplace”(Fordham University Press) maps the contingent vernacular imaginaries of capitalist modernity and mass consumption in the divergent media cultures of archipelagic port cities Singapore and Manila during colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. It will explore how the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated print and audiovisual representations could trace the emergence of accidental affinities outside official discourses of progress.

Elmo Gonzaga is Associate Director of the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in the “Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,” “Cultural Studies,” “Interventions,” “Verge: Studies in Global Asias,” “South East Asia Research,” and the “Journal of Asian Studies.”

Speaker:
Simon Whitaker, PhD Candidate in the School of English, HKU

Respondent:
Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Thursday, February 2, 2023
Time: 12:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

This presentation compares Franz Boas’s conception of culture as an integrated “whole”, with Zora Neale Hurston’s approach to representing Black life in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston was a student of Boas in the late 1920s at the University of Columbia, and at this time collected folklore in historically Black communities in the US South under his guidance. But their approaches were fundamentally different, and I argue that this difference is at the centre of Hurston’s novel.

Whereas Boas posited a culture as an integrated, complete set of tightly interlocking “traits”, Their Eyes actively resists the possibility that the events of Black life which it presents could be drawn together into a similarly ordered totality. However, the novel represents its characters as actively drawing those same events together in and through lived encounters with each other. Through close readings of the novel, I suggest that Hurston thereby relocates Boas’s process of cultural integration into the encounter between people, and in this way renders it negotiable.

Simon Whitaker is a PhD Candidate in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. His dissertation argues that literary texts and social-theoretical writing were involved in competing attempts to formulate new concepts of the “social unit” in the early twentieth-century north Atlantic world. It highlights the literary works of Naomi Mitchison, Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston as offering very different approaches to the social unit which nonetheless share a sense that society is a radically more uncertain and open structure than major texts of social theory at the time seemed to be suggesting. Simon currently lives in Tokyo where he will be teaching at Sophia University from April.

Speaker:
Professor Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Date: Monday, November 28, 2022
Time: 8:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom

View the talk recording here.

About the speaker:
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written extensively in major publications and peer-reviewed journals on a variety of topics including religion, literature, cinema and philosophy. His latest books include The Future of Two Illusions: Islam after the West (2022); The Last Muslim Intellectual: The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (2021); Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad (2020), and The Emperor is Naked: On the Inevitable Demise of the Nation-State (2020). His books and essays have been translated into many languages.

張愛玲香港敘事中的戰時聲景

Speaker: 郭詩詠 博士  Dr. KWOK Sze Wing 
Moderator: 黃心村 教授  Prof. Nicole HUANG
Date:November 23, 2022 (Wed)
Time: 16:30-18:00pm
Language: Putonghua
Venue: CPD-1.21, Level 1, Central Podium, Centennial Campus, HKU & Zoom

摘要：張愛玲筆下的戰爭經驗和戰爭意象一直受到學者關注。在張愛玲筆下，淪陷中的香港雖為非常時期，但仍有不變的人性和日常。戰時香港，白日時時有飛機轟炸，晚上的醫院裏有病人哀鳴，還有難堪的寂靜，在在都是深入骨髓的生命記憶。張愛玲對二戰時期香港聲音景觀的書寫，不但呈現了她對香港這個南方小城的觀感，更洩露了作者或人物的內心真實。是次講座將首先回顧張愛玲對二戰時期的香港聲音景觀的描述，集中分析作者如何通過聽覺重構其戰爭經驗，並進一步探討其中所隱含的歷史記憶、身分認同、心理創傷等多方面的問題。

Eileen Chang’s war experience and war images have always attracted the attention of scholars. In the works of Chang, although wartime Hong Kong is an exceptional period, human nature in everyday life remains unchanged. In wartime Hong Kong, there are aircrafts bombing during the day, patients crying in the hospital at night, and the embarrassing silence. They are all unforgettable life memories. Chang’s soundscape writing of Hong Kong during World War II not only presents her perception of this small southern city, but also reveals the inner reality of the writer or characters. This talk first reviews Chang’s description of Hong Kong soundscape during World War II, focusing on how the writer reconstructs her war experience through acoustics. It then further discusses Chang’s historical memory, identity, and psychological trauma.

簡介：郭詩詠     香港中文大學中國語言及文學系哲學博士，現為香港恒生大學中文系副教授。研究興趣集中在一九三零年代上海現代派、文學電影改編和後九七香港文學，發表論文多篇。目前正進行有關聽覺文化與一九三零至五零年代上海和香港文學的研究計劃。

Dr. Kwok Sze Wing received her PhD from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is an associate professor at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. She has published various journal articles on 1930s Shanghai modernists, film adaptation, and post-97 Hong Kong literature. She is currently working on a research project about auditory culture in Shanghai and Hong Kong literature in the 1930s-1950s.

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)

Panelists:

Omid Azadibougar
Professor of Comparative Literature, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University

Trisilpa Boonkhachorn
Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Chulalongkorn University

Jose Mari Cuartero
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines-Diliman

Lee Hyung-jin
Professor, Translation Studies and Comparative Literature, Sookmyung Women’s University

Mrinmoy Pramanick
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta

Moderators:

Daniel Elam
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Alvin K. Wong
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Monday, November 14, 2022
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom

This roundtable is part of an ongoing conversation that highlights the histories, methods, interventions, and futures of comparative literature in Asia. This conversation will focus on comparative literature in India, China, South Korea, Thailand. and the Philippines – with the hope of opening up more transnational conversations and collaboration across Asia. We hope you’ll join in!

Speaker:
Professor Ying Zhu, Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Thursday, November 10, 2022
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom and F2F

Hollywood in China unravels the century-long relationship between Hollywood and China. Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, the book charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications. The book is an inside look at the intense business and political maneuvering that is shaping the movies and the U.S.-China relationship itself—revealing a headlines-grabbing conflict that is playing out not only on the high seas, but on the silver screen.

Ying Zhu is the founder and chief editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is the author of four books including Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market and Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television, and co-editor of six books including Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds. Previously on the faculty at the City University of New York, she is now a professor in the Academy of Film at the Hong Kong Baptist University and an adjunct professor in the School of Arts at the Columbia University.

如金粉深埋：《小團圓》背後的閨秀生命

Speaker: 崔文東 博士  Dr. CUI Wendong (City U)
Moderator: 黃心村 教授  Prof. Nicole HUANG
Date:October 26, 2022 (Wed)
Time: 16:30-18:00pm
Language: Putonghua
Venue: CPD-1.21, Level 1, Central Podium, Centennial Campus, HKU & Zoom

摘要：《小團圓》是張愛玲設置的記憶迷宮，通向過去，也通向未來。藉助小說中的吉光片羽，我們得以確認《金鎖記》、《傾城之戀》、《琉璃瓦》、《相見歡》等其他作品中的女性人物原型，再結合家族檔案與報刊史料，足以鉤沉她們的生命史。這些閨秀或是光彩照人，或是沒沒無聞，皆如金粉沉入歷史的埃塵，惟有張愛玲的文字賦予她們不朽的生命。通過對照真實的與虛構的生命史，我們嘗試解讀張愛玲的文學觀與女性觀。

Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions is a maze of memories that leads to both the past and the future. We can identify the prototypes of female characters in other works such as “The Golden Cangue,” “Love in a Fallen City,” “Glazed Tiles,” and “Joy over the reunion” with the help of the novel’s fragments, and piece together their life histories using family archives and newspapers. All of these women, whether talented or not, are buried like gold sand in the dust of history, but Eileen Chang’s words bring them back to life. By contrasting the real and fictional life histories, we can gain insight into Eileen Chang’s views on literature and on women.

簡介：崔文東       現於香港城市大學中文及歷史學系擔任助理教授一職，從事近現代中國文學研究，尤其關注梁啟超、魯迅等文化巨擘。他於香港中文大學中國語言及文學系取得哲學博士學位，並曾任哈佛燕京學社訪問學人。迄今已在《文學評論》、《漢學研究》、《中國文哲研究集刊》等學術刊物發表論文十數篇，先後獲得教育部人文社會科學研究青年基金項目、香港大學教育資助委員會優配研究金、香港藝術發展局項目資助，並曾兩度榮膺宋淇翻譯研究論文紀念獎。

Cui Wendong is an Assistant Professor at Department of Chinese Language and History, City University of Hong Kong. His area of expertise is modern Chinese literature, with a focus on notable writers like Liang Qichao and Lu Xun. He received his PhD in Chinese Language and Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and served as a visiting fellow at Harvard-Yenching Institute. His research articles have been published in numerous academic journals. He has also twice been the recipient of the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards.

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)