Speaker: Professor Sebastian Veg, Centre for Historical Research, EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris
Moderator: Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, March 13, 2023 Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom and Face-to-Face
The role and place of intellectuals in colonial Hong Kong, while long understudied, has recently come into sharper focus. However, there are still many areas worthy of further and more systematic exploration. One of these is the role played by intellectuals during the Sino-British negotiations on Hong Kong’s future. At a time when many intellectuals advocated “democratic reunification,” how did civil society more broadly engage with a process that was mainly conceived as a diplomatic prerogative? How were issues such as political reform discussed within society as well as in connection with developments in mainland China? What role did intellectuals play in establishing connections across the border?
Sebastian Veg is a professor of intellectual history of modern and contemporary China at EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris. His latest book is “Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals” (Columbia UP, 2019).
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.
Date & Time: March 8, 2023 (Wed) 16:30-18:00pm Language: Putonghua Venue: CPD-1.21, Level 1, Central Podium, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Eileen Chang went on to become an active member in the cultural fields of Shanghai and Taiwan. Even after her death in 1995, she still exerted a profound impact on literature today. Since the publication of her early fiction and essays after 1943, she and her subsequent works continued to be imagined by the cultural fields of the two places. An enormous number of reports concerning Eileen Chang appeared in newspapers and magazines, including the author and her writing, her interaction with other intellectuals and scholars, her movies and film promotion, etc. These reports provide a wealth of data that could shed light on the structure of different cultural fields. For example, the reports showed how Eileen Chang and her writing interacted with different members in the cultural fields such as publishers, editors of newspapers and magazines, scholars, readers, etc. This talk discusses how the ‘imagination’ process of Eileen Chang was affected by cultural fields in Shanghai and Taiwan.
Dr. Leung Mo-Ling, Rebecca received her BA, MPhil, and PhD in Chinese from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and obtained Postgraduate Certificate in Education from the University of Hong Kong. She is currently Head of Creative Arts cum Associate Professor of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University and the Director of the Tin Ka Ping Centre of Chinese Culture. She has published numerous papers in renowned journals such as Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies and Bulletin of the Department of Chinese Literature National Chengchi University. She also published books titled Chinese Creative Writing and Multimedia in Practice, Imagination and Shaping: The Newspaper Coverage of Eileen Chang in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Visuality, Gender and Power: The Imaginations in Novels from Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying to Eileen Chang and The Studies of Chinese Humanities in the Digital Era etc. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of Chinese modern literature, Chinese contemporary literature, cultural & film theory and creative writing. Apart from academic research, she is also enthusiastic about creative writing. She obtained the prestigious “Unitas Award for New Novelists” in Taiwan in 2002. Her new novel A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments 02.21 was published in Taiwan in 2021.
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)
Speaker: Harmony Yuen, MPhil Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Dr. Mei Ting Li, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 2, 2023 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: F2F and On Zoom
Within the discourse of Hong Kong popular culture, queer girlhood has been considered a temporary and transitional phase to outgrow. Queer cinema characterizes same-sex desire as a universal female experience that operates on the temporal logic that lesbian intimacy is “just a phase”. Engaging closely with Jack Halberstam, José Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman’s theorization of queer time, this seminar takes a different approach to look at Cantopop as a space for queer expression.
The romantic universe of Joey Yung and Denise Ho’s pair of songs invents an impossible, utopian future that is not fixed within a specific temporal dimension, while Sophy Wong’s discography projects queerness onto the non-human, grotesque bodies of the allegorical lizard and figure of the beast.
Using at17 (Ellen Loo and Eman Lam) as a case, the seminar focuses on the mode of “queer liminality” of the duo: at the threshold of adulthood, they navigate alternative ways of experiencing female friendship, intimacy and growth. Rather than departing completely from the linear and progressive narrative of life, at17 interacts with traditionally heteronormative ideals while while turning sideways to a way of life that does not adhere strictly to reproductive temporality. This in-between space is what I refer to as “queer liminality” projected through the duo’s schoolgirl sonic aesthetic.
Harmony Yuen is a 2nd year MPhil candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Kathe Geist in conversation with Dr. Woojeong Joo
Date: Tuesday, February 28, 2023 Time: 9:00 am (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
This seminar presentation of a new book on famed Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu will feature an interactive discussion by the author, Dr. Kathe Geist, and Dr. Woojeong Joo, who has himself written extensively on the director. The talk will be illustrated with images from Ozu’s films, some from the book and others that could not be included for lack of space.
Kathe Geist is an art historian and the author of The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France to Paris, Texas. A Chinese version was published in Taiwan in 1993 and in mainland China in 2005. Dr. Geist turned her attention to Ozu in the 1980s and has been writing about him ever since. Ozu: A Closer Look draws on, modifies and amplifies her earlier work but is also the result of three years (2017-2020) of close, intensive analysis of all 34 of his extant films.
Woojeong Joo is a research fellow at the Center for Transregional Culture and Society, Nagoya University in Japan. His monograph, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday, was published by Edinburgh University Press (2017), and was also translated into Japanese, and published by the University of Nagoya Press (2020). Dr. Joo’s other research projects include the transnational coproduction between Japan and Colonial Korea in the 1930s and the early history of sound cinema in East Asia.
HKU Press has an exclusive offer of 40% off for purchases of Ozu: A Closer Look during the period 14 to 28 February 2023. The offer is available for purchases made through the HKU Press website (discount code HKUPP40) and in person purchases at the HKUP Bookshop, G/F, Run Run Shaw Heritage House, Centennial Campus, HKU.
Speaker: Abolfazl Ahangari, PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Arash Davari, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota
Date: Friday, February 24, 2023 Time: 10:30 am Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
This seminar discusses the history of reformism in Islam and argues that the reform project is aimed at providing an answer to a secular need for historicizing the sacred, making it worldly, and reviving it in and for the present condition.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
