Author: csgchku

Date: Monday, 19 July 2021
Time: 6:00 pm (GMT +8) via Zoom

Speaker: Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza, Lecturer, History of Race and Ethnicity, University of Manchester

Click here to view the event recording.

This paper analyses B.R. Ambedkar’s political writings in the years prior to Partition. I contextualise Ambedkar’s changing views on Pakistan through his Thoughts on Pakistan (1941), Pakistan or the Partition of India (1945, 1946); and Communal Deadlock and a Way to Solve It (1945). Ambedkar’s writings in this period were concerned with what he perceived as an attack on the political concept of the ‘minority’ in India. Since Dalits throughout India were a heterogeneous cluster of communities without a common denominator (such as language, profession or territory) other than their social and political oppression, their recognition as a political category gave structure to the body of their politics. Yet, at this time the future of the concept of political minority was under threat from different camps including the Hindu right, the Muslim League and Congress.

About the Speaker
Dr Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza is a Lecturer in the History of Race and Ethnicity at the University of Manchester. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge where he studied the thought of Dr B.R. Ambedkar and the concept of untouchability as a political category. From 2015 to 2018, Jesús was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Leeds where he researched the influence of pragmatism in the Global South, particularly in Mexico and India. Currently, Jesús is working on an AHRC project that investigates the intellectual origins of Indian anthropology.

About the Moderator
Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works on Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com

Date: Wednesday, 16 June 2021
Time: 1:30 – 3:30 pm (GMT +8)

Speakers: Hongwei Bao and Howard Chiang
Discussants and Respondents: Jamie Zhao and Alvin K. Wong
Moderator: Grace En-Yi Ting

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Since the late 20th century, political liberalization and LGBT activism have shaped Sinophone Taiwan and Hong Kong. Postsocialist China has also witnessed community-driven LGBT and queer events, HIV/AIDS activism, and film and cultural festivals. In May 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize gay marriage; almost simultaneously, that summer saw a wave of protests in Hong Kong. In August 2020, ShanghaiPRIDE, the biggest queer cultural festival in Mainland China, was shut down permanently. How might queer Chinese and Sinophone studies map the often uneven assemblages across LGBT and queer subjects, community, and media? How might community-based and ephemeral queer media practices reflect upon queer method and theory? Likewise, how might comparing diverse historical experiences, legal cases, and visuality of transness across the Sinophone Pacific enable transversal mode of thinking and transtopia? This joint book launch event will launch two books, Queer Media in China (Routledge, 2021) by Hongwei Bao and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia UP, 2021) by Howard Chiang. Together, Bao and Chiang’s books chart new directions in film and media studies, Chinese studies, queer theory, trans history, and Sinophone studies.

Bios of Speakers, Discussants, and Moderator

Speakers: Hongwei Bao and Howard Chiang

Hongwei Bao is an associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he also directs the Centre for Contemporary East Asian Cultural Studies. He is the author of Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China(Nordic Institute of Asia Studies Press, 2018), Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), and Queer Media in China (Routledge, 2021).

https://www.routledge.com/Queer-Media-in-China/Bao/p/book/9780367279455

Howard Chiang is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018), which received the 2019 International Convention of Asia Scholars Humanities Book Prize and the 2020 Bullough Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021). Since 2019, he has served as the Founding Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/transtopia-in-the-sinophone-pacific/9780231190978

Discussants and Respondents

Jamie J. Zhao is currently Assistant Professor of Communications at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She is also Honorary Professor and External Director of the Center for Gender and Media Studies at NingboTech University. Her research explores queer TV and fan cultures in a globalist age. Her writings can be found in a number of journals and edited volumes, such as the journals Feminist Media Studies, Continuum, Celebrity Studies, and Critical Asian Studies, and her coedited anthology, Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (HKU Press, 2017).

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at HKU. He is currently writing a book titled Queer Hong Kong as Method. Wong has published in journals such as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Concentric, Continuum, and Cultural Dynamics and in edited volumes such as Transgender China, Queer Sinophone Cultures, and Hong Kong Keywords. Wong is also the co-editor of Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020).

Moderator

Grace En-Yi Ting is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at HKU. As a queer and feminist studies scholar, she specializes in Japanese women writers and girls’ culture, as well as transnational feminisms and queer politics. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining femininities and female homosociality within representations of daily life by women writers in post-1980’s Japan. Her other work involves critiques of race and gender in the field of Japanese studies, as well as interrogating tensions between concepts of “queer” and “Asia” across Japanese, Sinophone, and Asian American literary discourses.

Date: Monday, 31 May 2021
Time: 5 – 6:30 pm (GMT +8)

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Panelists: Danish Sheikh (PhD Candidate, Melbourne Law School); Marco Wan (Professor,
Department of Law, HKU); Alvin Wong (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative
Literature, HKU); J Daniel Elam (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature,
HKU); Hong Kong Shax Theatre Group

On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. “LGBT persons,” the Court said, “deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’” But how definitive was this end?

In Love and Reparation, Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research, and personal memoir.

PANELISTS
Danish Sheikh (PhD Candidate, Melbourne Law School)
Marco Wan (Professor, Department of Law, HKU)
Alvin Wong (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU)
J Daniel Elam (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU)
Shax Theatre Group

ABOUT THE PANELISTS
Danish Sheikh is a playwright and activist-lawyer currently engaged in doctoral research at the Melbourne Law School. His writing has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in 2018, shortlisted for the Jan Michalski Award in 2017, and won the Publishing Next Award in the same year.

Marco Wan is Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong.

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research covers Hong Kong culture, Chinese cultural studies, Sinophone studies, and queer theory. Wong is writing a book titled Queer Hong Kong as Method. He has published in journals such as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Concentric, Cultural Dynamics, Continuum, and Interventions. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020).

Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com

Hong Kong Shax Theatre Group (HKSTG/ SHAX) is a registered non-profit society based in Hong Kong. With a focus on identity expression and cultural exchange, HKSTG takes a special interest in cultural adaptations and recontextualization in our creative productions. For more on Shax, please visit https://www.hkstg.org/

In modern-day Hong Kong, major constitutional controversies have caused people to demonstrate on the streets, immigrate to other countries, occupy major thoroughfares, and even engage in violence. These controversies have such great resonance because they put pressure on a cultural identity made possible by, and inseparable from, the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework. Hong Kong is also a city synonymous with film, ranging from commercial gangster movies to the art cinema of Wong Kar-wai. This book argues that while the importance of constitutional controversies for the process of self-formation may not be readily discernible in court judgments and legislative enactments, it is registered in the diverse modes of expression found in Hong Kong cinema. It contends that film gives form to the ways in which Hong Kong identity is articulated, placed under stress, bolstered, and transformed in light of disputes about the nature and meaning of the city’s constitutional documents.

Speaker: Marco Wan is Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong.

Respondent: Mara Malagodi, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Moderator: Michael Ng, Associate Professor, Department of Professional Legal Education, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong

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Date: Thursday, 20 May 2021
Time: 5 – 6:30 pm (GMT +8)
Speaker: Kelly Tse, Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Alvin Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong

To view the talk recording, please click here.

This seminar offers both a critique and defence of Crazy Rich Asians (2018) from a postcolonial Southeast Asian angle. It first explores the film’s politics of erasure along racial and ethnic lines vis-à-vis Southeast Asia, a narrative that Singapore unwittingly participates in through its touristic self-branding. The discussion then traces an aesthetics of excess in the film’s cinematic parade of Chinese capital. This visually lush neoliberal excess paradoxically registers the film’s parodic potential. Overall, the seminar unpacks the contradictions of mediating Southeast Asia in relation to China and Asian America amidst Asia’s spectacular economic rise.

About the Speaker
Kelly Tse (BA. MPhil. HKU, DPhil. Oxon) is an Assistant Professor of English at the Education University of Hong Kong. Previously, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on postcolonial and world literatures (East and Southeast Asia in particular), environmental humanities, gender and media studies. Her work has appeared in The Oxford History of the Novel in English series, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of International Women’s Studies, New Writing, amongst others.

All are welcome.

Date: Friday, 14 May 2021
Time: 9 – 10:30 AM (GMT +8)
Speaker: ZHAO Feng Chenzi, PhD Candidate, Western University, Canada

To watch the recorded seminar, please click here.

Covid-19 has posed various challenges to peoples in different parts of the world. In coping with the pandemic, many nation-states adopt militarized rhetoric and measures that refer to fighting and defending rather than caring and persevering. This paper perceives the Covid-19 pandemic in China as a complex emergency that resembles war. By asking where are women, where is gender, where is feminism, and where is security, this online ethnography examines the lives of women and gendered others during the time of emergency, the institutional and public discourses around the pandemic, and the developments in feminist activisms and awareness. This paper argues that the pandemic disproportionately affects women and gendered others in China. Women’s crucial roles and contributions in sustaining the society during the pandemic are unrecognized. Feminist activism gain momentum and visibility, yet the future of feminism in China remains precarious. State and institutions take a paternalistic attitude that leads to war-like thinking and militarized measures in response to a complex situation that entails deliberation, care, and collaboration. Such an attitude is intrinsically biased towards masculinity and domination, prioritizes state stability and security over the security and livelihood of individuals, disregards the needs of vulnerable groups, and perpetuates their vulnerability.

About the Speaker
ZHAO Feng Chenzi is a feminist, a woman, and a Chinese international PhD candidate in Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies at the Faculty of Education, Western University, Canada. Her research interests include women, globalisation, critical institutional studies, higher education, and social justice.

Moderator: Laura Meek, Assistant Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine

Date: Friday, 7 May 2021
Time: 2 PM HK Time (GMT +8)
Speaker: Nasia Anam

Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and especially after the U.S. “Travel Ban” of 2018, the airport has transformed, for many Muslims, into a site of surveillance and control rather than jet-setting. Though in a previous era, French anthropologist Marc Augé had deemed the airport to be a transitional and transactional “non-place,” it is now a charged site where Muslims and Muslim-appearing subjects are interpellated as threats whose very itinerancy endangers the hegemonic world order. This paper examines scenes of Muslim interpellation in recent works of fiction depicting what it means to be hailed into the fraught category of “Muslim” through assessments of sartorial and physical features such as headscarves and beards while in transit. I argue that in our contemporary moment, it is in the space of the international airport—where the potential for movement is infinite—that Muslims are “checked” in order to be prohibited from further mobility (and agency).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nasia Anam is Assistant Professor of English and Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her current book project, “Muslim Heterotopias: Colonial Logics of Space in Literatures of Migration,” centers on the figure of the Muslim migrant and the spatial legacies of colonization in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literature. Her writing and reviews have appeared in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Interventions, ASAP/Journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

To watch the recorded seminar, please click here.

Date: Wednesday, 28 April 2020
Time: 5 PM (GMT +8)
Speaker: Tsz-kit Yim, Ph.D. candidate in East Asian studies at Princeton University

To watch recorded seminar, please click here.

Today, what C.T. Hsia called “the classic Chinese novels” remain largely alive and kicking as not only literary translations, but also transmedial and transnational adaptations. Compared to Western literary canons which have been subject to postcolonial, racial, and gender critiques, it remains ambiguous what one should do with the ongoing afterlives of Chinese canons in, for instance, a Japanese video game, a Hong Kong soft-porn, a South Korean travel-reality show, or an Asian-American graphic novel. Through a survey of the field and selected case studies, this seminar proposes “affective network” as a lens to read Chinese classics and their transnational afterlives.

About the author:
Tsz-kit Yim is currently a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian studies at Princeton University, with B.A. (Comparative Literature & English) and M.Phil. (Comparative Literature) degrees from the University of Hong Kong. He works on classic Chinese novels and adaptations, intersecting broader inquiries of affect theory, gender and genre, as well as translation and world literature.

Moderator: Fiona Law, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: 27 April 2021 (Tuesday)
Time: 5:00 PM Hong Kong Time
Delivery: via Zoom

To watch the recorded seminar, please click here.

On March 16, 2021, a white gunman targeted three Asian owned businesses in Atlanta and murdered eight people, six of them Asian American women. Panelists will offer insights into what these killings reveal about the intersections of racism and misogyny. In particular, they will contextualize the impact of the pandemic on anti-Asian discrimination against broader histories of xenophobia, imperialism, and sexism linking the United States and Asia. Importantly, they will suggest ways in which these events in the United States are relevant for Hong Kong today.

Panelists:

Angie Baecker, Lecturer, Department of Art History, HKU

Puja Kapai, Convenor, Women’s Studies Research Centre; Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU

Grace En-Yi Ting, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, HKU

Moderator:

Alvin Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

All are welcome.