Date: Wednesday, 9 March 2022 Time: 10:00 am (GMT +8)
Speaker: Clara Iwasaki, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Alberta Discussant: Nicole Huang, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU Moderator: Elizabeth LaCouture, Director and Assistant Professor, Gender Studies Programme, School of Humanities, HKU
Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2022 Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom Click here for the event recording.
This talk focuses on the way three authors, Xiao Hong, Agnes Smedley and Eileen Chang, circulated around the transpacific. All three writers are strongly associated with autobiographical writings and in the case of Xiao and Chang, their sensational biographies (particularly their love lives) have frequently overshadowed their writing. All three women deployed their literary personae, but their control over their image was never absolute. Xiao Hong and Agnes Smedley were friends and more importantly, they circulated each other’s works and literary images. Xiao Hong sees in Smedley’s work a universal feminist struggle. Smedley sees in Xiao Hong a vision of a progressive and particularly Chinese proletarian feminism. For Eileen Chang, her autobiographical novels remained unpublished until many years after her death because her stark self-revelation was inconsistent with the image of old Shanghai glamor that her earlier fiction had conjured up.
Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. Her book Rethinking the Modern Chinese Canon: Refractions across the Transpacific was published by Cambria in 2020.
This event is co-presented by the Committee on Gender Equality and Diversity and the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong, with the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) and the Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU.
Speaker: Lalitha Gopalan, Associate Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas in Austin, USA Discussant: Gina Marchetti, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Moderator: J. Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, 17 February 2022 Time: 11:00 am (Hong Kong Time) on Zoom (9:00 pm on 16 February, Austin, Tx Time)
Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream to expand the scope of film studies that have focused so far on the dominance of Bollywood. Lalitha Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging less studied works that deserve critical attention. Through close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style, this book draws attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ and considering the change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a complete picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.
Lalitha Gopalan is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film, affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies, South Asia Institute, and Core Faculty in the Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, USA. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of Film Theory, Feminist Film Theory, Contemporary World Cinemas, Indian Cinemas, Genre Films, and Experimental Film and Video. Essays and books written by her include Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; Orient Blackswan 2021), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002) and Bombay (London: BFI Modern Classics, 2005); and the edited volume The Cinema of India (London: Wallflower Press, 2010).
Speaker: Abolfazl Ahangari, PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Supervisor: J. Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU Respondent: Siavash Saffari, Associate Professor of West Asian Studies, Seoul National University
Date: Wednesday, 16 February 2022 Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) on Zoom
In this seminar, I reread Dariush Shayegan’s Asia Confronts the West (1978) to reconsider secularism as a philosophical issue. To him, secularism is a historical force originated in Europe and aimed at inverting the epistemic world structure from the metaphysical to the earthly. It has led to a grand historical shift which is supposedly the moment of the formation of the ‘new world’ and the birth of the post-enlightenment subject. Following this approach, I argue that Shayegan’s view toward secularization can be comprehended as a process of ‘contraction’ through which every existing thing-in-the-world has to be diminished through being divided from itself to appear as a ‘knowable object’. More specifically, becoming secular [i.e., worldly] means to be contracted, being detached from one’s mystical core, the excess, or ‘the history’ and letting things appear as a ‘pure object’ in and for the present. But paradoxically, the secularized thing or the divided object, instead of becoming more secular [or worldly], has appeared to be vulgar, has lost its senses, and has paved the way for the formation of the divided subject. In this seminar, I focus on this contradictory aspect of secularism to provide a framework for thinking about the condition of (post)modernity, the senses of history, and the possibility of the West/non-West binary within the context of secular history.
Abolfazl Ahangari is a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are world & comparative literature, philosophy of history and literature, anticolonialism & postcolonial theory, world modernities, and political and liberation theology.
Panel 1: Guoyu Pian Time: 9:00am-10:40am (Taipei time) Chair: Hong Guo-Juin
Hsi Shih: The Beauty of Beauties (1965): The Grand Mirage of Taiwanese Cinema/ James Udden
Victory (1974): Symbolic Analysis of the Film in Three Parts/ James Wicks
Legend of the Mountain (1979): Rediscovering King Hu’s Land of Wayward Ghosts/ Michael Berry
Panel 2: Taiyu Pian Time: 11:00am-12:40pm (Taipei time) Chair: Wenchi Lin
The Best Secret Agent (1964): The First Female Spy Hero of Taiyu pian/ Chunchi Wang
The Bride Who Has Returned from Hel (1965): Cosmopolitan Vernacularism/ Ping-hui Liao
Dangerous Youth (1969): Sexual Economy, Taiyu Films and Bricolage/ Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh
This Webinar is held as part of the International Symposium on Taiwan Cinema 台灣電影線上國際研討會.
The International Symposium on Taiwan Cinema, organized by the Visual Culture Research Center at National Central University and the Centre for Film, Taiwan and Creative Industry at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, will proceed as a series of webinars on Zoom to be held from December, 2021 to April, 2022, in which contributing authors of the book 32 NEW TAKES ON TAIWAN CINEMA to be published by The Michigan University Press will be invited to present key points in their chapters. For more information please visit the facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/NCUVisual.
The symposium is co-organized by: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Minnesota – Twin Cities The Department of Filmmaking at Taipei National University of the Arts Institut d’Etudes Transtextuelles et Transculturelles at Université de Lyon (Jean Moulin) The Center for Taiwan Studies at University of California Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong
Hsien-hao Liao｜Chair Jason McGrath｜Daughter of the Nile (1987): Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dark Pop Experiment Earl Jackson｜Monga (2010): Affect and Structure Darrell Davis｜True Emotion Behind the Wall (2017): Taste of Salty Chicken Carlos Rojas｜The Great Buddha+ (2017): Tracing the Limits of the Visible
This Webinar is held as part of the International Symposium on Taiwan Cinema 台灣電影線上國際研討會.
The International Symposium on Taiwan Cinema, organized by the Visual Culture Research Center at National Central University and the Centre for Film, Taiwan and Creative Industry at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, will proceed as a series of webinars on Zoom to be held from December, 2021 to April, 2022, in which contributing authors of the book 32 NEW TAKES ON TAIWAN CINEMA to be published by The Michigan University Press will be invited to present key points in their chapters. For more information please visit the facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/NCUVisual.
The symposium is co-organized by: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Minnesota – Twin Cities The Department of Filmmaking at Taipei National University of the Arts Institut d’Etudes Transtextuelles et Transculturelles at Université de Lyon (Jean Moulin) The Center for Taiwan Studies at University of California Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong
Saturday, 4 December 2021, 9:00am to 5:30pm (Hong Kong time), on Zoom
Qiu Miaojin: Textuality, Visuality, and Desire in Global Circulation
This conference engages with the literary works of Qiu Miaojin, a famous lesbian and queer writer of Taiwan whose premature death in 1995 marks a watershed moment in queer and literary discourses both in and out of Taiwan. Qiu’s queer classic Notes of a Crocodile (1994) centers on a lesbian protagonist who assumes a non-human alter ego of a crocodile in the narration. Showcasing the clever use of irony, sarcasm, and dark humor, Qiu’s first novel instantly became a defining work of lesbian queer fiction in Taiwan. Qiu’s writing career ended too early when she committed suicide at the young age of twenty-six, leaving us with her last work called Last Words from Montmartre (1996). Recently, filmmaker Evans Chan has also completed a full feature film called Love and Death in Montmartre (2019). This conference brings together scholars who are interested in the lifework of Qiu by considering the impact of her works across the fields of film studies, literary studies, affect theory, queer studies, animal studies, and translation theory. It takes the specific case of Qiu’s lifework to investigate how the mobility of queer desire enables a kind of cross-genre, transmedial, and transnational mode of textuality. Presenters will situate the cultural phenomenon of Qiu Miaojin in broader comparative and global perspectives. The conference brings together literary and cultural critics, a filmmaker, and creative writers from Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North America, and the UK.
*Film screening: Love and Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特之愛與死 (2019), directed by Evans Chan (Vimeo link will be sent to registrants prior to the event.)
9:00-9:15 am: Welcome and opening remarks: Nicole Huang (Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature); Alvin K. Wong
9:15-10:00 am Panel 1: Qiu Miaojin and Cinematic Representations A Discussion of Love and Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特之愛與死 (2019) Featuring: Gina Marchetti, Mike Ingham, Shi-yan Chao, and Evans Chan Moderator: Alvin K. Wong
<10 Minutes Break>
10:10-11:40am Panel 2: Body, Affect, and Pedagogy 1. Kate Costello, Teaching Translation to Students of World Literature: Notes of aCrocodile as a Case Study 2. Tze-lan Sang, How Far Have We Come?: From Notes of a Crocodile to Small Talk 3. T.M. Mamos, Emotional Vectors: Intertextuality in Qiu Miaojin’s Novels 4. Jenn Marie Nunes, The Motif of Writing and Queer Female Agency in 1990s Taiwanese Short Fiction Moderator: Pei-yin Lin
Lunch: 11:40am-12:45pm
12:45pm-2:00 pm Panel 3: Queer Literary Publics and Performance 1. Chi Ta-wei, Literature as a Public: Qiu Miaojin on Mental Disorders 2. Alvin K. Wong, Queer Minor Transnationalism in Qiu Miaojin and Wong Bik-wan’s Works 3. Fan-Ting Cheng, Performing Queer Intervulnerability Moderator: Calvin Hui
*This session will be conducted in Chinese 2:00pm-3:30pm Panel 4: The Legacy of Qiu Miaojin: Writers in Dialogue 1. Luo Yijun (駱以軍), “Portraits of the Young Artist” 青年藝術家的畫像 2. Lolita C.F. Hu (胡晴舫), “Dying Young and Withering” 早夭與凋零, excerpt from Anonymity《無名者》 3. Chi Ta-wei (紀大偉), “What is Love in Montmartre?” 愛是什麼？—看《蒙馬特遺書》 4. Li Kotomi, (李琴峰), “Situating Qiu Miaojin’s Novels in Japan: Notes on Qiu and Japanese Queer Literature” 邱妙津小說在日本：兼談日本同志文學 Moderator: Nicole Huang
<10 Minutes Coffee Break>
3:40-4:45pm Panel 5: Animality, Cultural Translation, and Queer Aesthetics 1. Yahia Zhengtang Ma, “Desire” as a Verb: Translating Same-Sex Desire in Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre 2. Ari Larissa Heinrich, Writing Your Own Obituary: Reception of Last Words fromMontmartre among English-language Readers (interview with Yahia Ma) 3. Carlos Rojas, Animality and the Limits of Language Moderator: Grace Ting
4:45-5:30pm Roundtable
Organized by: Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU The Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), HKU
For enquiries, please contact: Dr. Alvin K. Wong (akhwong@hku.hk)
Date: Wednesday, 1 December 2021 Time: 5:00 pm (HKT) on Zoom
In this talk, I engage with Huang Zumo’s (黃祖模) film Romance on Lu Mountain (廬山戀) (1980) to explore the consumption of romantic love (including the first representation of a kiss in the People’s Republic of China cinema), fashionable clothes, and petty bourgeois sensibility. I argue that the depiction of a female character and her fashionable clothes in Huang’s film can be regarded as a signifying site where the changing relationship between the libidinal and the political from the end of the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of China’s economic reforms is staged and dramatized. I also present the fashion shows, magazines, and television melodramas that accentuate the rise of this fashion consciousness. Taken together, I contend that de-sublimation of romantic love, the re-fetishization of gender, and the re-articulation of ethnicity and culture are ultimately a political process: in the 1980s, the political culture of revolution is replaced by the economic ideology of modernization and development.
Calvin Hui is a Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of William and Mary in the United States. His research focuses on modern Chinese humanities (film, media, and literature), Hong Kong studies, critical theory, and cultural studies, with particular emphases on Marxist theory, gender and sexuality studies, and post-colonial and transnational studies. His first book, titled The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China, was published by Columbia University Press in September 2021. Hui is a recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2019). He is also a recipient of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Research Grant (2020) and Scholar Grant (2016).
Date: Wednesday, 17 November 2021 Time: 5:30 – 7:30 pm (GMT +8) Venue: 1/F – MWT4 (Meng Wah Complex), HKU Language: Screening—In Cantonese and Mandarin with Chinese and English subtitles Discussion—In Cantonese
Speaker: Chan Hau Chun, HKIPF 2021 Featured Image Maker
In collaboration with the Hong Kong International Photo Festival (HKIPF), the Department of Comparative Literature and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures will present a screening of the latest work Cubicle by Hong Kong emerging image maker Chan Hau Chun, a featured artist of Photography Cinema, HKIPF 2021. The Festival 2021 explores the multitude of forms, concepts, and narrativity of images between ‘still’ and ‘moving’; contemplates the mutual transformative influences of photography and our modes of living have on each other; etches out and reflects on the minute details of a multifaceted contemporary society. Details: https://hkipf.org.hk/news/photography-cinema/
About Cubicle In an old part of Hong Kong lies an old building, and within it countless little rooms. Demarcated merely by wooden panels, each room houses one family: a subdivided flat, with shared toilet-kitchens, sultry, impermeable, where hundreds live.
The film weaves together images taken over the last few years, documenting residents of subdivided flats within one building. After the social movement in Hong Kong and in coping with the global pandemic, the seemingly mundane everyday lives of these residents are in fact full of underlying tension. Within the cramped and rundown building, some people move out after just half a month, some stay for thirty years; some have grown up here, some have passed away in the rooms… What does our society look like when seen through these steady long takes? A 15-minute cut: https://www.nowness.asia/story/cubicle-hong-kong-apartments
About Chan Hau Chun Chan Hau Chun is a graduate of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, she is currently working as an independent film and image-maker. She produces both photography and videography; her works include Under the bridge, 32+4, Uncle Fai, Call me Mrs Chan, No song to sing, and Searching for Lau Tit Man.
About HKIPF Hong Kong International Photo Festival (HKIPF) was launched in 2010. In every edition, the Festival introduces different themes, movements, local and overseas practitioners to discuss manifold issues and perspectives. Through a wide range of public programmes, the Festival bridges Hong Kong and international perspectives, creating conversations between people and place, past and present, with oneself and the world. Website: https://hkipf.org.hk / Instagram: @hkipf
Speaker: Kenny Ng, Associate Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University Moderator: Nicole Huang, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU
Date: Thursday, 4 November 2021 Time: 5:00 pm (GMT +8) Venue: On Zoom
Recent scholarship has explored Eileen Chang’s United States Information Agency connection as a translator of American literature and her ambiguous voice on both sides of the Cold War divide. My previous chapters trace the generic travels of Chang’s romances and comedies across Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. This talk attempts to develop a new chapter on a Cantonese film ‘adaptation’ of Chang’s famous Shanghai novella, “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” (沈香屑・第一爐香). Directed by Tso Kea (Zuo Ji 左几) and penned by Hong Kong female writer Cheng Wai (鄭慧), Splendor of Youth (黛綠年華) (1957) was filmed by a progressive Cantonese film cast from the Union Film Studio (Zhonglian 中聯), a left-leaning organization that was under constant surveillance by the colonial government. The talk seeks to delineate the complexity of the cultural sphere in Cold War Hong Kong where a left Cantonese picture could be produced by a rightwing Mandarin studio, whereas popular writers like Cheng Wai were writing profusely under the auspices of Greenback culture.
Kenny Ng is an Associate Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. He has published widely on film culture and literary studies in the US, UK, Europe, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His books include The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2015); Indiescape Hong Kong: Interviews and Essays, co-authored with Enoch Tam and Vivian Lee (Hong Kong: Typesetter Publishing, 2018); and Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-links in Politics, Art, and Tradition (Hong Kong: Chunghwa Book Co., 2021). His ongoing book projects concern censorship and visual cultural politics, Cold War Asian cinema, the politics of Cantophone and Sinophone cinema, and left-wing cosmopolitanism.
Date: Thursday, 28 October 2021 Time: 4:00 – 5:30 pm (GMT +8) on Zoom
Speaker: Lou Rich, PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature Supervisor: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature Respondent: Harmony Yuen
Abstract: While Ancient Greece is well-renowned as a time and place in which ‘bisexuality’ was ‘in fashion’, could the same be said about Ancient China? Can we call bisexuality ‘bisexuality’ in a time when identity politics did not exist? This seminar examines and compares the sexual systems of two of the most influential cultures in terms of historical literature and culture: Ancient Greece and Dynastic China. Through the use of the term ‘bieroticism’ rather than bisexuality, this seminar looks at how sexual and social systems at the time allowed for a more diverse representation of non-binary sexual expressions – such as the Greek pederastic system, or the Chinese male-favourite tradition, and the literature and works that arose from this. Therefore, in light of research that consistently boxes historical cultures such as these into hetero or homoerotic, a lens of bieroticism hopes to shed fresh light and allows for nuance and the breaking of the hetero-homo binary, and lends new ways of thinking about premodern and modern sexuality and literature.
Bio: Lou Rich is a 3rd year PhD candidate In the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Hong Kong. They received their BA in Film and Media Production at Sheffield Hallam University in 2016, and their MA in English Studies at the University of Nottingham in 2017. Their work focuses specifically on representations of bisexuality in literatures and visual media spanning different cultures and countries.
Respondent:Harmony Yuen
Organized by the Department of Comparative Literature and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), HKU
For enquiries, please feel free to contact Lou Rich by email at slrich@connect.hku.hk
