Date: Thursday, 30 September 2021 Time: 6:30 pm (GMT +8) on Zoom
Speakers: Valeria Riquelme (Writer/Director), Clarissa Langley Coleman (Producer), Nick Foxall (Director of Photography), Sam Colombie (Sound Design) Moderator: Dr. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park
For Her is a short film about Jane, who struggles to write a story about a traumatizing event but ends trapped in her emotions as she attempts to capture the impossible.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director and members of the production and filmmaking team.
Panelists
Valeria Riquelme (Writer/Director) Valeria is a Mexican filmmaker, multimedia artist, and founder of the production house Tinta Limited. She began her career in the arts with the one-woman show So Went which she wrote, directed, and performed in 2019. She then wrote, directed, and produced her first short film, For Her. Currently, she is completing a Bachelor of Arts at HKU.
Clarissa Langley Coleman (Producer) Clarissa is a film producer and AD raised in Hong Kong, Japan, China, the US, and the UK who has worked on the sets of Mulan (2020), The Meg (2018), and Outcast (2014). She is co-founder of two film companies: Bao Bao Films and ChinaWest Films.
Nick Foxall (Director of Photography) Nick is the founder of Nick Foxall Productions and is an accomplished director of photography, lighting cameraman, editor, and scriptwriter.
Sam Colombie (Sound Design) Sam is a Hong Kong-based producer with experience in multimedia communications. His work has ranged from investigative reporting to podcasting. In For Her, he applied his versatile skills to the film’s sound design.
Moderator
Dr. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa. He specializes in poly-Asian cinema with a focus on Hong Kong action and contemporary South Korean cinema. He engages with film aesthetics, culture, theory, history, and sound from an Asian-centric perspective.
Brian Russell Roberts proposes a new, watery. paradigm for thinking about the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Roberts draws on literature, testimonies, visual arts from artists and writers who have felt the oceanic imperial reach of the United States, most notably in the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean. Borderwaters remaps the US as an ‘archipelagic nation’, and argues for a new imagination of the US across the world.
Respondents: Brandy Nālani McDougall, Associate Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Hsinya Huang, Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University; Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong
About the Author Brian Russell Roberts is Professor of English, Humanities College Professor, and Director of American Studies at Brigham Young University. In 2015 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Universitas Sebelas Maret in Indonesia. Focused on expressive facets of US transnational and imperial cultures and on archipelagic thought as it has emanated from locales ranging from the Caribbean to Indonesia, his work has been published in such journals as American Literature, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA. His books include Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Virginia 2013), Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke 2016, co-edited with Keith Foulcher), Archipelagic American Studies (Duke 2017, co-edited with Michelle Ann Stephens), and Oceans of Longing: Nine Stories by Sitor Situmorang (Silkworm 2018, translated with Keith Foulcher and Harry Aveling). This year, he has also published Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (Duke 2021), which Wai Chee Dimock has described as “essential reading for all Americanists.”
About the Respondents From Kula, Maui, Brandy Nālani McDougall, is of Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiʻi, Maui, and Kauaʻi lineages), Chinese and Scottish descent. Aside from her scholarship and poetry, McDougall is the co-founder of Ala Press, an independent press dedicated to publishing creative works by Indigenous Pacific Islanders. In addition, she currently serves on the American Quarterly board of managing editors as well as the board of the Pacific Writers’ Connection. McDougall is an Associate Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa specializing in Indigenous Studies in the American Studies Department. She received a College of Arts and Humanities Excellence in Teaching Award in 2017. She is on sabbatical leave for the 2017-18 academic year. Her current research focuses on the rhetorics and aesthetics of Indigenous women’s activist fashion within land/water protection movements.
Hsinya Huang is Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan. She is former Dean of Arts and Humanities and Provost of Academic Affairs and Faculty Advancement, NSYSU, and served as Director General of International Cooperation and Science Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, 2018-19. She is the author or editor of books and articles on Native American and Indigenous literatures, eco-criticism, transnational studies, including (De)Colonizing the Body: Disease, Empire, and (Alter)Native Medicine in Contemporary Native American Women’s Writings (2004) and Native North American Literatures: Reflections on Multiculturalism (2009), Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures (2014), Ocean and Ecology in the Trans-Pacific Context (2016), and Chinese Railroad Workers: Recovery and Representation (2017). She serves on the Advisory Board of The Journal of Transnational American Studies and Routledge series on Transnational Indigenous Perspectives and on the Editorial Board of Transmotion: A Journal of Vizenorian Indigenous Studies. She is currently working on a book project, titled After Hiroshima: Radiation Ecologies in Trans-Pacific Indigenous Literatures (Routledge).
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
Navid Naderi and Omid Azadibougar will consider the historical formation of a particularly geographical concept of the human and will discuss how this particular 18th century conception of the human being is one of the conditions of possibilities of the rise of peripheral national literatures in the 19th and the 20th centuries.
About the Speakers Navid Naderi is an independent scholar and an underpayed adjunct working at different universities in Tehran, Iran. He has worked and written in the fields of linguistics and world literature. He is currently working on a collection of essays (in Persian) about the emergence of Persian literature as a national literature out of the spirit of geography, ethnography, and world literature.
Omid Azadibougar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University, China. He is the author of The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery (2014) and World Literature and Hedayat’s Poetics of Modernity (2020), and a co-editor of Persian Literature as World Literature (2021).
Organised and convened by Abolfazl Ahangari (PhD student, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU)
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
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 inPostsocialist 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).
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
