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
This talk will focus on the intersection between the evolution of the Chinese television industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the career of the countercultural writer and cultural entrepreneur Wang Shuo. By the late 1980s, the Chinese television industry had entered a period of crisis. A film-derived model of slow, individualized production was proving impractical for an industry trapped between rapidly increasing demand and a shortage of resources and skilled television workers. Facing these pressures, Chinese television producers and critics pushed for the adoption of a “studio drama” (shineiju) model: domestic dramas shot on one set with a multiple-camera setup in an arrangement designed to maximize production and minimize production schedules. Although Wang Shuo, a writer who had been mostly known for his subversive stories of the Beijing demimonde, might initially seem an odd fit for this genre, the shineiju allowed him to bring to the fore the undercurrent of domestic sentimentalism that had long run beneath his work. Wang initially enjoyed the wide audience and financial rewards provided by television, but he soon soured on the limitations of the industry, and would go on to write incisive deconstructions of the structure of feeling created by Chinese television. Examining this encounter reveals the intertwined ideologies and technologies underpinning the postsocialist shift in the People’s Republic toward the private home, dilemmas shared by television industries east and west, and the problems involved in building (and studying) a “popular culture.”
About the speaker: Dylan Suher 蘇和 is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He is currently working on a book about how mainland Chinese writers, beginning in the late 1980s, articulated their anxieties over their changing professional identity through the media of television, film, and the internet. His areas of expertise include postsocialist mainland Chinese literature and film, Chinese television, and media theory. He has written essays and reviews of literature in translation for Asymptote, The White Review, and The Millions. For more information, please visit dylansuher.com.
Moderator: Claire Gullander-Drolet, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, HKU
This talk addresses a global network of camera operators working on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company between 1896-1903. Not only did these camera operators record films at sites from Algiers to Berlin to Tokyo, they also pictured the world anew, whether framing a street scene in Alexandria or offering a close-up of a passing face in Jerusalem. The Lumière Brothers’ broader vision was to bring the world to the world, and they imagined a global network of films easily circulatable beyond the constraints of language and literacy. Engaging the implications of cinematic versus literary capture, Allan’s talk explores the stakes of world literature in the age of the world picture.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER Michael is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, and editor of the journal Comparative Literature. His research focuses on debates in world literature, postcolonial studies, literary theory, as well as film and visual culture, primarily in Africa and the Middle East. In both his research and teaching, he bridges textual analysis with social theory, and draws from methods in anthropology, religion, queer theory, and area studies. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016, Co-Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book) and a guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature (“Reading Secularism: Religion, Literature, Aesthetics”), and with Elisabetta Benigni, an issue of Philological Encounters (“Lingua Franca: Toward a Philology of the Sea”). He is at work on a second book, Picturing the World: The Global Routes of Early Cinema, 1896-1903, which traces the transnational history of camera operators working for the Lumière Brothers film company.
Moderator: Daniel Elam 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
Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Maryam Wasif Khan Maryam Wasif Khan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. She received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Professor Aamir Mufti. She also holds an A.B. in Comparative Literature (summa cum laude) from Princeton University. Her work on British orientalism, Muslim reform and nineteenth-century prose fiction in Urdu has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History (MLQ) and PMLA. Her forthcoming book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Vernacular Populisms, (Fordham University Press: 2020) argues against conventional methods of writing literary history for colonial vernaculars such as Urdu or Hindi. Suggesting that Urdu prose fiction from the moment of its inception at Fort William College is coded with certain Orientalist ideals of Muslim identity, the project demonstrates how this identity, in the contemporary moment, manifests as a powerful religio-populist literary impulse. A second project is envisioned as a series of essays and contemplations on the possibilities contained in the act of reading foundational European texts outside of the Academy.
Ali Raza Ali Raza is a historian specializing in the history of modern South Asia. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and was a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His research and teaching interests include the social and intellectual history of South Asia, comparative colonialisms, decolonization, and post-colonial theory. Ali Raza’s work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies; Itinerario; South Asian History and Culture; and Contemporary South Asia. He is also the co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (Sage 2014), and the author of Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Daniel Elam 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
About the book: World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocates collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism.To trace this impossible political theory, Elam foregrounds theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way rather to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of imperial rule, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty.Aligning Frantz Fanon’s political writing with Erich Auerbach’s philological project, Elam brings together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought to demonstrate how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.
About the author: 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. He is the co-editor, with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat, of two volumes on South Asian revolutionary writing: Reading Revolutionaries (2014) and Writing Revolution (2017). His forthcoming monograph is Impossible and Necessary: Anticolonialism, Reading, Critique (Fordham University Press). At HKU, Daniel teaches courses in postcolonial theory, global modernism, and theories of comparativism. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.comRespondent:
Shruti Kapila, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Shruti Kapila is University Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She is the editor of An Intellectual History for India and the coeditor of Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India. Her writing has appeared in leading academic journals such as Past and Present and Modern Intellectual History and in international publications such as the Financial Times, India Today, and Prospect.
Moderator: Soo Ryon Yoon, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University Soo Ryon Yoon is an assistant professor in cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Trained as a performance studies scholar, she teaches and writes about contemporary performance, dance history, and racial politics in South Korea. She is currently working on her first monograph, Choreographing Affinities: Blackness, Koreanness, and Performing Race in Korea on the circulation of African diasporic performances in the Korean context. Soo Ryon Yoon holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and was a CEAS postdoctoral associate at Yale University.
Date: 16 November, 2020 Time: 5 PM (GMT +8) Speaker: Nicholas Y. H. Wong, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, The University of Hong Kong
New concepts of play and labor emerged in the wake of geopolitical East Asia’s capitalist restructuring after the Pacific War and specifically, the rise of Hong Kong’s plastic toy manufacturing. This dominant export-oriented colonial-national industry, I argue, shaped a generation of writers’s experience of childhood and subsequent attempts to write for and about the child. Modifying views of children in modern Chinese literature as national but also individual figures of development, I propose a Hong Kong theory of the child from the angle of mass production and consumption of cute, gimmicky objects, and ponder how literary writing both depicts and assumes the unstable relation between commodity and play-thing.
Date: 10 November 2020 Time: 5 PM (GMT +8) Speaker: Harry Yi-Jui Wu, Director and Assistant Professor at Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, Lee Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong.
In the 19th Century, there was an increase of mental asylums in the British Empire. They reflected the positivist and bureaucratic mentality as the panacea to manage lunatics as social problems in the time of urbanization and industrialization. When studying the history of psychiatry in Britain’s colonies, scholars have written quite extensively about racial segregation and racial psychiatric theories derived along these practices. However, if one puts Hong Kong in the context of port governmentality and the economy of migration, mental health suggests something very different from what it means in other colonies. In the port city on the margin of the British and Chinese Empires, all aspects of migration were linked to the worldwide chain of business, and services were commoditized.Managing “lunatics” or “the insane” was a measure for Hong Kong to maintain its function as the doorway between the two empires. Many of these lunatics were suicidal coolies trying to jump off the Praya, or drunken sailors who were brought to the police station immediately upon arrival. Lacking rigorous research, governmental and medical officers tried to uphold the regular operation of the prospering trade port in the cross-cultural context. Small scale of confinement means asylums only functioned as temporary custodial facilities before “patients” of different nationalities were repatriated back to where they came from. In this presentation, I deem the early development of mental health in Hong Kong an arrangement settled along the networks of empires based on the marine nature of the port city. This new research on one hand re-examines the existing historiography of colonial medicine. On the other hand, it considers Hong Kong as a fluid concept and the use of Hong Kong as a process rather than a static entity.
About the Speaker: Harry Yi-Jui Wu is Director and Assistant Professor at Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, Lee Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. His book, Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization will be published by MIT Press in April, 2021.Moderator: Laura Meek, Assistant Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, HKU
Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts and the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) jointly present — “Eileen Chang at the University of Hong Kong: An online presentation of images and documents from the archives” on the occasion of the centennial celebration of Chang’s birth in 2020.
