Presentation and Discussion of the Performance-Lecture (untitled) by Kai Tuchmann
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, September 16, 2024 Time: 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
(untitled) is the second of three performance lectures about documents in theatre. With (untitled), Kai Tuchmann moves towards a metaphysics of the documentary. The starting point is Gao Zipeng’s film “Geleshan,” which documents a collective of artists who met in the mountains of Chongqing in 2018 for a durational performance involving the firing of ceramics. Most of the participating artists began this performance by burning documents that were closely linked to personal experiences of illness and despair. Kai Tuchmann was one of the artists depicted in the film. Six years after this meeting in the mountains of Chongqing, Kai revisits this film. Juxtaposing the documented past of “Geleshan” with the present moment of his performance lecture, Kai`s work is asking the question of what lies at the core of documentation? What is it that comes to light beyond the visibility of the surfaces of our bodies and actions?
About Kai Tuchmann Kai Tuchmann graduated in directing from Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. As a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, he helped develop the curriculum for the BA Dramaturgy program there. Kai has also researched the history of dramaturgy as a Fulbright Scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University New York, and in 2024 he has been a curator for the Ludics Seminar at Harvard University. He works as a dramaturg, director and academic. In his internationally shown documentary theater works, Kai has explored the afterlife of the Cultural Revolution in contemporary China, the impact of urbanization on migrant workers in Europe and Asia, and the role of the body in the face of digital technologies. His stagings and dramaturgies were invited, among others, to I Dance Hong Kong, Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival, Zürcher Theaterspektakel, Kunstfest Weimar, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Wuzhen Theatre Festival and documenta-institute. He is the co-translator of Li Yinan`s 当代剧场访谈录 Juchang Performance in Contemporary Chinese Society (1980–2020). His recent publication is the edited volume Postdramatic Dramaturgies – Resonances between Asia and Europe (transcript, 2022).
Credits: (untitled) is deeply impacted through the works of and conversations with Gao Zipeng, Boris Nikitin, Wu Meng, Yao Bo, and Zhao Chuan.
Photo caption: Kai Tuchmann in February 2024 during his Performance–Lecture To Wake Up The Archives! at the Alliance Française de Bandung, Indonesia
Speaker: Ani Maitra, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Colgate University
Moderator:Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2024 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
This talk examines Priya Sen’s film Yeh Freedom Life (2018) as an experimental ethnography of sexual subalternity in contemporary India. The talk focuses on the film’s grounding of female same-sex desire in postcolonial working-class Delhi, specifically its representation of that desire at a critical distance from the discourse of queer rights and identity politics. Completed the same year that the Indian Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality emphasizing the individual’s “right to privacy,” Sen’s film captures the complex socioeconomic dynamics shaping the lives of its protagonists and reveals the limits of normative distinctions between the public and the private, straight and queer. The talk argues that it is the film’s “non-liberal” representation of the sexual subaltern–a figure that at once inhabits and subverts North Indian Hindu normativity on the fringes of liberal Anglophone activism–that makes it a timely decolonial feminist and queer intervention.
Ani Maitra is an associate professor of film and media studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. His research and teaching fall at the intersections of postcolonial and diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, and global media studies. Maitra is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern UP, 2020).
Speaker: Aakriti Mandhwani, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, September 9, 2024 Time: 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India captures the significant and yet largely unexplored world of commercially successful print and publishing in post-Independence India. It examines the world of “middlebrow” commercial publishing and practices of reading of North Indian middle-classes in the 1950s and 60s, the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947. While the immediate post-Independence period in India has been studied largely from the perspective of planning, policy, and the partition, the overarching and dominant critical narrative that emerges from the period emphasises sacrifice over personal pleasure, marking each citizen’s unconditional contribution to the nation’s growth. However, it was also a time when middle class selves were being re-imagined, and re-articulated themselves, in multiple ways. Taking as its focus the form and content of a range of bestselling middlebrow magazines and paperbacks in Hindi, Everyday Reading constructs an alternative story for the 1950s: one that is marked by consumption. The book argues that the middle classes who read these publications were everyday active consumers who defied the state’s prescriptions, carving their roles outside the logic of the austere nation.
Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction.
DEC 10 | TUE | 4:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements Speaker:Fan Yang (杨帆), Professor, Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Respondent:Nianshen Song (宋念申), Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University Moderator:Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
NOV 28 | THU | 5:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR In Praise of the Criminal Imagination Speaker:Haiyan Lee, Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Respondent:Marco Wan, Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, HKU Moderator:Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
NOV 13 | WED | 4:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR The Return of the Third World Speaker:Zhun Xu, Lingnan College, Sun Yat Sen University Discussant & Moderator:Daniel Vukovich, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
NOV 12 | TUE | 6:30 PM (HKT) | ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION Henry Steiner’s Hong Kong Speakers: Christopher DeWolf, Managing Editor, Zolima CityMag Billy Potts, Writer and Designer Moderator:Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
OCT 29 | TUE | 5:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR Jing-you: The Genius of Lam Nin-tung’s Film Philosophy Speaker: Victor Fan, Reader in Film and Media Philosophy, Department of Film Studies, King’s College London Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
OCT 4 | FRI | 4:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR The Neighborhood: Space, State, and Daily Life in a Manchurian City Speaker:Nianshen Song (宋念申), Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University Respondents: Loretta Kim, Associate Professor and Head, School of Modern Languages and Culture, HKU Ji Li, Associate Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, HKU Moderator:Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
SEP 30 | MON | 4:30 PM (HKT) | SCREENING & DISCUSSION Screening and Discussion of Self-Portrait: Dying at 47 KM with Director Zhang Mengqi 章夢奇《自畫像：47公里之死》放映暨映後談 Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-moderator: Yiping Lin, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
SEP 23 | MON | 10:00 AM (HKT) | SEMINAR Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985 Speaker: Jennifer Dorothy Lee, Associate Professor of East Asian Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Respondent: Angie C. Baecker, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
SEP 16 | MON | 6:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR What remains? Presentation and Discussion of the Performance-Lecture (untitled) by Kai Tuchmann Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
SEP 9 | MON | 6:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India Speaker: Aakriti Mandhwani, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Date: Tuesday, May 21, 2024 Time: 9:00 am to 6:15 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Workshop hosted by the Faculty of Arts, and cosponsored by the Louis Cha Fund and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong
For a brief overview of the Workshop and speaker bios, click here.
Opening Session: Welcome and Introduction (9:10–9:20am) Prof. David Pomfret, Dean of Arts Faculty, HKU Prof. Dan Vukovich (胡德), HKU, School of Humanities [organizer]
Panel 1 (9:20–10:25am) Keynote — Chair: Dan Vukovich Prof. Lu Xinyu (吕新雨), East China Normal University “Revolution, Worker-Peasant Alliance, and ‘Chinese-style Modernization’: A Global South Perspective”
Panel 2 (10:30–11:45am): Theory/Ideology/Discourse —Prof. Liu Kang (刘 康), Duke University & Visiting Prof., School of Chinese, HKU “De-territorialization, or Tribalization?—Traveling Theory” —Prof. Zhiguang Yin (殷之光), Fudan University “Theorizing the Global South: Solidarity of the Oppressed and Diversification of Globalization” —Prof. Dan Vukovich (胡德), HKU, School of Humanities “Beyond Liberalism and Illiberalism: On the Conjuncture”
Coffee break (11:45–11:50am)
Panel 3 (11:50am–1:10pm) Back to the Future: Traditions & the Contemporary —Prof. Daniel Bell (貝淡寧), HKU, Faculty of Law “Towards an East Asian Order Inspired by Traditional Culture” —Prof. Wang Pei (汪沛), HKU, School of Chinese “Filial Piety for Modern China” —Prof. Lili Yang (杨力苈), HKU, Faculty of Education “Global Ambitions of Chinese Universities: Towards a World-Centred Tianxia System of Higher Education?” Chair: Prof. Beth Harper, HKU, Comparative Literature
Lunch break (1:10–2:30pm)
Panel 4 (2:30–3:45pm): Borders, “Ethnics,” Diasporas, Citizens —Prof. Enze Han (韓恩澤), HKU, Department of Politics “Chinese Migration and Diaspora Politics” —Prof. Zhengxu Wang, (王正绪), Zhejiang University “Minben Meritocracy: A Take on the Regime Type Question” —Prof. Loretta Kim [金由美], HKU, School of Modern Languages and Cultures “Evolving Expressions of Ethnic Identity and Regional History: Going Beyond the ‘Nationality’ (minzu 民族) Framework”
Coffee break (3.45-4:00pm)
Panel 5 (4.00 pm-5.15 ) Culture in Globalization: Ways of Seeing, Feeling, & Being —Prof. Alvin K. Wong (黃家軒), HKU, Comparative Literature “Gendering China and the Anthropocene” —Prof. Geng Song (宋耕), HKU, School of Chinese “Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity in a Global China” —Prof. Wei Yan Vivien (魏艷), HKU, School of Chinese “From Radio to Podcast: Toward a New Culture of Sound in Modern China”
Panel 6 (5:20–6:15pm) Roundtable Discussion What difference does the current conjuncture make? What forms could, and should “global studies” take in China, Hong Kong, and for the theoretical or interpretive humanities? Ways forward for the hub and SAR?
This workshop is meant to introduce and kickstart a humanities research hub to be based in the Arts Faculty (but inclusive of other humanities scholars working in the social sciences). The particular, nonexclusive focus is the question of China and critical or interpretive global studies, particularly as this relates to the new global ‘conjuncture’ or theatre.1 It focuses on the rise and reality of China as an economic, cultural, and geo-political power; but, moreover, as an important and compelling intellectual, theoretical, and humanistic object of inquiry. How should we understand modern and contemporary China from global perspectives, and how should we understand “globality” from the perspectives of China? Likewise for non- or pre-modern China: how do, or how might these inheritances inform the global present? We seek to examine not just the venerable topic of “China and the world,’ but also the world in China (and vice versa). We aim further to better describe, understand, and produce knowledge about the new global situation or conjuncture that characterizes our historical present.
This is not just an empirical, factual, or data- driven project. If we can all agree that it is a brute fact that China is a major ‘player’ and constituent part of contemporary globalization, how should we interpret and evaluate and theorize this new reality? This is precisely the purpose of the hub and its future activities. And it is, as well, the traditional role and function of the humanities, criticism, and the interpretive social sciences.
It would be a mistake to limit – even if unintentionally – such a project primarily to scholars working outside of China and the immediate region. This has often been the practical reality, even for “global academe.” We are committed to engaging and working with scholars based in the mainland in particular, to establish lines of dialogue, inquiry, and collaboration between ourselves and our peers across the border and in the Asian region. This initial workshop will bring together scholars working at HKU, to present their past and current work on “China and global studies” and to reflect on what they take to be some of its chief, inter-related aspects. It will also bring in scholars working in the mainland, or whom have extensive experience working there, who likewise work on China in/and globalization. Part of our conversation, which will continue in the months ahead, will turn on what forms, what questions, and what topics our research hub about “China, Humanities, and Global Studies” can take.
Prof. Daniel Vukovich, Arts Faculty, School of Humanities & Comp Lit Program.
1 ‘Conjunctural’ analysis stems from Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall amongst others, but it can also stand here as simply a new period of global history, a fresh outcome of the forces and relations at work between China, the West, the South, and Asia. We are in a period of ‘new times.’
Speaker Bios
Panel 1 (9:20–10:25am) Keynote Prof. Lu Xinyu (吕新雨), East China Normal University
Lu Xinyu is Zijiang Chair Professor and Dean of the School of Communication at East China Normal University. She earned her degrees from Anhui University, Zhejiang University, and Fudan University. Her research spans media studies and visual culture, rural-urban iniquities, sociology, philosophy, and politically-grounded readings of history. She is the author of many books, including the influential The Countryside and Revolution (2013), Scholarship, Media, and the Public (2014), and Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement (2003), and the forthcoming Neoliberalism or Neocollective Rural China: A Critique and Prospect (Palgrave 2024).
Prof. Liu Kang (刘康), Duke University & Visiting Prof., School of Chinese, HKU
Liu Kang is Professor of Chinese Studies, and Director of Duke Program of Research on China at Duke University. Professor Liu is Elected Member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe) since 2015. He is the author of twelve books, and written widely in scholarly journals in both English and Chinese. In addition, He frequently contributes in the form of op-eds, interviews, reviews, to American and Chinese print media and the internet media, on issues ranging from contemporary Chinese media and culture, globalization, to Marxism and aesthetics. His research covers Chinese Studies, cultural and media studies, comparative literature, political science, and international relations.
Prof. Zhiguang Yin (殷之光), Fudan University
Zhiguang Yin is a Professor in international politics at the Fudan University. His research interest lies mainly in the area of Chinese modern intellectual and legal history, ethnic minority policy, 19-20 century history of international relations, imperial history, and Sino-Middle Eastern relations. His research and teaching centre on a theoretical interests in understanding the making of the modern world order through the dynamic tension between domination and resistance. His current projects include studies of liberal imperialism and Afro-Asian solidarity movements with a particular interests in Sino-African, Sino-Middle Eastern relations and pan-Africanism. His most recent monographs include: A New World: Afro-Asian Solidarity and the PRC’s Imagination of Global Order (Chinese, 2022), and Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2014). His articles appear in English and Chinese academic journals such as European Journal of International Law, Third World Quarterly, History, Turkish Journal of Sociology, Shehui Kexue (Social Sciences), and Kaifang Shidai (Open Times).
Prof. Dan Vukovich (胡德), HKU, School of Humanities
Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of colonialism/imperialism and critical theory in relation to the intellectual and political history of the “China-West” relationship. He has worked in Hong Kong since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program at HKU and has been an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing and a Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学). He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) and most recently After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In these three books and in numerous articles he is concerned with the age-old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge (and ‘real’ politics), and the dialectics of difference and universality.
Panel 3 (11:50am–1:10pm) Back to the Future: Traditions & the Contemporary
Prof. Daniel Bell (貝淡寧), HKU, Faculty of Law
Daniel A. Bell (貝淡寧) is Professor, Chair of Political Theory with the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He served as Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University (Qingdao) from 2017 to 2022. His books include The Dean of Shandong (2023), Just Hierarchy (co-authored with Wang Pei, 2020), The China Model (2015), The Spirit of Cities (co-authored with Avner de-Shalit, 2012), China’s New Confucianism (2008), Beyond Liberal Democracy (2007), and East Meets West (2000), all published by Princeton University Press. He is also the author of Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1993). He is founding editor of the Princeton-China series (Princeton University Press) which translates and publishes original and influential academic works from China. His works have been translated in 23 languages. He has been interviewed in English, Chinese, and French. In 2018, he was awarded the Huilin Prize and was honored as a “Cultural Leader” by the World Economic Forum.
Prof. Wang Pei (汪沛), HKU, School of Chinese
Wang Pei, Assistant professor at the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong. She completed her PhD thesis on phenomenology at department of philosophy of Tsinghua University and was a joint PhD. student in Université Paris 1. She was a post-doc fellow in Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Science. She is the co-author (with Daniel. A. Bell) of Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World, published by Princeton University Press in 2020. She has authored academic articles in English, Chinese, and French, mainly on phenomenology and comparative philosophy. She is currently writing a book titled “The Power of Calligraphy: A Political History of Calligraphy in China.”
Prof. Lili Yang (杨力苈), HKU, Faculty of Education
Lili Yang is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. She has strong interests in Eastern-Western comparison in higher education, especially how higher education (including the epistemic practices of intellectuals, the position of the university in society, the individualized and collective good of universities) are shaped by Eastern and Western intellectual traditions, and social, political, and educational cultures. Lili is interested in drawing on traditional Chinese ideas and thoughts to inform contemporary (global) higher educational practices. She also conducts research on global science. More broadly, her interests include higher education, comparative education, and educational and political philosophy. Previously, Lili was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, where she also received her Ph.D. in Education. She is the author of Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Prof. Beth Harper, HKU, Comparative Literature – Chair
Beth Harper is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her interests span premodern European and Chinese literature and thought, with a particular focus on tragedy, lyric, comparative east-west poetics, ecocriticism and the intersection of literature and philosophy.
Prof. Enze Han (韓恩澤), HKU, Department of Politics & Public Administration
Enze Han is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, The University of Hong Kong. He is an expert on international relations of Southeast Asia and China’s foreign policy towards Southeast Asia. His recent publications include The Ripple Effect: China’s Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2024), Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State Building between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019), Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National Identity in China (Oxford University Press, 2013), and more than 30 academic articles appearing in Journal of Politics, International Affairs, Review of International Studies, World Development, The China Quarterly, Security Studies, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies among many others. Dr. Han was awarded Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University during 2021-2022. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders’ Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, United States. Dr. Han received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the George Washington University, and he was also a postdoctoral research fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University.
Prof. Zhengxu Wang, (王正绪), Zhejiang University
Zhengxu Wang is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Political Science, School of Public Affairs of Zhejiang University in China. Before joining Zhejiang University, he was Distinguished Professor at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs, research fellow at the East Asian Institute of National University of Singapore, and Associate Professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at UK’s University of Nottingham, where he also served as Acting Director of the university’s China Policy Institute. His research interests are in comparative politics, Chinese politics, and empirical political science theories. His publications have appeared in Governance, International Review of Sociology, Political Research Quarterly, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and others.
Prof. Loretta Kim [金由美], HKU, School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Loretta Kim is an Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. She is a historian of late imperial and modern China, focusing on the comparative history of borderlands and frontiers, regional identities and histories of China, and Chinese ethnic minority languages and literatures. Her most recent publications include Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (2019) and The Russian Orthodox Community in Hong Kong: Religion, Ethnicity, and Intercultural Relations (2021).
Panel 5 (3:50–5:05pm) Culture in Globalization: Ways of Seeing, Feeling, & Being
Prof. Alvin K. Wong (黃家軒), HKU, Comparative Literature
Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. His research spans across the fields of Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, queer theory, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities. Wong’s book Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He has published in journals such as Gender, Place & Culture, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Concentric, Cultural Dynamics, Continuum, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, JCMS, and Interventions and in edited volumes such as Transgender China, Queer Sinophone Cultures, Fredric Jameson and Film Theory, Sinophone Utopias, and Queer TV China. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020).
Prof. Geng Song (宋耕), HKU, School of Chinese
Geng Song is a Professor in the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong. He has written extensively on topics such as men and masculinities in East Asia, Chinese television, and Chinese nationalism. Among his publications are Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity (2022), Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China(co-author, 2014), Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century (co-editor, 2015), The Cosmopolitan Dream: Transnational Chinese Masculinities in a Global Age (co-editor, 2018), and The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (2004). He also co-edits a book series on “Transnational Asian Masculinities” for Hong Kong University Press.
Prof. Wei Yan Vivien (魏艷), HKU, School of Chinese
Wei Yan is an Assistant Professor at the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of two books, including Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Modern Chinese Detective Fiction (1896-1949) (Brill, 2020) and The Transculturation of Judge Dee Stories: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Routledge, 2022). Her current GRF project focuses on Radio Drama in Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s.
Speaker: Sijia Yao, Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture, Soka University of America
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, May 16, 2024 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: CRT-7.30, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU & on Zoom
This talk draws on Sijia Yao’s recently published book Cosmopolitan Love (University of Michigan Press, 2023) in which she proposes a new notion of cosmopolitanism by examining the love stories of D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang. Instead of adopting the regular inquiry modes of comparison between East and West, she experiments with a comparison methodology, the third term comparison, which establishes at the outset a purpose that allows the concentration on two texts from two very distinctive cultural contexts, reestablishing and reshaping relationships. She will introduce such an approach, which provides the conceptual tools to establish a China–West purposive comparative paradigm that structures the whole book. She demonstrates the method with a case study.
Sijia Yao (PhD Purdue University) is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America. She has published articles on Sinophone literature, film, music, and culture in journals such as The Comparatist, Comparative Literature Studies, Tamkang Review, and Telos. Her book, Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang was published by the University of Michigan Press in November 2023. This event is co-organized by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, Department of Comparative Literature, and the School of Chinese in the Faculty of Arts at the University of 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. It is co-hosted by the School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU, and co-sponsored by the Louis Cha Fund for Chinese Studies & East/West Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC).
This seminar intersects key areas of Eileen Chang’s existence as a bilingual writer from a unique empirical perspective by trying to answer the question: How did a male translator tackle the complicated mission of rendering her English works in a Chinese style that would possibly be seen as approximating her own, with at least some hallmarks of the unmatchable master? Reflecting on his translations of Chang over the years, including the novella “The Young Marshal,” a speech, an essay and letters, the speaker will cite examples and tell anecdotes that occurred in the process of his bittersweet job, revealing how despite a translator’s ideally “invisible” role, certain elements of his person could seep into the drafts before the occasion arose for rectification and fine-tuning, often with insight from collaborators, to precisely mirror probable authorial intentions. If Chinese is Chang’s ultimate homeland, her siren call for homeward translation will never cease. Perhaps a translation voyage thus directed is only bound for a phantom isle in Chang’s literary terrain but even so, it is a space full of what George Steiner named “the liberating power of the word.”
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 鄭遠濤 譯書寫作的人，英文系畢業，曾獲兩屆梁實秋文學獎翻譯類獎項。生於廣州，現居三藩市灣區。少年時癡迷張愛玲作品，30歲左右得到將英文張著翻譯為中文的機緣，譯出《少帥》，後來參與兩卷本《張愛玲往來書信集》所涉譯事。其他譯著有西洋歷史小說亞歷山大三部曲、《奧古斯都》，約翰·伯格的《到婚禮去》等。近年因戀上巴西音樂而學習葡萄牙語。
Silvano Zheng is a literary translator and writer with a degree in English. Two-time winner of the prestigious Liang Shih-chiu Translation Award from Taiwan. Born in Guangzhou, he lives in Berkeley, California. Aficionado of Eileen Chang’s oeuvre since his adolescence, at 30 he undertook an assignment to translate the late master’s English works into Chinese, a project that resulted in The Young Marshal and other volumes. Zheng’s translations also include Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy, John Williams’ novel Augustus, and John Berger’s To the Wedding. He is now learning Portuguese for the love of Brazilian music.
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: Tani Barlow, George & Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities, Department of History, Rice University
Moderators: Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, SMLC, The University of Hong Kong Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong
Date: 2 MAY 2024 (THU) Time: 4:30–6:00 pm Venue: Room 436, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
This talk explores my difficulties writing an intellectual history of society. Society and 社會 are categories that became, over the last century, our primary way of illuminating the past, and explaining what we currently experience. Yet – this is my starting point – society/社會 are anachronous; they were never a part of thought or experience before the early 20th century. Previously, in The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (2004) and In the Event of Women (2021) I sought evidence of a subject, and conditions for thinking that made it possible for that subject, women, to act to emancipate itself. In this project I seek to understand how social theorists, including feminists, forged a universal explanation of human experience, society, and how they ontologized its foundational elements as the universal historical experiences of social class, social sex, and social self.
Tani Barlow is George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and the founding senior editor of positions: asia critique. She is the author of In the Event of Women (Duke University Press, 2021), The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Duke University Press, 2004), and Inter/National Feminism and China, Ito Ruri and Kobayashi Eri, trans., (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Press, 2003).
The series is coordinated by Prof. Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Prof. Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Prof. Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures. This event is organized with the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. For details, go to www.meal.hku.hk.
Eileen Chang’s incomplete manuscript Chronicle of a Strange Land was posthumously published in 2010. Originally written in 1946, Chronicle is structured like a travelogue but unfolds like a fiction narrative. Its incompleteness and stylistic hybridity lead to multiple readings. This lecture begins with a stylistic analysis of the narrative, followed by a discussion of how an internal landscape is materialized as the narrative progresses. In a land of strangeness, a particular “Chineseness” comes into shape, observed through a sharp and stern gaze, and realized in a metaphorical and, at times, poetic language. This lecture defines the uniqueness of Chronicle in the context of Eileen Chang’s entire writing career.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 吳曉東 北京大學中文系教授，主要研究領域為中國現代文學，大量的專著和編著中的代表作品有：《陽光與苦難》、《象徵主義與中國現代文學》、《從卡夫卡到昆德拉》、《二十世紀外國小說專題》、《鏡花水月的世界》、《二十世紀的詩心》、《一九三〇年代的滬上文學風景》、《臨水的納蕤思：中國現代派詩歌的藝術母題》、《記憶的神話》、《文學性的命運》等等。
WU Xiaodong is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at Peking University. He is the prolific author and editor of dozens of monographs and editions including the following: Sunlight and Suffering, Symbolism in Modern Chinese Literature, From Kafka to Kundela, Case Studies of Twentieth-Century Novels, The World Through the Looking Glass, The Zeitgeist of Twentieth-Century Poetry, The Literary Landscape in 1930s Shanghai, Narcissus at the Water: A Study of Motifs in Modern Chinese Poetry, The Myth of Memories, The Destiny of Literariness, and many more.
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)
