Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time (2:00 pm Lahore) Venue: On Zoom
One of the oldest settlements in Karachi, Lyari has been the site on-going violence between political parties, criminal gangs and law enforcement agencies since the early 2000s. Due to this on-going conflict, Lyari has been labeled by law enforcement agencies and the media as one of several ‘no-go areas’ in the city. However, residents of Lyari tell a different story, referring to this area as ‘Karachi ki maan’ or the mother of Karachi. For Lyari’s residents, their locality has continuously shifted from being a space of protection against the hostile social and political environment of the city to a space of terror at the hands of local criminal gangs and law enforcement agencies. While the conflict has gradually subsided since 2013, the state-led Operation came with its own violence with many residents losing family members to extrajudicial killings (‘encounters’). Many others are still in prison for alleged involvement in the gangs. Furthermore, the roots of the conflict—poverty, drugs, and the conflict between political parties—remain factors that shape the area. Hence, while Lyari may officially be at ‘peace’, residents are aware the violent conflict may erupt at any time in the future. This documentary follows two residents of Lyari, both of whom have lost family members to gang violence and police encounters. Through telling their stories, the documentary sheds light on the on-going ramifications of violence and to question whether peace has truly been achieved for the people of Lyari.
Nida Kirmani – Producer Professor Nida Kirmani is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is a leading, feminist public intellectual who has published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development, and urban studies in India and Pakistan.
In November 1946, Eileen Chang released a revised edition of Romances. The preface “A Few Words to the Reader,” the postscript “China’s Day and Night,” and the cover featuring a modern person peering into the home of a late Qing dynasty woman offer insight into her creative process and personal circumstances. The preface serves as a defense against the label of traitor, while the postscript features a poem that atypically blends themes of daily life and love, evoking a sense of unease that she wished to convey through the cover. All of these revolve around the keyword “home”, revealing Chang’s interior aesthetic. Despite Chang’s expressed preference for Chinese-style “one bright two dark” rooms, her marriage, life path, autobiographical works, and late self-writing suggest otherwise. In hindsight, the preface, postscript, and cover of the revised edition of Romances appear to have foreshadowed her later years, which were marked by unease. Regarding Chang’s life and writing, this talk posits that the world provided Chang with a space and time where her characters could traverse bright and dark rooms through passageways, while she traversed different eras through her fiction.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 蘇偉貞，香港大學中文學院博士。1985年至2006年任職《聯合報》副刊，2007年起專任中國文化大學中文系、成功大學中文系等校，目前任教致理科技大學通職學部。80年代初期以《陪他一段》（1983）崛起文壇， 90年代以《沉默之島》（1994）獲《中國時報》百萬小說評審團大獎，已出版多部小說集和散文集，及學術專書《孤島張愛玲──追蹤張愛玲香港時期小說》(2002)、《描紅──台灣張派作家世代論》（2006）、《長鏡頭下的張愛玲：影像‧書信‧出版》（2011）、《不安、厭世與自我退隱──易文及同代南來文人》（2020）。
SU Wei-chen obtained her PhD from the School of Chinese, HKU. She worked at the United Daily News from 1985 to 2006. Since 2007, she has held full-time teaching positions at several universities, including the Chinese Culture University and National Cheng Kung University. Currently, she teaches at the General Education Division of Chihlee University of Technology. She rose to fame with her novel Be with Him for a While (1983), and in the 1990s, she won the China Times Literature Award for Best Novel with Island of Silence (1994). She is the author of more than a dozen volumes of fiction and nonfiction, as well as three scholarly books on Eileen Chang and one on the film director and screenwriter Yi Wen.
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: Christopher B. Patterson (aka Kawika Guillermo), Associate Professor, Social Justice Institute, University of British Columbia
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2023 Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (7:00 pm/Sep 19, Vancouver) Venue: On Zoom
This talk catalogues the author’s writing process for their prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, using the concept of creative “self-referencing:” the way writers discover their multiple selves scattered throughout the world (and in art), and how they seek to reference them in their own work. Against forms of creative imagination that see writers as singular “voices” who express their individuality, self-referencing discloses the many others (authors, communities, kin) who influence an authors’ sense of self. For marginalized authors, self-referencing has become a resistant form of embodied cross-referencing that affirms the writer’s non-normative desires, experiences, and ways of being (and writing) by embracing their multiple points of (self)reference, and their multiple selves.
Kawika Guillermo is the author of Stamped: An Anti-travel Novel and All Flowers Bloom. Kawika Guillermo is the matrilineal name for Christopher B. Patterson, who is Associate Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and the author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games and Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific.
Date: Wednesday, August 30, 2023 Time: 11:00 am – 12:30 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: CRT-7.30, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU Language: English
This lecture traces the origins, development, and ramifications of two influential discourses in contemporary Chinese literary and film studies: a “Chinese school of comparative literature” and a “Chinese school of film.” While the former originated in the 1970s and continues to the present, the latter has emerged in recent years. There are similarities between the two. The lecture offers an assessment of the possible strengths and contributions of these ideas and also points out their theoretical inconsistency and blind spots. While such discourses attempt to rightfully overcome Eurocentric tendencies and promote indigenous traditions in academia, they create a new set of problems and dilemmas at the same time.
Sheldon Lu is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Davis where he has served as Department Chair of Comparative Literature, Director of Graduate Program of Comparative Literature, and Founding Co-Director of Film Studies. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of some 15 books in English and Chinese on comparative literature, Chinese literature, and films studies. His recent books include Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation (2021); Lyric Poetry and Solidarity Society in Hong Kong in the 1950s 一九五〇年代香港詞壇與堅社 (2022, in Chinese); and Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema: Reimagining a Field (2020, co-editor).
This seminar is presented by the School of Chinese with the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong.
NOV 15 | WED | 05:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty Speaker: Pang Laikwan, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Cultural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong Moderator: Jean Ma, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
NOV 9 | THU | 05:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana Speaker: Jon Solomon, Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 Moderator: Daniel Vukovich, Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
NOV 1 | WED | 05:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR Screening War in Russian and Chinese Nationalist Blockbusters Speaker:Dr. Tatu-Ilari Laukkanen, Tampere University, Finland Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
OCT 25 | WED | 05:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR Formal Objects in the Anthropocene: Shell and Spiral Speaker: Robert Hariman, Professor, School of Communication, Northwestern University Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
SEP 20 | WED | 10:00 AM (HKT) | SEMINAR Creative Self-Referencing: writing crafts for our many selves Speaker: Christopher B. Patterson (aka Kawika Guillermo), Associate Professor, Social Justice Institute, University of British Columbia Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator: Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, July 3, 2023 Screening: 4:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Discussion: 5:10 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: Room CPD3.04, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU and ON ZOOM
This presentation examines the creation of Valerie Soe’s 2019 documentary film “Love Boat: Taiwan,” which looks at one of the longest-running cultural immersion programs in the world. The program, which is well-known in the Taiwanese American community, is sponsored by the government of Taiwan and takes place every summer in Taipei. Despite its high-minded aspirations that include classes in Mandarin-language study, martial arts, and brush painting, the program’s popularity stems from another source: its reputation as an excellent place for college-aged Taiwanese Americans to hook up and find romance. Because of this, although it does not take on a ship and is landlocked at a conference center in Taipei, the program is more commonly known by its romantic nickname – the Taiwan Love Boat.
Since its inception in the 1960s the Love Boat has served three purposes: as a propaganda tool for the Taiwanese government, as a site for romance for young Taiwanese Americans, and as a means for Taiwanese American parents to insure the preservation of Taiwanese bloodlines. Every summer this unique form of diplomacy gives young Taiwanese Americans a taste of global politics on an intimate scale. By looking at the ways in which a seemingly innocuous program can have wide-ranging political, social, and cultural repercussions, “Love Boat: Taiwan” explores the intersections of culture, politics, and history.
In addition to discussing and screening the film “Love Boat: Taiwan,” Valerie Soe will also talk about some of her award-winning short experimental films and documentaries that look at the experiences and concerns of Asian Americans.
Valerie Soe – Director, Producer & Writer Since 1986 Valerie Soe’s experimental videos, installations, and documentary films have won dozens of awards, grants, and commissions and have exhibited at film festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide. Her short experimental video, “ALL ORIENTALS LOOK THE SAME,” won Best International Video at the 1987 Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani, Torino, Italy, First Place, Experimental Category, at the 1987 Sony Corporation Visions of U.S. Festival, and Honorable Mention, Experimental Video, at the 12th Atlanta Film and Video Festival. Her feature documentary, “Love Boat: Taiwan,” was released in 2019 and won the Audience Award at the Urban Nomad Film Festival In Taipei, Taiwan, and has played to sold-out festival audiences across North America and in Taiwan. Her short experimental documentary, “Radical Care: The Auntie Sewing Squad” (2020), made in collaboration with Kronos Quartet and the Auntie Sewing Squad, won a Director’s Choice Award at the 2021 Thomas Edison Film Festival and the 2021 Best of Bernal Award at Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema. Her writing has been published in books and journals including “Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism;” “The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema;” “Amerasia Journal,” and “Asian Cinema,” among many others. Soe is the author of the blog beyondasiaphilia.com (recipient of a 2011 Art Writers’ Grant, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation), which looks at Asian and Asian American art, film, culture, and activism. She is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.
Speakers: Prof. Christopher LUPKE (University of Alberta) & Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan LI (York University)
Commentators: Dr. LIN Pei-yin & Prof. Nicole HUANG (HKU)
Date & Time: July 3, 2023 (Mon) 16:00-18:00pm Language: English Venue: Level 2 Multi-Purpose Area (Ingenium), Main Library, Main Campus, HKU
Topic #1: Ritual, Repression, Repetition, and Reproduction In the Fiction of Eileen Chang This presentation considers the fiction of Eileen Chang, especially her classic short story “The Golden Cangue” (1943) in light of the grammar of filiality in Chinese society and cultural representation. One might initially think, how does Eileen Chang’s work figure into the scheme of filiality? Narrowly understood, filiality primarily means respect for one’s parents, ancestors, and privileges the vaunted role of sons in the process of biological reproduction. But when we investigate filiality more deeply, we can see that it functions in Chinese society (and all of East Asia for that matter) as a sort of grammar that has loosely scripted consanguine relations for more than two millennia. But that all changed in the modern era when filiality became the battleground in the crisis between tradition and modernity. So, how does Eileen Chang fit in? Many of her works very consciously or even obsessively linger upon the questions of marriage, biological reproduction, and intergenerational relations. “The Golden Cangue,” a story in which the main character Qiqiao is forced into a loveless marriage of convenience by her relatives for monetary gain, is perhaps the best example in modern Chinese fiction of a person once persecuted who becomes the perpetrator, someone who was a victim of feudal values and social convention who returns at a later age to inflict on her own children the same sort of abuse that was visited upon her. This disturbing fact has created one of the most fascinating caesuras in modern Chinese literature and an endless point of speculation and discussion for scholars of the modern era. What do we do when the target of mistreatment and trauma becomes one of its most adroit and gruesome offenders? Eileen Chang’s work persists in haunting our thinking and discussions precisely because of its irremediable refusal to allow us to empathize with one of its most emblematic victims.
Christopher Lupke (Ph. D. Cornell University)is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and former Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies. A scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and cinema, his books include The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien: Culture, Style, Voice, and Motion and a translation of Ye Shitao’s monumental work, A History of Taiwan Literature, which one the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the translation of a scholarly book from the Modern Language Association. Christopher Lupke has edited or co-edited five books and five special journal issues, and is the recipient of the Michael Delahoyde Award for Distinguished Editing. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, boundary 2, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Chinese Literature, and numerous other publications. Lupke’s current research project is a book-length study of the Confucian notion of “filiality” in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone fiction.
Topic #2: Eileen Chang’s Works and Self-Translation Eileen Chang’s literary achievements are in part a result of her bilingualism and self-translation, which means that her work engages mainly with two languages and their related literary traditions, cultures, and critical traditions, although this point is overlooked in most studies of her works. As a Chinese and English bilingual writer and self-translator, Chang both preserves and transgresses the Chinese and English literary and cultural conventions that provide the larger context of this study. This talk focuses on Eileen Chang’s Chinese short story “Guihuazheng: Ah Xiao beiqiu” (1944), Chang’s self-translation into English, “Shame, Amah!” (1962), and its triangular English translation by Simon Patton, “Steamed Osmanthus Flower: Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn” (2000). Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan Li will examine the in-betweenness and an interdependent relationship among these texts. She argues that the combination of Chinese and English versions presents a better picture of both Chinese and Western perspectives on gender relations and life philosophy in early twentieth-century China.
Jessica Tsui-yan Li (Ph.D. Chinese University of Hong Kong; Ph.D. University of Toronto) is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University. She is Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. She has published on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese Canadian literature, film, drama, translation studies, gender studies, Hong Kong studies, and diasporic studies. She is the editor of The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019) and the guest editor of the special issues for the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée on “Engaging Communities in Comparative Literature” June 2017 44.2 and “Garnering Diversities in Comparative Literature” June 2018 45.2. She has published several articles on Eileen Chang Studies. Her essay, “Xunfang Zhang Ailing de Xingkong” (Seeking the Starry Sky of Zhang Ailing) published in Dang’an Chunqiu (Memories and Archives) in Shanghai in 2015 received the finalist award organized by Shanghai shi dang’an guan (Shanghai Municipal Archives). She is currently working on a monograph on the self-translation of Eileen Chang.
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)
A conversation between: Dr. Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University Dr. Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Dr. Akshya Saxena, Assistant Professor of English, Vanderbilt University Dr. Preeti Singh, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program, Dartmouth College
Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2023 Time: 7:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
Isabel Huacuja Alonso is a historian of sound media and modern South Asia in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her book Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, January 2023) is a transnational history of radio broadcasting in Hindi and Urdu from the late colonial period through the early post-independence era (1920-1980).
Daniel Elam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Fordham University Press, 2020) and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2020).
Akshya Saxena is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press, 2022) and the co-editor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, Practice (University of California Press, 2023).
Preeti Singh is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages program at Dartmouth College. She researches and teaches postcolonial studies and world literature with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first-century South Asian and South Asian diasporic literatures and cinema.
Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar are currently creating the scaffolding of their newest book on histories and practices of documentary theatre in India. They understand this publication as an expansion of their own curatorial work into the field of writing. Therefore, the foundation of this publication is rooted in the act of curation. Curating a book—as opposed to Anthologizing—is open and shapeshifting without water tight dictums. In their volume multi-authored erotica performance texts sit just as comfortably next to academic essays. Similarly, a work-in-progress script and course curriculum occupy a harmonious space rather than a disparate one. For them curating is that delicate process of synchronous interrelation of thought, action, time, politics, and history.
While classical performance writing stays within the world of a single play, a curatorial approach is concerned with the orbit that lies outside the particular theatrical production. Together with an esteemed panel of theatremakers and editors, they want to discuss the question—What strategies and approaches might allow one to extend such a curatorial gesture into a book?
Panelists: Kai Tuchmann, Dramaturge, Director and Academic Anuja Ghosalkar, Writer and Director, Founder of Drama Queen Amitesh Grover, Associate Professor, National School of Drama (India) Nishant Shah, Professor of Global Media and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio, Chinese University of Hong Kong Arushi Vats, Writer Zhao Chuan, Theatremaker, Writer and Founding Member of the Shanghai-based Theatre Collective Grass Stage
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU
Date: Tuesday, June 20, 2023 Time: 5:00-6:30 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom
Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar are the co-curators of the first international workshop series on Documentary Theatre in India called Starting Realities that programmed artists like Gobsquad Collective, Boris Nikitin, Rimini Protokoll, Zhao Chuan through 2018-19. Collaboratively they curated a symposium on Documentary Theatre practices in India and Asia for the Serendipity Arts Festival in 2019 titled, Connecting Realities. They are co-curators of a VR based performance called, Look, Here is Your Machine, Get In! for the Serendipity Arts Virtual 2020. For the Brecht Festival, Augsburg 2022, they curated an experimental video work. In 2022 they designed and facilitated an online course curriculum on Digital Documentary Theatre for the Serendipity Arts Foundation. The duo has facilitated workshops and lectures at It’s the Real Thing, Basel, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, National School of Drama, New Delhi, Harkat Studio, Mumbai, Goethe-Institute Bangalore and Mumbai, Under The Mango Tree, Berlin, University of Music and Performing Arts, Frankfurt. Currently they are editing a book on the history of Documentary Theatre in India, that will be published in 2024 by Hong Kong University Press.
Kai Tuchmann Kai Tuchmann graduated in directing from Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. He works as a dramaturge, director and academic. 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 he is a Fellow of the Mellon School of Theatre at Harvard University. In his internationally shown documentary theatre 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, Zürcher Theatrespektakel, Festival d’Automne à Paris, and documenta-institute. His recent publication is the edited volume Postdramatic Dramaturgies-Resonances between Asia and Europe (transcript, 2022).
Anuja Ghosalkar Anuja Ghosalkar is the founder of Drama Queen—a Documentary theatre company, evolving a unique form of theatre in India since 2015. Her practice focuses on personal histories, archival absences and blurring the hierarchies between audience and performer—to extend the idea of theatre to create audacious work. Iterations around form and process, modes of (social) media, sites, technologies, reclaiming narratives on gender and intimacy are critical to her performance making and pedagogy. Her performances and workshops have been programmed by University of Oxford, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Sophiensale, Serendipity Arts Festival, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Forum Transregionale –ZMO, among others. As guest faculty at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, she leads practice based pedagogy. She has written on film and performance for Nang Magazine, Art India, Bioscope, Hakara, Outlook, and for an edited volume on Performance Making and the Archive for Routledge. She is the 2022 research fellow at the archives of the National Centre for Biological Studies.
Amitesh Grover Amitesh Grover (b.1980) is an award-winning director and artist. He is the recipient of the MASH FICA Award, Swiss Art Residency Award, Bismillah Khan National Award, Charles Wallace Award (U.K.), and was nominated for the Arte Laguna Prize (Italy), Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) and Forecast Award (HKW, Germany). With a background as a theatre director, he works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and concepts: an embodied practice that he calls performance in the expanded field. His work has been shown globally at venues like the Southbank Centre (London), Arts Centre (Melbourne), MT Space (Canada), HKW Berlin (Germany), Belluard Bollwerk International (Switzerland), The Hartell Gallery (U.S.), and in India at the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Chennai Photo Biennale, VAICA Video Art Festival, among several others. He has been curator for the International Theatre Festival of Kerala, Ranga Shankara (Bangalore), and Nove Writers’ Festival (Prague). He studied at the University of Arts London, and is a published author in several performance journals. Currently, he is Associate Professor at the National School of Drama (India). He is based in New Delhi, India, and his work and reviews are available online <www.amiteshgrover.com>
Nishant Shah Nishant Shah is a Professor of Global Media and the Director of the Digital Narratives Studio at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After co-founding the Centre for Internet & Society (India) in 2008, he has since then, worked in various academic roles as the Director of Digital School at Leuphana University in Germany, and the Vice-President of Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts in The Netherlands. He is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a knowledge partner with Point of View (Mumbai), Digital Asia Hub (Singapore/Hong Kong), and Radboud Institute of Culture and History (Nijmegen). Nishant actively positions his work at the intersections of academic research, humanist traditions of story-telling and meaning making, and capacity development for hopeful change practice. His last two books Really Fake (University of Minnesota Press) and Overload, Excess, Creep: An Internet From India (Institute of Network Cultures / Leftword Books), are available for open digital access. His current preoccupations are about expanding and exploring the affordances of digital authorship, authenticity, and authority towards collective action.
Arushi Vats Arushi Vats is a writer based in New Delhi, India. She is the associate editor for Fiction at Alternative South Asia Photography, and the recipient of the Momus – Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship 2021, and the Art Scribes Award 2021. She has conducted workshops on writing for Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, Khoj International Artists Association, and Art Chain India. Her curatorial projects have focused on conceptions of image and power, and histories of resistance in South Asia.
Zhao Chuan Zhao Chuan, born in 1967, works across theatre, literature, film and contemporary art. He creates alternative and socially engaged theatre and is the founding member and mastermind of the Shanghai-based theatre collective Grass Stage (since 2005). For over a decade, as a theatremaker and writer, he has created a number of theatre works across China together with his collective Grass Stage. However, they are often unable to present these works in conventional theatres because of the issues they addressed and their non-professional set-up. The group encourages people from different backgrounds to consider human living conditions and historical issues and stimulates participators and audiences to respond to those issues through the creative process, rehearsals, performances and post-talks. Given its strong interest in social practice, the group’s theatre activities have often been considered too ideological, marginal and uncertain by the mainstream. From 2015 to 2019, Grass Stage supported industry workers to make their theatre pieces; From 2017 to 2019, in dialogue with young people from diverse backgrounds, the group developed stage plays on youth issues in today’s China. His theatre works include Geli Isle (2021), Wild Seeds (2018) and Social Theater Trilogy (2006–2017), comprising World Factory, The Little Society, Madmen’s Stories, Unsettling Stones (2012) etc. “Theatre of Contagion” is the new start of a series of works since the pandemic era in early 2020.
He has been awarded several international literary awards, including the Unita Prize for New Novelists (Taiwan 2001). His publications include fiction, essays and art criticism: On Radical Art: the 80s Scene in Shanghai (author, 2014), The Body at Stake: Experiments in Chinese Contemporary Art and Theatre (co-editor, author, 2013), Beyond the Stage: Zurich Sketches (author, 2021) and AnOther Gathering: Performance in Multiple Realities (co-editor, author, 2021). He is also the producer of an independent documentary titled Shanghai Youth (2015). He has been involved in many international art residencies, collaboration projects and teaching.
Speaker: Professor Theodore Huters, Professor Emeritus of Chinese, UCLA
Moderator: Dr. Daniel Vukovich, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, June 8, 2023 Time: 4:00 pm (Hong Kong Time) Venue: On Zoom and Face-to-Face
The period between China’s defeat by Japan in 1895 and the New Culture Movement that gathered momentum after 1919 was marked by a great epistemic instability. Whereas there had been a number of efforts to accept certain Western ideas and technologies in the period prior to the war with Japan, even those who embraced those efforts were committed to the notion of Chinese cultural superiority. And following the May Fourth Movement and the reorganization of Peking University and the Commercial Press, there was general acceptance among the intellectual elite that the old Chinese order was not up to the challenge of the West. In the interim period, however, neither the Chinese nor the Western system was regarded definitively as having the upper hand: there was instead a nagging uncertainty as to which set of ideas was ultimately superior. Wu Jianren (1866-1910) was the novelist most acutely tuned into the political economy and intellectual wavering of the period, and his The New Story of the Stone, written in two distinct segments between 1905 and 1907, is his most complete interpretation of the various hard choices he saw as confronting China. While in the work he recognizes, often only indirectly, the power of Western science, after setting out China’s problems in the first half of the novel, in the second half he deploys the tropes of science fiction in an attempt to prove the superiority and potential of Chinese cultural values. The supreme difficulty of this effort is mirrored in the contradictions and inconsistencies that surface in the text.
Theodore Huters is Professor Emeritus of Chinese at UCLA and editor of the translation journal Renditions. He holds a PhD from Stanford University. His publications include Qian Zhongshu, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China, as well as numerous articles and edited books on modern and late traditional Chinese culture. He has translated a number of works by important Chinese intellectuals. His latest book is Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity, published in 2022.
