Date: Wednesday, 1 December 2021 Time: 5:00 pm (HKT) on Zoom
In this talk, I engage with Huang Zumo’s (黃祖模) film Romance on Lu Mountain (廬山戀) (1980) to explore the consumption of romantic love (including the first representation of a kiss in the People’s Republic of China cinema), fashionable clothes, and petty bourgeois sensibility. I argue that the depiction of a female character and her fashionable clothes in Huang’s film can be regarded as a signifying site where the changing relationship between the libidinal and the political from the end of the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of China’s economic reforms is staged and dramatized. I also present the fashion shows, magazines, and television melodramas that accentuate the rise of this fashion consciousness. Taken together, I contend that de-sublimation of romantic love, the re-fetishization of gender, and the re-articulation of ethnicity and culture are ultimately a political process: in the 1980s, the political culture of revolution is replaced by the economic ideology of modernization and development.
Calvin Hui is a Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of William and Mary in the United States. His research focuses on modern Chinese humanities (film, media, and literature), Hong Kong studies, critical theory, and cultural studies, with particular emphases on Marxist theory, gender and sexuality studies, and post-colonial and transnational studies. His first book, titled The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China, was published by Columbia University Press in September 2021. Hui is a recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2019). He is also a recipient of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Research Grant (2020) and Scholar Grant (2016).
Date: Wednesday, 17 November 2021 Time: 5:30 – 7:30 pm (GMT +8) Venue: 1/F – MWT4 (Meng Wah Complex), HKU Language: Screening—In Cantonese and Mandarin with Chinese and English subtitles Discussion—In Cantonese
Speaker: Chan Hau Chun, HKIPF 2021 Featured Image Maker
In collaboration with the Hong Kong International Photo Festival (HKIPF), the Department of Comparative Literature and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures will present a screening of the latest work Cubicle by Hong Kong emerging image maker Chan Hau Chun, a featured artist of Photography Cinema, HKIPF 2021. The Festival 2021 explores the multitude of forms, concepts, and narrativity of images between ‘still’ and ‘moving’; contemplates the mutual transformative influences of photography and our modes of living have on each other; etches out and reflects on the minute details of a multifaceted contemporary society. Details: https://hkipf.org.hk/news/photography-cinema/
About Cubicle In an old part of Hong Kong lies an old building, and within it countless little rooms. Demarcated merely by wooden panels, each room houses one family: a subdivided flat, with shared toilet-kitchens, sultry, impermeable, where hundreds live.
The film weaves together images taken over the last few years, documenting residents of subdivided flats within one building. After the social movement in Hong Kong and in coping with the global pandemic, the seemingly mundane everyday lives of these residents are in fact full of underlying tension. Within the cramped and rundown building, some people move out after just half a month, some stay for thirty years; some have grown up here, some have passed away in the rooms… What does our society look like when seen through these steady long takes? A 15-minute cut: https://www.nowness.asia/story/cubicle-hong-kong-apartments
About Chan Hau Chun Chan Hau Chun is a graduate of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, she is currently working as an independent film and image-maker. She produces both photography and videography; her works include Under the bridge, 32+4, Uncle Fai, Call me Mrs Chan, No song to sing, and Searching for Lau Tit Man.
About HKIPF Hong Kong International Photo Festival (HKIPF) was launched in 2010. In every edition, the Festival introduces different themes, movements, local and overseas practitioners to discuss manifold issues and perspectives. Through a wide range of public programmes, the Festival bridges Hong Kong and international perspectives, creating conversations between people and place, past and present, with oneself and the world. Website: https://hkipf.org.hk / Instagram: @hkipf
Speaker: Kenny Ng, Associate Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University Moderator: Nicole Huang, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU
Date: Thursday, 4 November 2021 Time: 5:00 pm (GMT +8) Venue: On Zoom
Recent scholarship has explored Eileen Chang’s United States Information Agency connection as a translator of American literature and her ambiguous voice on both sides of the Cold War divide. My previous chapters trace the generic travels of Chang’s romances and comedies across Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. This talk attempts to develop a new chapter on a Cantonese film ‘adaptation’ of Chang’s famous Shanghai novella, “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” (沈香屑・第一爐香). Directed by Tso Kea (Zuo Ji 左几) and penned by Hong Kong female writer Cheng Wai (鄭慧), Splendor of Youth (黛綠年華) (1957) was filmed by a progressive Cantonese film cast from the Union Film Studio (Zhonglian 中聯), a left-leaning organization that was under constant surveillance by the colonial government. The talk seeks to delineate the complexity of the cultural sphere in Cold War Hong Kong where a left Cantonese picture could be produced by a rightwing Mandarin studio, whereas popular writers like Cheng Wai were writing profusely under the auspices of Greenback culture.
Kenny Ng is an Associate Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. He has published widely on film culture and literary studies in the US, UK, Europe, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His books include The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2015); Indiescape Hong Kong: Interviews and Essays, co-authored with Enoch Tam and Vivian Lee (Hong Kong: Typesetter Publishing, 2018); and Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-links in Politics, Art, and Tradition (Hong Kong: Chunghwa Book Co., 2021). His ongoing book projects concern censorship and visual cultural politics, Cold War Asian cinema, the politics of Cantophone and Sinophone cinema, and left-wing cosmopolitanism.
Date: Thursday, 28 October 2021 Time: 4:00 – 5:30 pm (GMT +8) on Zoom
Speaker: Lou Rich, PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature Supervisor: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature Respondent: Harmony Yuen
Abstract: While Ancient Greece is well-renowned as a time and place in which ‘bisexuality’ was ‘in fashion’, could the same be said about Ancient China? Can we call bisexuality ‘bisexuality’ in a time when identity politics did not exist? This seminar examines and compares the sexual systems of two of the most influential cultures in terms of historical literature and culture: Ancient Greece and Dynastic China. Through the use of the term ‘bieroticism’ rather than bisexuality, this seminar looks at how sexual and social systems at the time allowed for a more diverse representation of non-binary sexual expressions – such as the Greek pederastic system, or the Chinese male-favourite tradition, and the literature and works that arose from this. Therefore, in light of research that consistently boxes historical cultures such as these into hetero or homoerotic, a lens of bieroticism hopes to shed fresh light and allows for nuance and the breaking of the hetero-homo binary, and lends new ways of thinking about premodern and modern sexuality and literature.
Bio: Lou Rich is a 3rd year PhD candidate In the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Hong Kong. They received their BA in Film and Media Production at Sheffield Hallam University in 2016, and their MA in English Studies at the University of Nottingham in 2017. Their work focuses specifically on representations of bisexuality in literatures and visual media spanning different cultures and countries.
Respondent:Harmony Yuen
Organized by the Department of Comparative Literature and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), HKU
For enquiries, please feel free to contact Lou Rich by email at slrich@connect.hku.hk
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/
