Category: Past Events

Speaker:
Professor Elmo Gonzaga, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Discussant:
Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, February 6, 2023
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom and F2F

Writing about the vernacular emergence of a “cultural imaginary” of modernity in the Asian metropolis, Leo Ou-fan Lee highlights how an archipelago of multimodal archival materials could form “a contour of collective sensibilities and significations resulting from cultural production.” Advocating for a departure from an overarching unity or coherence in cultural analysis, Édouard Glissant suggests that archipelagic thinking could be used to uncover how “differences” might “interact, collide, and coexist” by “accident.” This talk will discuss the methods by which the forthcoming monograph “Monsoon Marketplace”(Fordham University Press) maps the contingent vernacular imaginaries of capitalist modernity and mass consumption in the divergent media cultures of archipelagic port cities Singapore and Manila during colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. It will explore how the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated print and audiovisual representations could trace the emergence of accidental affinities outside official discourses of progress.

Elmo Gonzaga is Associate Director of the MA in Intercultural Studies Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in the “Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,” “Cultural Studies,” “Interventions,” “Verge: Studies in Global Asias,” “South East Asia Research,” and the “Journal of Asian Studies.”

Speaker:
Simon Whitaker, PhD Candidate in the School of English, HKU

Respondent:
Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Thursday, February 2, 2023
Time: 12:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

This presentation compares Franz Boas’s conception of culture as an integrated “whole”, with Zora Neale Hurston’s approach to representing Black life in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston was a student of Boas in the late 1920s at the University of Columbia, and at this time collected folklore in historically Black communities in the US South under his guidance. But their approaches were fundamentally different, and I argue that this difference is at the centre of Hurston’s novel.

Whereas Boas posited a culture as an integrated, complete set of tightly interlocking “traits”, Their Eyes actively resists the possibility that the events of Black life which it presents could be drawn together into a similarly ordered totality. However, the novel represents its characters as actively drawing those same events together in and through lived encounters with each other. Through close readings of the novel, I suggest that Hurston thereby relocates Boas’s process of cultural integration into the encounter between people, and in this way renders it negotiable.

Simon Whitaker is a PhD Candidate in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. His dissertation argues that literary texts and social-theoretical writing were involved in competing attempts to formulate new concepts of the “social unit” in the early twentieth-century north Atlantic world. It highlights the literary works of Naomi Mitchison, Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston as offering very different approaches to the social unit which nonetheless share a sense that society is a radically more uncertain and open structure than major texts of social theory at the time seemed to be suggesting. Simon currently lives in Tokyo where he will be teaching at Sophia University from April.

Speaker:
Professor Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Date: Monday, November 28, 2022
Time: 8:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom

View the talk recording here.

About the speaker:
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written extensively in major publications and peer-reviewed journals on a variety of topics including religion, literature, cinema and philosophy. His latest books include The Future of Two Illusions: Islam after the West (2022); The Last Muslim Intellectual: The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (2021); Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad (2020), and The Emperor is Naked: On the Inevitable Demise of the Nation-State (2020). His books and essays have been translated into many languages.

張愛玲香港敘事中的戰時聲景

Speaker: 郭詩詠 博士  Dr. KWOK Sze Wing 
Moderator: 黃心村 教授  Prof. Nicole HUANG
Date:November 23, 2022 (Wed)
Time: 16:30-18:00pm
Language: Putonghua
Venue: CPD-1.21, Level 1, Central Podium, Centennial Campus, HKU & Zoom

摘要：張愛玲筆下的戰爭經驗和戰爭意象一直受到學者關注。在張愛玲筆下，淪陷中的香港雖為非常時期，但仍有不變的人性和日常。戰時香港，白日時時有飛機轟炸，晚上的醫院裏有病人哀鳴，還有難堪的寂靜，在在都是深入骨髓的生命記憶。張愛玲對二戰時期香港聲音景觀的書寫，不但呈現了她對香港這個南方小城的觀感，更洩露了作者或人物的內心真實。是次講座將首先回顧張愛玲對二戰時期的香港聲音景觀的描述，集中分析作者如何通過聽覺重構其戰爭經驗，並進一步探討其中所隱含的歷史記憶、身分認同、心理創傷等多方面的問題。

Eileen Chang’s war experience and war images have always attracted the attention of scholars. In the works of Chang, although wartime Hong Kong is an exceptional period, human nature in everyday life remains unchanged. In wartime Hong Kong, there are aircrafts bombing during the day, patients crying in the hospital at night, and the embarrassing silence. They are all unforgettable life memories. Chang’s soundscape writing of Hong Kong during World War II not only presents her perception of this small southern city, but also reveals the inner reality of the writer or characters. This talk first reviews Chang’s description of Hong Kong soundscape during World War II, focusing on how the writer reconstructs her war experience through acoustics. It then further discusses Chang’s historical memory, identity, and psychological trauma.

簡介：郭詩詠     香港中文大學中國語言及文學系哲學博士，現為香港恒生大學中文系副教授。研究興趣集中在一九三零年代上海現代派、文學電影改編和後九七香港文學，發表論文多篇。目前正進行有關聽覺文化與一九三零至五零年代上海和香港文學的研究計劃。

Dr. Kwok Sze Wing received her PhD from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is an associate professor at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. She has published various journal articles on 1930s Shanghai modernists, film adaptation, and post-97 Hong Kong literature. She is currently working on a research project about auditory culture in Shanghai and Hong Kong literature in the 1930s-1950s.

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)

Panelists:

Omid Azadibougar
Professor of Comparative Literature, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University

Trisilpa Boonkhachorn
Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Chulalongkorn University

Jose Mari Cuartero
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines-Diliman

Lee Hyung-jin
Professor, Translation Studies and Comparative Literature, Sookmyung Women’s University

Mrinmoy Pramanick
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Indian Language and Literature, University of Calcutta

Moderators:

Daniel Elam
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Alvin K. Wong
Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Monday, November 14, 2022
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom

This roundtable is part of an ongoing conversation that highlights the histories, methods, interventions, and futures of comparative literature in Asia. This conversation will focus on comparative literature in India, China, South Korea, Thailand. and the Philippines – with the hope of opening up more transnational conversations and collaboration across Asia. We hope you’ll join in!

Speaker:
Professor Ying Zhu, Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Thursday, November 10, 2022
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom and F2F

Hollywood in China unravels the century-long relationship between Hollywood and China. Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, the book charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications. The book is an inside look at the intense business and political maneuvering that is shaping the movies and the U.S.-China relationship itself—revealing a headlines-grabbing conflict that is playing out not only on the high seas, but on the silver screen.

Ying Zhu is the founder and chief editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is the author of four books including Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market and Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television, and co-editor of six books including Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds. Previously on the faculty at the City University of New York, she is now a professor in the Academy of Film at the Hong Kong Baptist University and an adjunct professor in the School of Arts at the Columbia University.

如金粉深埋：《小團圓》背後的閨秀生命

Speaker: 崔文東 博士  Dr. CUI Wendong (City U)
Moderator: 黃心村 教授  Prof. Nicole HUANG
Date:October 26, 2022 (Wed)
Time: 16:30-18:00pm
Language: Putonghua
Venue: CPD-1.21, Level 1, Central Podium, Centennial Campus, HKU & Zoom

摘要：《小團圓》是張愛玲設置的記憶迷宮，通向過去，也通向未來。藉助小說中的吉光片羽，我們得以確認《金鎖記》、《傾城之戀》、《琉璃瓦》、《相見歡》等其他作品中的女性人物原型，再結合家族檔案與報刊史料，足以鉤沉她們的生命史。這些閨秀或是光彩照人，或是沒沒無聞，皆如金粉沉入歷史的埃塵，惟有張愛玲的文字賦予她們不朽的生命。通過對照真實的與虛構的生命史，我們嘗試解讀張愛玲的文學觀與女性觀。

Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions is a maze of memories that leads to both the past and the future. We can identify the prototypes of female characters in other works such as “The Golden Cangue,” “Love in a Fallen City,” “Glazed Tiles,” and “Joy over the reunion” with the help of the novel’s fragments, and piece together their life histories using family archives and newspapers. All of these women, whether talented or not, are buried like gold sand in the dust of history, but Eileen Chang’s words bring them back to life. By contrasting the real and fictional life histories, we can gain insight into Eileen Chang’s views on literature and on women.

簡介：崔文東       現於香港城市大學中文及歷史學系擔任助理教授一職，從事近現代中國文學研究，尤其關注梁啟超、魯迅等文化巨擘。他於香港中文大學中國語言及文學系取得哲學博士學位，並曾任哈佛燕京學社訪問學人。迄今已在《文學評論》、《漢學研究》、《中國文哲研究集刊》等學術刊物發表論文十數篇，先後獲得教育部人文社會科學研究青年基金項目、香港大學教育資助委員會優配研究金、香港藝術發展局項目資助，並曾兩度榮膺宋淇翻譯研究論文紀念獎。

Cui Wendong is an Assistant Professor at Department of Chinese Language and History, City University of Hong Kong. His area of expertise is modern Chinese literature, with a focus on notable writers like Liang Qichao and Lu Xun. He received his PhD in Chinese Language and Literature from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and served as a visiting fellow at Harvard-Yenching Institute. His research articles have been published in numerous academic journals. He has also twice been the recipient of the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards.

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:
Dr. Melody Jue, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara

Respondent: Dr. Winnie Yee, MALCS Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU
Moderator: Dr. Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Monday, October 10, 2022
Time: 10:00 am (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom

What would media and literary studies look like, underwater? In Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), I show how the ocean can be a science fictional environment for defamiliarizing concepts, offering cold and briny contexts in which to rethink what it means to store and organize information. After outlining how scuba diving can be a valuable method in the humanities and media studies, I present an analysis of an underwater structure nicknamed a “bookshelf reef” near UC Santa Barbara. The bookshelf is normally a terrestrial infrastructure of informatic organization; yet by displacing it underwater, I draw attention to the importance of gravity and buoyancy in defining interactions with the bookshelf as an archival infrastructure.

Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science book award. She is the co-editor with Rafico Ruiz of Saturation (Duke Press, 2021) and has published articles in journals including Grey Room, Configurations, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Resilience, and Media+Environment. Her new work explores the mediations of seaweeds in trans-Pacific contexts.

Special book talk in celebration of the 90th anniversary of FPS Library and Eileen Chang’s 102nd birthday.

Speaker: Professor Nicole HUANG 
Date & Time: September 30, 2022 (Fri) 18:00-19:30pm
Language: English
Venue: Multi-purpose Area, 2/F, Main Library & Zoom

This lecture paints an intellectual portrait of Eileen Chang (1920-1995), a major twentieth-century writer and one of the most celebrated alumni in the history of the University of Hong Kong. Chang was educated bilingually from an early age and enrolled in HKU in 1939, majoring in English and History. Her college education abruptly ended two and a half years later by the bloody Hong Kong Battle of December 1941, an experience that would find recurrent expressions in her writings. In May 1942, she returned to Shanghai and became an overnight literary sensation. Two volumes marked her early literary success: a collection of short stories and novellas entitled Romances and a book of prose entitled Written on Water. Her “tales of two cities”—Shanghai and Hong Kong—were some of the most endearing narratives in her early literary output, contrasting two urban environments as mirrors and shadows of one another. Three long narratives stand out in her later writings, two of which were written in English— The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change—and the third, the most critically acclaimed of all, was written in Chinese, titled Little Reunions. Significant portions of these long narratives were a retelling of her wartime Hong Kong experience. Her time as a HKU college student consistently found its many manifestations in a literary career deeply haunted by memories of war, migration, and permanent loss. In researching this project, I have tapped into hidden treasure housed in the HKU libraries and archives. I seek to redefine Chang’s solitary experiment as an important chapter in our collective knowledge of global Chinese and global English.

The event arrangements may be adjusted according to the prevailing pandemic prevention measures.

The book is now available for sale at the Press, a special 25% discount for the book is from 1 September to  2 October 2022. Don’t miss it. 

Speaker:
Dr. Lucas Bender, Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University

Moderator:
Dr. Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: Monday, September 26, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: On Zoom
Click here for the event recording.

Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770) came of age in an era marked by confidence that the accumulated wisdom of the cultural tradition could guarantee Chinese civilization’s continued stability and prosperity. When, however, the Tang dynasty collapsed in 755 to An Lushan’s rebellion, he began to question contemporary assumptions about the role that tradition should play in making sense of experience and defining human flourishing.

In this book, Lucas Bender argues that Du Fu’s evolving and experimental poetics in the wake of the rebellion have played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic reading from the Tang to the present day. In reimagining his relationship to tradition, Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new paradigm of poetry’s relationship to ethics. His work also presents an interesting model for adapting to a fact of human moral experience that is increasingly obvious in our own time: that the moral ideas writers have inherited and use to make sense of their experience will, in most cases, not be those through which their works will be received and interpreted in generations to come.

Lucas Rambo Bender is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Having recently published a monograph on Du Fu, he is now working on medieval Chinese frontier poetry and on the legacy of so-called “Obscure Learning” (Xuanxue 玄學).