In modern-day Hong Kong, major constitutional controversies have caused people to demonstrate on the streets, immigrate to other countries, occupy major thoroughfares, and even engage in violence. These controversies have such great resonance because they put pressure on a cultural identity made possible by, and inseparable from, the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework. Hong Kong is also a city synonymous with film, ranging from commercial gangster movies to the art cinema of Wong Kar-wai. This book argues that while the importance of constitutional controversies for the process of self-formation may not be readily discernible in court judgments and legislative enactments, it is registered in the diverse modes of expression found in Hong Kong cinema. It contends that film gives form to the ways in which Hong Kong identity is articulated, placed under stress, bolstered, and transformed in light of disputes about the nature and meaning of the city’s constitutional documents.
Speaker: Marco Wan is Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong.
Respondent: Mara Malagodi, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Michael Ng, Associate Professor, Department of Professional Legal Education, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong
Date: Thursday, 20 May 2021 Time: 5 – 6:30 pm (GMT +8) Speaker: Kelly Tse, Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong Moderator: Alvin Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong
This seminar offers both a critique and defence of Crazy Rich Asians (2018) from a postcolonial Southeast Asian angle. It first explores the film’s politics of erasure along racial and ethnic lines vis-à-vis Southeast Asia, a narrative that Singapore unwittingly participates in through its touristic self-branding. The discussion then traces an aesthetics of excess in the film’s cinematic parade of Chinese capital. This visually lush neoliberal excess paradoxically registers the film’s parodic potential. Overall, the seminar unpacks the contradictions of mediating Southeast Asia in relation to China and Asian America amidst Asia’s spectacular economic rise.
About the Speaker Kelly Tse (BA. MPhil. HKU, DPhil. Oxon) is an Assistant Professor of English at the Education University of Hong Kong. Previously, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on postcolonial and world literatures (East and Southeast Asia in particular), environmental humanities, gender and media studies. Her work has appeared in The Oxford History of the Novel in English series, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of International Women’s Studies, New Writing, amongst others.
Covid-19 has posed various challenges to peoples in different parts of the world. In coping with the pandemic, many nation-states adopt militarized rhetoric and measures that refer to fighting and defending rather than caring and persevering. This paper perceives the Covid-19 pandemic in China as a complex emergency that resembles war. By asking where are women, where is gender, where is feminism, and where is security, this online ethnography examines the lives of women and gendered others during the time of emergency, the institutional and public discourses around the pandemic, and the developments in feminist activisms and awareness. This paper argues that the pandemic disproportionately affects women and gendered others in China. Women’s crucial roles and contributions in sustaining the society during the pandemic are unrecognized. Feminist activism gain momentum and visibility, yet the future of feminism in China remains precarious. State and institutions take a paternalistic attitude that leads to war-like thinking and militarized measures in response to a complex situation that entails deliberation, care, and collaboration. Such an attitude is intrinsically biased towards masculinity and domination, prioritizes state stability and security over the security and livelihood of individuals, disregards the needs of vulnerable groups, and perpetuates their vulnerability.
About the Speaker ZHAO Feng Chenzi is a feminist, a woman, and a Chinese international PhD candidate in Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies at the Faculty of Education, Western University, Canada. Her research interests include women, globalisation, critical institutional studies, higher education, and social justice.
Moderator: Laura Meek, Assistant Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine
Date: Friday, 7 May 2021 Time: 2 PM HK Time (GMT +8) Speaker: Nasia Anam
Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and especially after the U.S. “Travel Ban” of 2018, the airport has transformed, for many Muslims, into a site of surveillance and control rather than jet-setting. Though in a previous era, French anthropologist Marc Augé had deemed the airport to be a transitional and transactional “non-place,” it is now a charged site where Muslims and Muslim-appearing subjects are interpellated as threats whose very itinerancy endangers the hegemonic world order. This paper examines scenes of Muslim interpellation in recent works of fiction depicting what it means to be hailed into the fraught category of “Muslim” through assessments of sartorial and physical features such as headscarves and beards while in transit. I argue that in our contemporary moment, it is in the space of the international airport—where the potential for movement is infinite—that Muslims are “checked” in order to be prohibited from further mobility (and agency).
ABOUT THE SPEAKER Nasia Anam is Assistant Professor of English and Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her current book project, “Muslim Heterotopias: Colonial Logics of Space in Literatures of Migration,” centers on the figure of the Muslim migrant and the spatial legacies of colonization in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literature. Her writing and reviews have appeared in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Interventions, ASAP/Journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Today, what C.T. Hsia called “the classic Chinese novels” remain largely alive and kicking as not only literary translations, but also transmedial and transnational adaptations. Compared to Western literary canons which have been subject to postcolonial, racial, and gender critiques, it remains ambiguous what one should do with the ongoing afterlives of Chinese canons in, for instance, a Japanese video game, a Hong Kong soft-porn, a South Korean travel-reality show, or an Asian-American graphic novel. Through a survey of the field and selected case studies, this seminar proposes “affective network” as a lens to read Chinese classics and their transnational afterlives.
About the author: Tsz-kit Yim is currently a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian studies at Princeton University, with B.A. (Comparative Literature & English) and M.Phil. (Comparative Literature) degrees from the University of Hong Kong. He works on classic Chinese novels and adaptations, intersecting broader inquiries of affect theory, gender and genre, as well as translation and world literature.
Moderator: Fiona Law, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
On March 16, 2021, a white gunman targeted three Asian owned businesses in Atlanta and murdered eight people, six of them Asian American women. Panelists will offer insights into what these killings reveal about the intersections of racism and misogyny. In particular, they will contextualize the impact of the pandemic on anti-Asian discrimination against broader histories of xenophobia, imperialism, and sexism linking the United States and Asia. Importantly, they will suggest ways in which these events in the United States are relevant for Hong Kong today.
Panelists:
Angie Baecker, Lecturer, Department of Art History, HKU
Puja Kapai, Convenor, Women’s Studies Research Centre; Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU
Grace En-Yi Ting, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, HKU
Moderator:
Alvin Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
This talk will focus on the intersection between the evolution of the Chinese television industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the career of the countercultural writer and cultural entrepreneur Wang Shuo. By the late 1980s, the Chinese television industry had entered a period of crisis. A film-derived model of slow, individualized production was proving impractical for an industry trapped between rapidly increasing demand and a shortage of resources and skilled television workers. Facing these pressures, Chinese television producers and critics pushed for the adoption of a “studio drama” (shineiju) model: domestic dramas shot on one set with a multiple-camera setup in an arrangement designed to maximize production and minimize production schedules. Although Wang Shuo, a writer who had been mostly known for his subversive stories of the Beijing demimonde, might initially seem an odd fit for this genre, the shineiju allowed him to bring to the fore the undercurrent of domestic sentimentalism that had long run beneath his work. Wang initially enjoyed the wide audience and financial rewards provided by television, but he soon soured on the limitations of the industry, and would go on to write incisive deconstructions of the structure of feeling created by Chinese television. Examining this encounter reveals the intertwined ideologies and technologies underpinning the postsocialist shift in the People’s Republic toward the private home, dilemmas shared by television industries east and west, and the problems involved in building (and studying) a “popular culture.”
About the speaker: Dylan Suher 蘇和 is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He is currently working on a book about how mainland Chinese writers, beginning in the late 1980s, articulated their anxieties over their changing professional identity through the media of television, film, and the internet. His areas of expertise include postsocialist mainland Chinese literature and film, Chinese television, and media theory. He has written essays and reviews of literature in translation for Asymptote, The White Review, and The Millions. For more information, please visit dylansuher.com.
Moderator: Claire Gullander-Drolet, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, HKU
This talk addresses a global network of camera operators working on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company between 1896-1903. Not only did these camera operators record films at sites from Algiers to Berlin to Tokyo, they also pictured the world anew, whether framing a street scene in Alexandria or offering a close-up of a passing face in Jerusalem. The Lumière Brothers’ broader vision was to bring the world to the world, and they imagined a global network of films easily circulatable beyond the constraints of language and literacy. Engaging the implications of cinematic versus literary capture, Allan’s talk explores the stakes of world literature in the age of the world picture.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER Michael is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, and editor of the journal Comparative Literature. His research focuses on debates in world literature, postcolonial studies, literary theory, as well as film and visual culture, primarily in Africa and the Middle East. In both his research and teaching, he bridges textual analysis with social theory, and draws from methods in anthropology, religion, queer theory, and area studies. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016, Co-Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book) and a guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature (“Reading Secularism: Religion, Literature, Aesthetics”), and with Elisabetta Benigni, an issue of Philological Encounters (“Lingua Franca: Toward a Philology of the Sea”). He is at work on a second book, Picturing the World: The Global Routes of Early Cinema, 1896-1903, which traces the transnational history of camera operators working for the Lumière Brothers film company.
Moderator: Daniel Elam Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com
Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Maryam Wasif Khan Maryam Wasif Khan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. She received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Professor Aamir Mufti. She also holds an A.B. in Comparative Literature (summa cum laude) from Princeton University. Her work on British orientalism, Muslim reform and nineteenth-century prose fiction in Urdu has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History (MLQ) and PMLA. Her forthcoming book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Vernacular Populisms, (Fordham University Press: 2020) argues against conventional methods of writing literary history for colonial vernaculars such as Urdu or Hindi. Suggesting that Urdu prose fiction from the moment of its inception at Fort William College is coded with certain Orientalist ideals of Muslim identity, the project demonstrates how this identity, in the contemporary moment, manifests as a powerful religio-populist literary impulse. A second project is envisioned as a series of essays and contemplations on the possibilities contained in the act of reading foundational European texts outside of the Academy.
Ali Raza Ali Raza is a historian specializing in the history of modern South Asia. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and was a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His research and teaching interests include the social and intellectual history of South Asia, comparative colonialisms, decolonization, and post-colonial theory. Ali Raza’s work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies; Itinerario; South Asian History and Culture; and Contemporary South Asia. He is also the co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (Sage 2014), and the author of Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Daniel Elam Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com
Speakers: Olga Zayts, Associate Professor, School of English, HKU; Zoe Fortune, CEO of City Mental Health Alliance Hong Kong International research team: Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar, Universidad Católica del Maule, Chile Sylvia Jaworska, the University of Reading, the UK Tse Wai Sum, Vincent, the University of Hong Kong Moderator: Brian King, Assistant Professor, School of English, HKU To watch the seminar recording, please click here.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has taken an enormous toll on the mental health of working mothers across the globe, who have struggled to sustain full-time employment, while simultaneously dealing with the closure of schools and childcare facilities and home-schooling. In this talk we present selected results of a cross-disciplinary collaborative project between psychologists, sociolinguists and a mental health NGO in Hong Kong, and discuss how such collaborative work can lead to meaningful impacts bridging academic research in social sciences and humanities, public policy and the ‘lived experiences’ of real people in the community during the unprecedented health crisis.
