Category: Past Events

Speakers:
Yoshiko Nakano, Professor, Department of International Design Management, Tokyo University of Science
Georgina Challen, CSGC Research Assistant, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Respondent: John M. Carroll, Principal Lecturer, Department of History, HKU
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, March 3, 2025
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

The Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley is home to over 470 graves connected to the city’s Japanese population. Most of these graves belong to individuals who died during the Meiji era (1868–1912), a remarkable period of modernisation and opening up of Japan that saw thousands of its inhabitants travel to other parts of the world to study, work, and settle. Who were these people? What were they doing in Hong Kong? And why were unbaptised Japanese buried in what was called at one time the ‘Protestant Cemetery’?

These are the questions that Meiji Graves in Happy Valley (2024, HKU Press) seeks to answer. By revealing the personal journeys of these mostly forgotten Japanese, the authors aim to add to transnational perspectives on Hong Kong and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong from 2000 to 2022.

Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. She is currently a Research Assistant in the Department of Comparative Literature’s Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures.

HKU Press is offering a 20% discount (code 20CP2025) for online orders of the book up to April 5, 2025. For details, visit https://hkupress.hku.hk/Meiji_Graves.

This event is co-organized by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Japanese Studies, and Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.

Speaker: Chris Hanscom, Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA

Moderator: Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, The University of Hong Kong

Date: 21 FEB 2025 (FRI)
Time: 4:30–6:00 pm (HKT)
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Using examples from fiction and photography this talk will explore the relationship between art and politics, particularly regarding the aesthetic representation of atrocity. What kind of remembering is adequate to the traumatic event, and can how the representation of such memory avoid both the cycle of endless melancholic return and the forgetting that accompanies the “memorization” of that past? Where politics is defined as the struggle over the propriety of language, it is the work of art, not the archival document, that stands at the juncture of the imperative to remember and the prohibition against making sense of the inexplicable.

Chris Hanscom is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA, where he teaches courses on Korean literature and film and is director of the UCLA Korean Humanities Initiative.

This event is presented by the Modern East Asian Literature Research Cluster. The seminar series is coordinated by Professor Su Yun Kim (suyunkim@hku.hk), Professor Pei-yin Lin (pylin@hku.hk), and Professor Alvin Wong (akhwong@hku.hk), and is supported by the School of Chinese, School of Humanities, and School of Modern Languages and Cultures. For more information, please visit www.meal.hku.hk

Speaker: Mimi Thi Nguyen, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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

Date: Monday, February 17, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (8:00 pm/16 Feb/Chicago)
Venue: On Zoom

The historical present is often perceived through the presence or absence of beauty, such that distinct personal, social, and political projects unfold through disputes about the beauty we deserve – which is to say, the life worth living. How might affective and aesthetic responses to scarcity, precarity, and uncertainty, drawn from the crises of war and colonial and capital dispossession, help us to understand the promise of beauty as a world-building engagement? This talk considers how the promise of beauty is so usable across a spectrum of political claims, whether imperial or insurgent, and how these claims delineate what forms of life are valuable, and for whom.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author The Gift of Freedom and The Promise of Beauty. With Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, and Yutian Wong, she is a coeditor for Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University.

Speaker: Cai Yuqian, Predoctoral Fellow, Centre on Contemporary China and the World, HKU

Respondent: John Carroll, Principal Lecturer, Department of History, HKU
Moderator: Alvin K Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, February 13, 2025
Time: 5:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room LE7, Library Extension Building, Main Campus, HKU

“Hong Kong exceptionalism” has been discussed by writers and intellectuals (such as Chan Koon-chung, Anthony Cheung, and Rey Chow) in its various forms—including historical, institutional, developmental, and cultural—since at least the 1990s. It is shaped by the city’s past experience under British rule and current status as a Special Administrative Region of the P.R.C., but it is also informed by the ideas of liberal and American exceptionalism, calling attention to the transnational history of the concept.

“Singapore exceptionalism” has also evolved since the 1990s, notably manifesting in the “Asian values” debate, and has become a prominent element in official discourse, endorsed by leaders and diplomats (such as Chan Heng Chee, Lee Hsien Loong, and Lawrence Wong). It reflects the city-state’s strategic, political, economic, and social uniqueness, as well as its global activism aimed at ensuring international relevance and competitiveness. Nevertheless, while transnational in origin and substance, the meanings of exceptionalism in Singapore differ strikingly from those in Hong Kong.

Evaluating exceptionalism as an identity-cum-justification narrative, this seminar will explore the two cities as comparable sites for understanding the transnational histories and various forms of exceptionalism within and beyond their immediate contexts.

Cai Yuqian is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Centre on Contemporary China and the World (CCCW) at HKU and a PhD candidate in Public Policy and Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals across disciplines and languages, including International Studies Review, Cold War International History Studies, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Il Tolomeo. 

Speakers and Editors of Transpacific, Undisciplined:
Lily Wong, American University
Christopher B. Patterson, University of British Columbia
Chien-ting Lin, National Central University in Taiwan

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

Date: Friday, February 7, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm / Feb 6 / Washington DC)
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU and on Zoom

Antinuclear coalitions centering Native survivance from Okinawa to the Dakotas to Micronesia, refugee figures and automated empathy in virtual reality, cross-strait erotic intimacy in Taiwanese teahouses, art illuminating everyday convergences between migrant workers in Hawai‘i’s hospitality industry. By foregrounding such complex entanglements within, across, and beyond the Pacific, Transpacific, Undisciplined (2024, University of Washington Press) activates generative, if obscured, connections against fixed national and methodological boundaries and reveals how an undisciplined approach can reconfigure itself in relation to unequal exchanges among Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.

With lucid contributions and a rich theoretical framework, this groundbreaking book mobilizes the dynamic energy of the transpacific as an analytic, and brings together seemingly unrelated intellectual fields to trace across empires, local struggles, and inter-imperial intimacies.

Lily Wong is associate professor in the departments of Literature and Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies at American University. She is author of Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness.

Christopher B. Patterson is associate professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games.

Chien-ting Lin is associate professor in the English Department and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies graduate program at National Central University in Taiwan.

危機時刻的欲望書寫：以許地山和更敦群培為對照的闡釋

Speaker:
Yang Qu, PhD Candidate in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Respondents:
Nicole Huang, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, January 17, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 417, 4/F, The Jockey Club Tower, HKU

The concept of kāma, or desire, as one of the four aims of human life (puruṣārtha) and the central focus of the Indian science of sensual pleasure (kāmaśāstra), was conceptualized and developed in medieval India. But how did this concept find its way into the intellectual circles of twentieth-century Chinese and Tibetan literati? Moreover, how did their writings—through textual translations, literary compositions, and generic transcreations—give rise to a complex intertextuality that uncovers the under-examined dimensions of desire in modern China?

This talk explores the works of key intellectuals from the broader Sinophone world, including Xu Dishan (許地山, 1894–1941) and Dai Wangshu (戴望舒, 1905–1950), in parallel with notable figures from the Tibetophone world, such as Ju Mipham (’Ju mi pham, 1846–1912) and Gendün Chöpel (Dge ’dun chos ’phel, 1903–1951). Despite their distinct cultural and historical contexts, these figures share a common fascination with desire, which they approach in various ways: as an intellectual pursuit, a cultural taboo, a commercial commodity, and, at times, a forbidden path to spiritual liberation. These diverse dimensions extend far beyond conventional understandings of sexuality and erotic love, particularly in times of crisis—including social upheaval, war, and personal spiritual dilemmas. Their intellectual engagements with desire thus expand the “kāma world” beyond the South Asian subcontinent, offering a lens through which to imagine a place for Indian erotics in modern China.

Yang Qu (曲洋) is a PhD Candidate in South Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, under the mentorship of Professor David Der-wei Wang. His dissertation project, “Obsession with India: Literature, Travels, and the Quest for Alternative Modernity in Modern China,” examines the complex engagement with India in early twentieth-century Chinese intellectual thought, exploring themes of national rejuvenation, spirituality, revolution, eroticism, and literary subjectivity. His research has been recognized with several awards, including the Lo Chia-luen International Sinology Scholarship (National Chengchi University, 2023), the “Ms. Yu Tsai Yuhui Special Award” from the China Times Cultural Foundation, and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (CCKF, 2024).

Speaker: Fan Yang (杨帆), Professor, Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Respondent: Nianshen Song (宋念申), Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University

Moderator: Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 758, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Professor Yang’s new book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements, mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV media such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation.

Fan Yang (杨帆) is the author of Disorienting Politics (2024) and Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). Her new project, Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South, examines the first Special Economic Zone as a media-infrastructural complex that straddles globalizations from “above” and “below.”

Nianshen Song (宋念申) is a social and intellectual historian whose work includes Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 (2018) and Zhizao Yazhou [制造亚洲 Mapping Asia] (2024).

This event will be a seminar with Professor Fan Yang (杨帆) of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, about her new book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (2024). Participants are encouraged to read the book beforehand. An open access version is available on the UMP website : https://press.umich.edu/Books/D/Disorienting-Politics3. And also at: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/90807/1/9780472904464.pdf. Professor Nianshen Song (宋念申) of Tsinghua University (清華大學人文社會科學高等研究院) will serve as respondent to the book, and Professor Dan Vukovich (SoH) will moderate. All are welcome!

This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.

Speaker: Haiyan Lee, Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Stanford University

Respondent: Marco Wan, Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, HKU

Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, November 28, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower

Current events have pressed home the disconcerting truth that the law is not synonymous with justice, and that its apparatus is liable to entrench as much as curb systemic injustices. Nowhere is the discrepancy between law and justice more starkly on display than in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. A contemporary Chinese novel, Sunspots by Xu Yigua, transposes the fault line of the French novel to a society newly committed to the rule of law. Here three fugitives seek private redemption by pouring their hearts and souls into the raising of an orphan girl while quietly holding down menial jobs; a determined cop gets on their trail; when they are eventually ensnared by the net of law, the reader must grapple with the (mis)carriage of justice at the very moment in which justice is served. From this comparative reading, I launch into a broader reflection on why we love anti-heroes and why society cultivates the criminal imagination.

Haiyan Lee is the Walter A. Haas Professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, and A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination.

Speaker: Zifeng Liu, Department of History, Hong Kong Baptist University

Respondents:
Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Alicia Le, MPhil Candidate, Department of History, HKU

Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 417, 4/F, The Jockey Club Tower, HKU

This talk will provide some sketches of the Chinese arc of Black women’s internationalism. Using Shirley Graham Du Bois’s articulation of an Afro-Arab-Asian political imaginary as a case study, I will foreground the crucial role of Black left feminism in forging mid-twentieth-century anticolonial and nationalist solidarities and of interlocution with Chinese socialism in the midst of the Cold War and decolonization in shaping Africana radical traditions. The ways in which Black women radicals bumped up against, if not contested nationally and internationally dominant notions of race, gender, sexuality, and geopolitical order will also be explored.

Zifeng Liu is an intellectual historian of the twentieth-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. His current book project traces a history of African and African diaspora women radicals’ engagements with China in the age of Bandung. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Speaker: Zhun Xu, Lingnan College, Sun Yat Sen University

Discussant & Moderator: Daniel Vukovich, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower

After significant economic and social progress in the 1960s and 1970s, the prominence of the national question in the Third World largely diminished during the era of neoliberal globalization, leading to a decline in the significance of the Third World as a concept. However, the last two decades have witnessed a notable resurgence of national identity in the politics and economies of Third World countries, particularly as the BRICS nations have gained prominence. Our analysis of Third World trade reveals a marked decrease in dependence on the West, with these countries increasingly trading among themselves, both as buyers and sellers. Additionally, we observe that since the peak of neoliberalism, Third World elites have been more intentional in resource allocation and often exhibit a stronger commitment to national development. These developments strongly indicate a resurgence of the Third World on the global stage.

 Zhun Xu (许准) teaches economics at Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学), on leave from the City University of New York. His main research interests include the political economy of development, the Chinese economy, and economic history. He is on the editorial boards of Science & Society and the Journal of Labor and Society. He is the author of From Commune to Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and articles in numerous venues, including The American Journal of Public Health, Review of Radical Political Economics, and The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Format: Professor Xu will present his paper as part of his current work in progress on global political economy and the limits to China’s current use of global capitalism/world trade. Professor Vukovich will serve as discussant and moderator for a broad discussion of the global and political-economic conjuncture. As part of the background reading, we are making available brief, classic selections from Marx and Engels on trade as seen from the standpoint of the 19^th century. All are welcome to join the discussion.

This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.