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).

APR 16 | WED | 4:30 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
I Came for a Reason – On the Importance and Significance of Sexual Positions in 北京故事 (1996)
Speaker: Frederico Vidal, Visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Hongwei Bao, Associate Professor in Media Studies, University of Nottingham
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

APR 11 | FRI | 4:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
Screen Time Dilemmas: Screens and the Governance of Productivity in China
Speaker: Chenshu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Moderator: Zoe Meng Jiang, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

MAR 28 | FRI | 4:30 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building
Speaker: Kwai-Cheung Lo, Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

MAR 20 | THU | 5:30 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
Metaphor, Energy and Material Narratives on the Ocean (1982-present)
Speaker: Laia Ventayol, Visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Winnie Yee, MALCS Programme Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

MAR 6 | THU | 4:30 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War
Speaker: Suzy Kim, Professor of Korean History, Rutgers University
Moderator: Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, HKU

MAR 3 | MON | 5:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong
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

FEB 21 | FRI | 4:30 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
The Politics of Art in Contemporary Korean Fiction
Speaker: Chris Hanscom, Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA
Moderator: Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, The University of Hong Kong

FEB 17 | MON | 10:00 AM (HKT) | SEMINAR
On The Promise of Beauty
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

FEB 13 | THU | 5:30 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
Varieties of Exceptionalism: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Transnational History
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

FEB 7 | FRI | 10:00 AM (HKT) | BOOK LAUNCH
Book Launch: Transpacific, Undisciplined
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

JAN 17 | FRI | 4:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR
Writing Desire in Times of Crisis: A Comparative Study of Xu Dishan and Gendün Chöpel
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

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

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Professor Dan Vukovich (胡德)
The New Global Conjuncture After the Rise of China and the Global South: Problems of Method & Interpretation

Professor Li Haimo (李海默)
The Global South from a Burkean Perspective

Selected texts for the Symposium “New Times”? Thinking Through the Rise of China & the End of the 20th Century organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Research Hub, the School of Chinese, and the School of Humanities.

Wang Hui , “The Economy of Rising China and Its Contradictions.” Trans. David Ownby, 2018, Reading the China Dream website.   汪晖, “中国崛起的经验及其面临的挑战,” 文化纵横  (Beijing Cultural Review), 2010.2:  24-35.

Wang Hui, “The Twentieth Century, the Global South, and China’s Historical Position.” [2024]  Originally published on October 22, 2024 in Dossier No. 81: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Wang Hui, “Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought,” Modern China, January 2020, Vol. 46, No. 1. pp. 3-48.

Wang Hui, “Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought:  Part 2 : The Birth of the Century: China and the Conditions of Spatial Revolution,”  Modern China, March 2020, Vol. 46, No. 2.  pp. 115-160.

Wang Hui, “The Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory:  Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday” [2020]  . 汪晖, “革命者人格与胜利的哲学——纪念列宁诞辰150周年”， April 21, 2020, Beijing Cultural Review.  Translated by David Ownby. Reading the China Dream website.

Bios:
Wang Hui is a Changjiang Scholar Professor in the Department of Chinese Literature and the Department of History, Tsinghua University, and is a founding director of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He received his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1988. His research interests include Chinese intellectual history, modern Chinese literature and social/political theory. His recent publications include China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality (London/New York, Verso, 2016).
https://www.xyc.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1152/1564.htm

Huang Ping is currently the Director of the Centre for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Executive Vice President of the Chinese Institute of Hong Kong. He is formerly the Director of the Institute of American Studies and the Director of the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Readings (Dushu).His major research areas include development, migration, China’s way towards modernity, China-US-Europe Relations, and World Politics.
https://ciss.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/CFExperts/5813

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.