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 19th 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.
Speakers: Christopher DeWolf, Managing Editor, Zolima CityMag Billy Potts, Writer and Designer
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024 Time: 6:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
When Henry Steiner moved to Hong Kong in 1961, it was only meant to be for nine months. More than 60 years later, he is the most important graphic designer in the city’s history. Henry Steiner’s Hong Kong, the first book in the new Zolimag Culture Guide series, explores the city through the lens of Steiner’s work, from the idea of East meets West, to the graphic identity of world-leading companies like HSBC, to Hong Kong icons like the Jockey Club, Hong Kong Land, Peak Tower, Ocean Terminal, Wellcome, Dairy Farm, Lane Crawford and more.
Christopher DeWolf has been writing about Hong Kong for nearly 20 years, earning a reputation as one of the city’s leading journalists on architecture, design, history and culture. The author of Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong (Penguin, 2017), DeWolf has been Zolima CityMag’s managing editor since its launch in 2015, and his award-winning work has also appeared in other magazines and books around the world including TIME, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Good Beer Hunting and Spacing.
Billy Potts is a Hong Kong-born writer and designer whose work offers a unique perspective shaped by his lifelong immersion in the city’s cultural landscape. His writing for Zolima CityMag explores the city’s hidden stories and design heritage, including traditional crafts, calligraphy and more. Potts’ in-depth design and research study on defunct and abandoned signage, Hong Kong Ghost Signs, has been backed by both the Design Trust and Lord Wilson Heritage Trust. Through his design studio Handsome Co., Potts has worked on projects involving Hong Kong’s iconic trams, the classic Camel flask and other renowned local brands including Cathay Pacific, Ascot Chang, and more. Billy has a Chinese-English background and is fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.
This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and Zolima CityMag.
Speaker: James Marcus, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYU
Moderator:Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024 Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.
James Marcus is the author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024) and Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut (2004). He edited and introduced Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage (2010) and has translated seven books from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova’s The Duel (2010). His essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, VQR, The American Scholar, The Atlantic, and many other publications. He is also the former editor of Harper’s Magazine, and currently teaches at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Speaker:Jenny Chak, MPhil Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU Respondent:Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Cornell University Moderator:Beth Harper, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, November 5, 2024 Time: 9:00 am Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
The past decade has witnessed a “darker” shift in ecocritical interests, with a growing body of works examining the more disturbing aspects of the interactions between human and nonhuman nature. This trend is particularly evident in the expanding body of research seeking to theorize concepts such as ecohorror, ecophobia, and ecogothic. These ongoing discussions offer a fresh and robust perspective for the cross-cultural analysis of the works of Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640-1715) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), two esteemed writers renowned for probing into the unsettling facets of human experience that intersect with ecological concerns.
This talk specifically focuses on how the works of Pu and Poe exhibit a provocative sensitivity towards nonhuman animals, deviating from the prevailing ideas of interspecies reciprocity during early Qing China and nineteenth-century America. Through close readings of selected stories, I argue that they lay bare the marginalization, exploitation, and oppression of animals that underpin the anthropocentric idealism of absolute harmony between species. I also investigate the parallels between the concept of the “strange” (guai 怪) in Chinese “tales of the strange” (zhiguai 志怪) and the Gothic tradition in the Western world, entangled with the two writers’ comparable explorations of a wider, inscrutable ecology existing beyond human dominion.
Jenny Wan Ying Chak is a final year MPhil student studying Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include cross-cultural ecocriticism and Gothic theories, with a particular focus on the literary works of Pu Songling and Edgar Allan Poe in her current project.
Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023); Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015); The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
Speaker: Victor Fan, Reader in Film and Media Philosophy, Department of Film Studies, King’s College London
Moderator:Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024 Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Lam Nin-tung’s (林年同) ‘The Spatializing Consciousness of Chinese Cinema’ [中國電影的空間意識, 1983] has long been considered an article on the aesthetics specific to Chinese cinema. Published before the emergence of film philosophy as a field of study, Lam’s ambitious and truly original proposal to rethink the cinematographic image as a spatializing consciousness has been grossly overlooked by his peers. For Lam, even though the cinema is technologically and ideologically configured according to the European theory of perspective, Chinese filmmakers have long experimented with spatializing the relationship between the spectator’s body and the image, via the technē of camera perception, by layering views of reality onto a two-dimensional frame. In so doing, Lam sees the cinematographic image-consciousness as a process of jing-you (鏡游 or mirroring-journeying), one that challenges the anthropocentric understanding of cinematographic perception. His film philosophy, Fan argues, addresses the shortcomings of the binary notion of subject-object divide and deconstructs the relation between film semiotics and aesthetics.
Lam’s contribution to film philosophy does not stop at proposing a groundbreaking understanding of the cinematographic image as consciousness before and separately from European film phenomenology and Deleuze’s two cinema books. He also decolonizes film studies by building an episteme that puts into consideration Chinese film history, aesthetic debates, as well as Daoist and Buddhist philosophies. This talk is developed out of a collaborative project between Fan and Liu Siqi to translate Lam’s magnum opus into the English language. Through a line-by-line scrutiny of his writing, key concepts, as well as the archival and scholarly references he uses, they unearth and reconstruct Lam’s highly systematic method. In this talk, Fan discusses not only Lam’s philosophy itself but also the process of translation as epistemic reconstruction.
Victor Fan is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy at the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London and a film festival consultant. Fan graduated with a Ph.D. from Yale University and an MFA at School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His articles have also been published in peer-review journals including World Picture Journal, Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, Film History: An International Journal, and many other edited volumes. His film The Well was an official selection of the São Paolo International Film Festival; it was also screened at the Anthology Film Archives, the Japan Society and the George Eastman House.
Speaker:Lory Wong, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU Respondent:Cecilia L. Chu, School of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong Moderator:Dan Vukovich, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2024 Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
The Colonial Sanitary Engineer, Osbert Chadwick’s 1882 Reports on the Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong is the first significant document on Hong Kong’s sanitary state. The reports prompted regulations to improve sanitary infrastructure and the creation of the Sanitary Board. As a result, many modern historical narratives have referenced Chadwick’s reports, with some magnifying its Eurocentric and classist perspectives associating the East and the poor as filthy, and the West as clean and modern.
This talk challenges the aforementioned Eurocentric and classist portrayals of the Chinese and Europeans in Chadwick’s reports by scrutinizing the internal contradictions in his document, before offering comparatively less biased perspectives of alternative archival sources which have been sidelined by modern historical narratives. The talk is based on a part of my PhD chapter examining the distorted lens in which many colonial officials viewed the Chinese, the spaces they occupied in the lead up to the 1894 plague, the outbreak itself, and the ways in which these perspectives guided the colonial government’s handling of Taipingshan. My doctoral thesis aims to challenge the popular traditional historiographical narratives of the 1894 plague in Hong Kong and offer alternative ways to understanding the event.
Lory Wong is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Hong Kong history, Hong Kong culture and literature, Postcolonial Studies, and the Medical Humanities.
Cecilia L. Chu is an Associate Professor and Director of the MPhil-PhD Programme in the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained as an urban historian with a background in design and conservation, her works focus on the social and cultural processes that shape the forms and meanings of built environments and their impacts on local communities. She is the authorofthe award-winning book, Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City, which received the 2023 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award from the Urban History Association and the 2024 International Planning History Society Book Prize. Her other book publications include The Speculative City: Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment (2022) and Hong Kong Built Heritage (forthcoming 2025).
Speaker:Nianshen Song (宋念申), Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University
Respondents: Loretta Kim, Associate Professor and Head, School of Modern Languages and Culture, HKU Ji Li, Associate Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, HKU
Moderator:Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, October 4, 2024 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
This event will take the form of a seminar/discussion with Professor Nianshen Song (宋念申) of Tsinghua University (清華大學人文社會科學高等研究院), about his new book project, The Neighborhood: Space, State, and Daily Life in a Manchurian City. Select chapters will be sent to registered HKU participants. The discussion will be led by Professors Loretta Kim and Li Ji of HKU (SMLC), and moderated by Professor Dan Vukovich (SoH).
The Neighborhood is a nearly-400-year history of a small urban space, which examines the trans-regional political, religious, and economic forces that shaped and reshaped a frontier city and people’s life. Xita (West Stupa) is a thriving commercial neighborhood in Shenyang, the largest city in Northeast China. Its story began in 1643 when the Qing emperor erected a Tibetan-Buddhist stupa in the old city’s western suburb. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), Xita was a landmark of the political/spiritual alliance between the Manchu, Mongols, and Tibetans. In the early twentieth century, colonial powers (first Russia then Japan) and local warlords constructed competing railways that intersected in Xita, turning it into an urban center which manifested the intensified cross-continental geopolitical competition. During the Japanese colonial period, Xita was a symbol of Japan’s pan-Asianist empire, while it at the same time developed into one of the largest Korean diasporic enclaves in urban China. In the 1990s, when Shenyang, socialist China’s capital of heavy industry, turned into a “rust city,” Xita surprisingly flourished. Due to Korean investment and government propagation, it transformed into a peculiar consumerist and entertainment quarter in a largely de-industrialized metropolis. The story of Xita unfolds the nuanced interactions between state, people, and urban space in imperial, colonial, nationalist, socialist, and post-socialist contexts.
Nianshen Song is Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, affiliated with the Department of History, Tsinghua University. Before returning to Beijing in 2021, he taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research and teaching focus on late imperial and modern China from global and regional perspectives, with special interests in China’s ethnic frontiers, East Asian trans-regional networks, historical geography, urban studies, and historical geography. He is the author of Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2018 and Zhizao Yazhou [制造亚洲 Mapping Asia] (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2024). His journal articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Inner Asia, Geopolitics, Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Science), and Kaifang shidai, among others.
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.
Moderator:Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-moderator:Yiping Lin, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, September 30, 2024 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower The discussion will be conducted in English and Mandarin Chinese (with translation).
“Self-Portrait: Dying at 47 KM” is the fifth film of Zhang Mengqi’s “Self-Portraits” series made in her hometown village which she named 47KM, near Suizhou in Hubei Province. This year, her grandpa passed away. What does the village mean to her without her grandpa? She started to search for stories about death in the village: unnatural deaths in history, bizarre deaths in reality, and deaths fuelled by hatred … “In the mundane daily life accompanied by so many deaths,” she asks, “how should she understand death?”
Zhang Mengqi is a filmmaker and choreographer. She has participated in The Folk Memory Project since 2011 and has curated and co-organized the “Film for Mother” Festival since 2021. Zhang has made 11 feature-length documentaries known as the “Self-Portraits series”, a decade-long creative documentation about her hometown village near Suizhou City, Hubei Province. Her films have been selected by Cinéma du Réel, Visions du Réel, BFI London Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image, and have won awards at the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, among others. Her choreographic work has been performed at the Foundation CULTURESCAPES (Switzerland), Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (France), ImPuls Tanz (Vienna), and Eurokaz (Croatia).
《自畫像》系列紀錄片作品曾多次入選法國真實電影節、瑞士尼翁真實電影節、BFI 倫敦電影節等；並獲得韓國 DMZ 紀錄片電影節國際最佳紀錄片白鵝獎 ，釜山國際電影節最佳紀錄片獎，西班牙 Punto de Vista 電影節最佳導演及觀眾選擇獎，山形國際紀錄片電影節國際競賽單元優秀獎等。「自畫像」系列劇場作品曾在瑞士 Foundation CULTURESCAPES 藝術節，法國青年舞蹈交流季，維也納 ImPuls Tanz 舞蹈節，克羅埃西亞 ZKM 青年劇場等國際戲劇舞蹈節演出。
