Category: Upcoming Events

Speaker: Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, January 30, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is required.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104784

In this presentation, I will reflect on my past, recent, and future work exploring the geographies of colonialism and anticolonialism. I will open with a summary of my 2007 book, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, which explored three landscapes of ordering which united New and Old Delhi as the capital of British rule in colonial India. I will also reflect on the intellectual moment from which this work emerged (geographer’s engagement with the latter-Foucault, postcolonial theory, and urban studies). Second, I will summarise my 2025 book, Spaces of Anticolonialism, which complements and supplements the first work, by exploring spaces of anticolonial struggle in Delhi in periods of protest mass-movement but also in everyday spaces of political mobilisation. Here, I reflect on ongoing debates regarding geographies of “resistance,” the decolonial, and the nature of the city. Finally, I will share ongoing research regarding the synergies between global urban history and global urban studies, and ask what “anticolonial urbanism” might be, what it could contribute, and how we might explore it comparatively between South, Southeast and East Asia.

Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. His research centres on the geographies of late-colonialism, with a particular focus on British-Indian relations in the interwar period. His monographs include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007); Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (2014); Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (2023); and Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2025). He is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Historical Geography.

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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

Speaker: Ani Maitra, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Colgate University

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

Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This talk examines Priya Sen’s film Yeh Freedom Life (2018) as an experimental ethnography of sexual subalternity in contemporary India. The talk focuses on the film’s grounding of female same-sex desire in postcolonial working-class Delhi, specifically its representation of that desire at a critical distance from the discourse of queer rights and identity politics. Completed the same year that the Indian Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality emphasizing the individual’s “right to privacy,” Sen’s film captures the complex socioeconomic dynamics shaping the lives of its protagonists and reveals the limits of normative distinctions between the public and the private, straight and queer. The talk argues that it is the film’s “non-liberal” representation of the sexual subaltern–a figure that at once inhabits and subverts North Indian Hindu normativity on the fringes of liberal Anglophone activism–that makes it a timely decolonial feminist and queer intervention.

Ani Maitra is an associate professor of film and media studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. His research and teaching fall at the intersections of postcolonial and diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, and global media studies. Maitra is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern UP, 2020).

Thinking China and Circulation:
Beyond Borders / In Translation / Across Adaptation

Abstract submission: September 1, 2022
Paper submission: October 3, 2022

Dates of Workshop: October 20-22, 2022 (Thu-Sat)
Venue: Zoom

Circulations are at the core of globalization and speak to all fields, periods, and regions. They can be political, economic, cultural, geographical, social, communal, familial, or personal. They may involve the relocation of objects and images; translation, adaptation, and appropriation of texts; or trajectories of individuals. They may be influenced by diverse forms of media. They may be imposed and experienced by individuals, groups, or institutions. They may take place on an equal footing or reinforce power relationships. They may bring about understanding, transformations, creativities, or else misunderstanding, prejudice, and defiance. Circulations also entail a historical process of images, texts, and ideas changing over time.

This historical moment – global pandemic, changing geopolitics, the threat of economic sanctions, and renewed racism against the Chinese diaspora – is a good time to reflect on real-life and virtual circulations in the context of China.

The Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong invite graduate students working on China and the Sinophone world of the twentieth century to submit paper abstracts on the theme of “CIRCULATION”. We encourage people to interpret the theme in the broadest possible terms. We particularly welcome proposals that discuss circulations in relation to China in/and the world (in any language or across multiple languages). We hope to bring together early-career scholars working across disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, film and media studies, etc.

Please submit your abstract (up to 250 words) with a working title, and your CV to conf.complit.hku@gmail.com by September 1, 2022. Selected participants will be notified of their acceptance by September 5 and should submit the full paper by October 3. There are no fees to attend the workshop.

The graduate workshop will be held on Zoom October 20-22 HKT. Papers will be circulated in advance among all the participants. Attendees are expected to read the papers of their panel before the workshop and give feedback during the panels. Participants in Hong Kong are welcome for a dinner after the workshop.

Three faculty members will also give advice on each paper during the three-day workshop:

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Wang’s specialties are Modern and Contemporary Chinese and Sinophone Literature, Late Qing fiction and drama, and Comparative Literary Theory.

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research spans across the fields of Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, queer theory, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities.

Peng Hsiao-yen is research fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. Her publications include Dandyism and Transcultural Modernity: The Dandy, the Flâneur, and the Translator in 1930s Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris (Routledge, 2010).

If you have any queries, please kindly email Junlin Ma (jlma@connect.hku.hk), Ying Xing (yingxing@connect.hku.hk), or J. Daniel Elam (jdelam@hku.hk).

This conference is organized by Junlin Ma, Ying Xing, and J. Daniel Elam under the auspices of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at HKU.