The Activist and the Queer in Contemporary White Snake Productions

Speaker: Liang Luo 羅靚, University of Kentucky

Moderator: Xiaolu Ma 馬筱璐, HKUST

Date: May 2 (Tue) 08:00-10:00 pm (HKT) / 08:00-10:00 am (NY) 

Registration Link: https://hkust.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAkde6tpzgvGtVkFdIeITy9aNHZOi4y6Blv#/registration

Abstract

Inspired by the Chinese white snake legend, three English-language White Snake projects, ranging from Western opera, digital video, to stage play, energetically engage with issues relevant to minority activism in the United States, enriching our understanding of contemporary White Snake repertoire as vigorously multivalent, constantly regenerating, and profoundly empowering. In the Chinese context, three Chinese-language White Snake productions, ranging from TV drama series, animation film, to TV film with an all-child cast, use images of children and females to challenge a world dominated by adults and males, queering the heteronormative romance in the White Snake story, and presenting a bold celebration of the humanity of the nonhuman. We have a lot to learn from these activist, queer bodies of the snake women hybrids, as they continuously teach us the importance of cultural empathy and the power of radical tolerance.

Bio

Liang Luo is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and The Global White Snake (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Both books are forthcoming in Chinese. Her new book and documentary project is on the relationship between the European left, black internationalism, and Chinese revolution. Professor Luo's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the International Center for the Studies of Chinese Civilization at Fudan University, and the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University, among others. She is an external reviewer for the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the outgoing chair of the Modern and Contemporary Chinese forum of the Modern Language Association, and she served as a conference program committee member for the Association for Asian Studies.