Upcoming Events
世界的白蛇—越界與重生之力
IAS 1038, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST
充滿活力的英語白蛇譜系從十九至二十世紀之交一直延伸到二十一世紀，成為本研究的關鍵個案，顯示出白蛇現象的當代性和跨越性及其對全球文化生產日益增長的影響力。本書原稿以英文寫就，探討白蛇傳說在亞洲及全球範圍內多姿多彩的旅行。作者揀取埋藏於故紙堆中的相關歷史文本，同時更面對白蛇傳說的諸多新變種，在歷史與當下的對比和參照中，追蹤白蛇跨界旅行的意義和價值嬗變，深度解析了中、英、日、韓語種的白蛇文本，發掘了白蛇故事對複合身份與多元性向、越界之愛、反抗權威、非凡之人與物等各種激進思想的包容性。作者强調，文化即是挪用；文化產品本身就是在不斷斡旋、不斷轉型中產生出來的。文化的旅行與變形能力正是促使其生生不息的原因。正如白蛇一般，任何文化都需要不斷蛻皮重生。 READ MORE...
Past Events
Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past
LSK 1033, HKUST
How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism. Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a return to revolution foster alternative visions of China’s future path? Tu probes the nexus of literature, thought, and memory, bringing to light the dynamic moral sentiments and emotional excess at work in these post-Mao ideological contentions. By analyzing how rival intellectual camps stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, Tu argues that the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia. READ MORE...
Seditious Voices: Revolution and Information in the Korean War Campaign, 1950-1953
Room 4502 (Lift 25-26), HKUST
To date, historians in China and the West were drawn to studying the Korean War largely because it is the first foreign war the communist revolutionary state fought under the mantle of internationalism and the first hot war during the Cold War that inaugurated the US-China confrontation for more than two decades. They have shown convincingly that China’s entrance into the Korean conflict signified a critical turning point in China’s foreign policy and domestic politics. Yet, few seem to have thought to ask how the government sold such a complex war to the public and how the public reacted to the top-down effort intended to win their hearts and minds, a mere eight months after the Communists won the national victory and seventeen months after Beijing came under Communist rule. This talk, built upon Ma's forthcoming book, intends to move beyond the sort of “history of the headquarters” by exploring connections between the official and grassroots levels, and between political rhetoric and quotidian effects, to uncover the social meaning of the war. READ MORE...