Upcoming Events
Past Events
The Activist and the Queer in Contemporary White Snake Productions
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. READ MORE...
COVERT HISTORY OF THE US-CHINA COLD WAR
Drawing upon his recently published book Agents of Subversion, John Delury will explore the covert history of the Cold War between the United States and China from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. He will discuss different kinds of Cold War “battlefields”—from New Haven to Hong Kong, Korea to Manchuria—where ideas were weaponized in policy debates as well as clandestine missions. Following the trail of one particular CIA mission into the PRC at the height of the Korean War, Delury will offer a framework for understanding US-China Cold War diplomacy (and the lack thereof) that might offer at least cautionary lessons for the present. READ MORE...