What’s New

 

Webinar – Everyday Life and Affordances in Koh Hong Teng’s Singaporean Comics

Speaker: Prof. Weihsin GUI (Associate Professor of English, University of California-Riverside, USA)

Date: 22 April 2022 (Friday)

Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm

Zoom Link: https://eduhk.zoom.us/j/93297637413

Zoom Meeting ID: 932 9763 7413

Talk title: Everyday Life and Affordances in Koh Hong Teng’s Singaporean Comics

Abstract:

My talk examines the comics of Singaporean illustrator and artist Koh Hong Teng, who stands out in the Singaporean comics scene due to his meticulous attention to visual and physical details and his depictions of everyday lives of ordinary Singaporeans. I focus on a few of Koh’s shorter, anthologized comics as well as two of his longer collaborative works, Gone Case (2010) and Ten Sticks One Rice (2012). While none of Koh’s comics are explicitly engaged in socio-political critique, this does not mean that his comics shy away from commentary about such issues in contemporary Singapore. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s discussion of affordances in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2017), I show how Koh’s comics create visual and narrative affordances for readers to think and raise questions about social life and power structures through his quotidian representations of common Singaporeans.

Speaker:

Weihsin Gui is Associate Professor of English and Director of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California-Riverside. He is the author of National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics (2013) and the editor of Common Lines and City Spaces (2014), an essay collection on Singaporean poet Arthur Yap. He also co-edited a 2016 journal special issue of Interventions about Singapore and neoliberalism (2016) and another 2020 special issue of Antipodes on literary and cultural connections between Southeast Asia and Australia-New Zealand. He has published several essays is various academic journals, among them an essay on “Contemporary Literature From Singapore” that appeared in the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Literature (2017), and a chapter on “Narrating the Global South East Asian Diaspora” that was published in Volume 10 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English (2019).

Migration, Life Writing, and the Spectacle of the Migrant Body in Distress
Death here and now: Intimacy and politics in an ethnobiographical and photographic film

Thanatic Ethics Winter Webinar Series – Talk 2

Date: 4 February 2022 (Friday)

Time: 10 -11 AM CET (5 -6 PM HKT)

Title: Death here and now: Intimacy and politics in an ethnobiographical and photographic film  (in French and English)

Includes film clips from ‘Quel côté de l’absence?’ (with subtitles in English)

Speakers:

Valérie Cuzol (Max Weber Centre, France)

Frédéric Lecloux (Photographer and documentary maker)

 

To see the full abstract and bio of the speaker, please visit Thanatic Ethics’s website.

We are delighted to announce the “Thanatic Ethics” Webinar Series which will run from January to March 2022. Please note that all times refer to Central European Time since our speakers will be presenting from Europe. The details of the talks are as follows:

Winter Webinar series

Date and Time: 14 Jan 2022, 10am CET
Speaker: Alessandro Corso (Department of International Development, University of Oxford)
Title: The Art of Confession: ethnographic reflections on responsibility and doubt at the borderland of Lampedusa.
Date and Time: 4 Feb 2022, 10am CET
Speakers: Valérie Cuzol (Max Weber Centre, France)

Frédéric Lecloux (Photographer and documentary maker)

Title: Death here and now: Intimacy and politics in an ethnobiographical and photographic film (in French and English) and

Discussion of the film  ‘Quel côté de l’absence?’ (with subtitles in English)

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/292694642

Date and Time: 4 Mar 2022, 10am CET
Speaker: Professor Mita Banerjee (Chair of American Studies, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany)
Title: Migration, Life Writing, and the Spectacle of the Migrant Body in Distress

Eventbrite details will be announced in due course for all webinars.

The webinars are convened by Bidisha Banerjee (CPCH, The Education University of Hong Kong), Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) and Thomas Lacroix (CERI – Sciences Po, Paris/ MFO).