The Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities at The Education University of Hong Kong is proud to announce that Hong Kong’s first ever One City, One Book initiative will be hosted during the 2018/2019 academic year.

One City One Book Hong Kong （我城我書）is a community reading programme which aims to encourage as many people as possible, to read and discuss a single book at around the same time. Each year students, scholars, and readers of all kinds will focus their attention on one single book. A series of activities related to the chosen book will be held around Hong Kong, including discussions of the book and its themes, along with exhibitions, film screenings, school events, book discussions, author visits, cultural performances, library events, and so forth. The goals of the initiative are to build a sense of community and promote reading, discussion, and civic engagement. To get started, see below for this year’s book!The book chosen for the first ever One City One Book initiative in Hong Kong is The Arrival (2006), a wordless graphic novel by the Chinese Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan.

Please visit onecityonebook.hk for further details. Should you have any inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact us at oncecityonebook@eduhk.hk.

We regret to inform you that the captioned talk is cancelled. Dr. Mallot was scheduled to arrive in Hong Kong over the weekend. He has had to cancel his ticket because of the approaching super typhoon.

“I Used to be Human Once”: Disability in Contemporary Indian Writing

Date: 19 September 2018 (Wednesday)

Time: 12:30 – 14:00

Venue: B3-P-04, Tai Po Campus, The Education University of Hong Kong

Abstract

How does disability studies impact postcolonial discourse? How do postcolonial writers address differently-abled subjects? This talk seeks to illuminate and interrogate the intersections – fruitful and fraught – between these fields, covering a wide range of texts but paying particular attention to Mahesh Dattani’s Tara (a play about conjoined twins) and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (a novel about the 1984 Bhopal disaster).  As South Asian disability rights advocates struggle to achieve more legal rights and more practical modes of accessibility, writers have repeatedly turned to differently-abled protagonists, with mixed intentions and varied results.  At the center of this hotly debated discourse lies a central, uncomfortable question:  what does it mean to be “normal”?  What, in some cases, does it mean to be “human”?

Bio

J. Edward Mallot is an Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Arizona State University. His book Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia was published by Palgrave Macmillan. He has published on a wide range of postcolonial and transnational authors, including Amitav Ghosh, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Kamila Shamsie, Nathaniel Mackey, and Karen Tei Yamashita, among others.

All are welcome and no registration is required. Please send any enquiries to Mr. Manni Cheung at 2948 7360 or via email cheungml@eduhk.hk.

Thinking-with Bark: Activating a postdevelopmental logic in early childhood education

Mindy Blaise, Professor, Early Childhood Education, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

15:30 – 17:00, 19th April 2018

B3-LP-04, Tai Po Campus EdUHK

This paper sets out to challenge the developmental logic that works hard to tame, simplify, and control young children’s learning. As a challenge to this kind of logic, I have been conducting a long term multisensory and affect-focused inquiry of children’s relations with place. Weekly I go walking with a group of children and their teachers to Stony Creek, located on the lands of the Kulin Nations people in Melbourne, Australia. By paying attention to children’s relations with Eucalyptus trees, we created the Bark Studio as a place for experimentations and provocations.

In the Bark Studio we have been wondering about bark movements and ask, “How does movement let knowing happen?” We are intrigued with this question because it challenges the idea that knowing presupposes what is to be known, or that knowing presupposes the subject.

By thinking with movement, movements of thought, and bark materiality, I show how bark movements put into motion the relational potential of the bark. Several encounters with bark, wind, and water will be explored. I will explore how teachers and young children are putting thinking into movement and movement into thinking and how this makes room for relational complexity. I argue that relational complexity activates a postdevelopmental logic that unleashes, complicates, and opens-up learning in early childhood education.

Professor Mindy Blaise’s interdisciplinary research involves bringing together the environmental humanities and early childhood education to generate postdevelopmental pedagogies for the Anthropocene. She provokes teachers to challenge human exceptionalism and ‘make room for the more’ to generate ethico-political practices for living well together in these uncertain times.

Dear Movie Lovers,

We will continue our CPCH film salon next Wednesday (11/4) with Good Men, Good Women  《好男好女》by Taiwan-based director HOU Hsiao-Hsien. In this series, we will show movies from Hong Kong and Taiwan featuring social struggles in both regions during the 1990s and 2000s. Please refer to the following for details of our first screening:

Good Men, Good Women《好男好女》 

Date: 11 April 2018 (Wed)

Time: 18:15 – 21:00

Venue: D1-LP-06
Language: (film) In Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Japanese with English subtitles.; (post-screening discussion) Bilingual – Chinese & English

Synopsis (trailer)

Hou’s multi-layered masterpiece is the third film (after A City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster) in his remarkable trilogy of historical epics. Annie Shizuka Inoh (Annie Yi) plays Liang, an actress preparing for the lead role in a film about Chiang Bi-Yu, a heroine of the anti-Japanese resistance of the 1940s who was imprisoned as a subversive in the 1950s during the repressive “White Terror,” Taiwan’s version of the red scare (and a once-taboo subject). Liang receives an unwelcome reminder of her own troubled past when someone starts faxing her pages from her old diary. Hou’s bold film operates in three tenses: Liang’s present, her remembered past (rendered in vivid, vibrant colour), and her mind’s-eye imaginings of the film she is about to make (shot in rich black-and-white). In Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Japanese with English subtitles.

About the director

Of the ten films that HOU Hsiao-Hsien directed between 1980 and 1989, seven received best film or best director awards from prestigious international films festivals in Venice, Berlin, Hawaii, and the Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes. In a 1988 worldwide critics’ poll, Hou was championed as “one of the three directors most crucial to the future of cinema.”

Full Schedule of Film Salon on Social Struggles in Hong Kong & Taiwan

• 11/4 (Wed, D1-LP-06) Good Men, Good Women《好男好女》(dir. HOU Hsiao-Hsien 侯孝賢,  1995)
• 16/4 (Mon, D1-LP-03) The Rice Bomber《白米炸彈客》(dir. CHOI Li卓立, 2014)
• 18/4 (Wed, D1-LP-03) From the Queen to the Chief Executive 《等候董建華發落》(dir. Herman YAU邱禮濤, 2010)
• 25/4 (Wed, D1-LP-03) Ordinary Heroes《千言萬語》(dir. Ann HUI許鞍華, 1999)

No registration required and we look forward to seeing you at the salon soon. All sessions are intended for purposes of giving or receiving instruction through film analysis and commentary among students and teachers.

Date: 28^th March 2018 (Wed)

Time: 15:30 – 17:00

Venue: D1-LP-06, Tai Po Campus, EdUHK

Abstract

Not sure what to submit to the RAE? What is impact, and how can Humanities and Social Sciences researchers achieve it? How do we write a research narrative? Want to improve your GRF chances? How are external reviewers chosen? What makes for an effective grant application? Should I apply again if I get 3.5? How important is having a Hong Kong dimension? Chris Berry has been on various RGC panels, including the GRF, since 2007. He has been through RAE exercises in Australia and the UK. He will offer his insights from these experiences and answer your questions.

Bio

Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese-language cinemas and other Chinese-language screen-based media, as well as work from neighboring countries. Publications include: Cinema and the National: China on Screen (2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (2004);Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017); Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture (2016); Public Space, Media Space (2013); Chinese Cinema, 4 vols, (2012); The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (2010); Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and Social Space (2010); Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes (2009); TV China (2008); Chinese Films in Focus II (2008); and Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (2005).

All are welcome and no registration is required. Please send any enquiries to Mr. Manni Cheung at 2948 7360 or via email cheungml@eduhk.hk.

Public Lecture: “Taiwanese-Language Films (Taiyupian): An Alternative Cinema of Poverty?”

Date: 26^th March 2018 (Mon)

Time: 12:30 – 14:00

Venue: D2-LP-05, Tai Po Campus, EdUHK

Abstract

The cycle of over 1,000 low-budget, Taiwanese-language films made between the mid-1950s and early 1970s was neglected and forgotten for many years. By the time people became interested in reclaiming them as Taiwan’s heritage, only 200-plus survived. One reason for their low regard has been their low production quality. In this paper, I propose approaching Taiwanese-language films as an alternative “cinema of poverty.” Recently, Song Hwee Lim has adapted Jerzy Grotowski’s idea of a “theatre of poverty” to analyse Midi Zi’s films. But where Lim and Grotowski see poverty as encouraging a high modernist stripping down to the essentials of the medium, Taiwanese-language cinema is another kind of cinema of poverty. It is characterised by the adoption of methods designed to maximise audience appeal in the shortest production time possible and at a low budget. These methods include sensational plot twists, emotive acting, and an exuberant practice of what Lu Xun in the 1930s called “grabbism” (拿来主义) – borrowing music, plot and anything else that works from overseas to create a locally distinctive bricolage.

Bio

Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese-language cinemas and other Chinese-language screen-based media, as well as work from neighboring countries. Publications include: Cinema and the National: China on Screen (2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (2004);Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017); Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture (2016); Public Space, Media Space (2013); Chinese Cinema, 4 vols, (2012); The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (2010); Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and Social Space (2010); Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes (2009); TV China (2008); Chinese Films in Focus II (2008); and Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (2005).

All are welcome and no registration is required. Please send any enquiries to Mr. Manni Cheung at 2948 7360 or via email cheungml@eduhk.hk.