Writing Beyond Tradition: Chivalric Stories by Chen Jinghan in Late Imperial ChinaOn September 2, Dr. Iris Lujing Ma of University of Texas at Austin delivered a lecture on “Writing Beyond Tradition: Chivalric Stories by Chen Jinghan in Late Imperial China” to an audience of thirty at UBC’s Centre for Chinese Research. Dr. Ma’s talk focused on stories about knights-errant published in the literary journal New-New Fiction 新新小說 (1904) by its editor and main contributor, Chen Jinghan 陳景韓 (1878-1965). Dr. Ma showed how Chen established a global context for his writings through appropriating knight-errant stories from different countries, exploring new themes, and experimenting with genres, linguistic registers, and narrative approaches. Ma engaged the audience in a discussion of how Chen incorporated anarchism into Chinese knight-errant fiction, and in doing so turned traditional chivalric subgenre into to a vehicle for engagement with critical issues at stake in the late Qing.
Killing Time: The Hong Kong Handover and its AfterlivesOn August 31, the Modern Chinese Culture Seminar hosted Professor Carlos Rojas of Duke University, who spoke about “Killing Time: The Hong Kong Handover and its Afterlives.” Speaking to an audience of thirty at UBC’s Department of Asian Studies, Prof. Rojas used Fruit Chan’s 2016 film Kill Time as a starting point to reflect on the legacy of the Handover, and on the significance of its twentieth—and fiftieth—anniversaries. Although Chan’s film is set in contemporary Beijing, based on a novel by a Mainland Chinese author, and at first glance appears to have little to do with Hong Kong, Prof. Rojas argued that the work explores concerns relevant to the Handover and its legacies, and particularly the sense of anticipation and anxiety that the Handover has generated, as well as the sense of potentiality and foreboding contained in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Agreement’s guarantee that Hong Kong would enjoy a post-Handover moratorium of “fifty years without change.”
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