[Air-L] Global Media and China Webinar: Mediating Borders: New Boundaries for Hong Kong Studies

[Xiao Han]

Dear All, 

The SAGE journal Global Media and China, sponsored by the Communication University of China, is pleased to announce its webinar series. The first webinar will take place on ZOOM: 

Join Zoom Meeting
https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/91865769066?pwd=VW9selYvN1FTMWhTYzNLUDlLVFFCUT09 <https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/91865769066?pwd=VW9selYvN1FTMWhTYzNLUDlLVFFCUT09>

Meeting ID: 918 6576 9066
Passcode: 236266

Time:
October 29, 20.30 - 22.30 (Beijing/HK Time)
October 29, 14.30 - 16.30 (UTC/GMT)


Theme
 

There are myriad methods and tactics to study and examine Hong Kong as a former crown colony and a current Chinese special administrative region. Using the idea of border as a critical tool as well as the subject of critique, this webinar highlights and addresses a political and historical fact that the bordering, debordering and transbordering of Hong Kong, as long taken-for-granted through the media, has never been a fixed and stable boundary. To think of the borderscape of Hong Kong is to see border as always in process, which will generate new possibilities in sustaining and reconfiguring the city’s cultural infrastructure to meet new demands and challenges. If political binarism and cultural parochialism have walled up Hong Kong cultures from national or transnational transformations, this webinar seeks to initiate new discussions and revisit old discovery of Hong Kong amid the ebb and flow of nationality, transnationality and globality.

 
Speakers

 

Prof. Yiu-Wai Chu, Professor and Director, Hong Kong Studies Programme, The University of Hong Kong

 
Dr. Helena Wu, Lecturer and Research Fellow, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland

 
Dr. Danny Weng-kit Chan, Lecturer, College of Professional and Continuing Education, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

 
 
Abstracts

 
Yiu-Wai Chu, “Hong Kong (in China) Studies: Hong Kong Popular Culture as Example” 

 
Hong Kong’s integration into the Mainland has become a topic that is pertinent to the consideration of the future of Hong Kong culture and the city as a whole. Through the cross-border ventures of Hong Kong cultural industries, this talk examines the implications of a new version of “northbound imaginary” in Hong Kong cinema, television and popular songs. It endeavors to use these cross-border experiences as examples to contribute an additional dimension to Hong Kong studies, which is seen as important as the worlding of Hong Kong culture. Hopefully, this will also shed light on a cultural studies response to the new configuration of the Greater Bay Area.

 
 
Helena Wu, “Sports as a Lens: The Making of Athletes' and Spectators' Identities in Postmillennial Hong Kong”

 
This talk explores the trajectories of local and national belonging in various forms and degrees, which, in turn, bespeak the evolving Hong Kong-China relationship in the larger socio-political context of post-handover Hong Kong. It examines the multifarious articulations of local and national identifications registered in the athletes’ and the spectators’ performing bodies, their mediated images and embodiments. Through the media representation and repercussion of cross-border sports competitions and athletes’ image, the talk explores the athletes’ and the spectators’ performing bodies and their mediated identities and embodiments, in order to tease out the body and identity politics embedded in sports practice and viewership partaken in different scenarios.

 
 
Danny Wen-kit Chan, “Beyond Nationhood: Border and Coming of Age in Hong Kong Cinema”

 
The 50s of Hong Kong manifests the initiation of a communal imagination oscillating in between the sovereignty of a British colony and the reality of a Chinese territory.  The influx of immigrants from the north and, as a result, the establishment of a border during the 50s not only restructured the demographic composition of the city, but also brought along new momentum for mass cultural productions. Capitalizing on two titles produced in the early 50s and in the late 90s of Hong Kong cinema, namely Fung Fung’s The Kid (1950) and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999), this talk aims to explore the correlation between border, community and nationality through the life adventures of the child protagonists, whose transitions and explorations are entangled with a political and territorial border that polarizes our Sinophonic imagination in the ongoing present of China-Hong Kong division.



Dr HAN Xiao

Research Associate, Social Media Centre, Communication University of China (CUC)

Commissioning Editor, Global Media and China http://journals.sagepub.com/home/gch <http://gch.sagepub.com/>