Cosmopolitanism, civil disobedience and the global legacy of Martin Luther King

Through the 19th century, the motor of China’s geopolitical change shifted from Eurasia to its southern coast. The impact of the West on China, while resulting in disastrous territorial concessions, also gave rise to a Southern Cosmopolitanism, with Guangdong native, Kang Youwei, becoming a cutting edge figure. 120 years ago, Kang led the first major drive to modernize China in the ill-fated Hundred Days Reform. Three years earlier, in 1895, he organized Gongche Shangshu, the first Chinese “student movement” to petition the royal court for political reform. For many, this activist lineage’s latest manifestation was the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong’s 79-day Occupy demonstration for universal suffrage in 2014. Following the Arab Spring and a worldwide economic justice movement spearheaded by Occupy Wall Street, the Umbrella Movement originated as a civil disobedience campaign called “Occupy Central with Love and Peace.” One crucial document that inspired Benny Tai, law professor and conceiver of Occupy Central, is Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963). The Occupy campaign used the “Birmingham” essay as the foundation for an outstanding civic education initiative drawing upon a global legacy evolved from Thoreau and Gandhi. Evans Chan, New York-based film critic and director of “Raise the Umbrellas” (2016/2018) and acclaimed documentaries about Kang Youwei, explores this early stage of the Umbrella Movement to survey the continuing relevance of King’s legacy in the US, Hong Kong, and the world today. Speaker Born in Guangdong and grew up in Macau and Hong Kong, Evans Chan is an internationally renowned critic, librettist, playwright, and filmmaker. He received his Master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in New York and PhD in Screen Culture at Northwestern University, USA. Currently based in New York, Chan is one of Hong Kong’s leading independent filmmakers. His award-winning films have been shown at the Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Moscow, Vancouver, San Francisco and Taiwan film festivals, among others. In his dramatic and documentary films Chan explores the challenges confronting Hong Kong before and after its return to Chinese rule in 1997. To Liv(e) (1991) was listed as one of the 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films by Time Out Magazine in Hong Kong. Raise the Umbrellas (2016–2018) documents the 79-day massive democratic protests known as the Umbrella Movement in 2014. As a playwright, Chan developed in 2015 his award-winning film Datong: The Great Society (2011) into the libretto as Datong: The Chinese Utopia, which was presented by the Hong Kong Arts Festival and staged in London in 2017. Chan is also a writer whose work has appeared in many Chinese and English publications. His English-language play, adapted from Chinese writer Eileen Chang’s novel Naked Earth, was staged at New York’s Bank Street Theater. Filmography: To Liv(e) (1992), Crossings (1994), Journey to Beijing (1998), Adeus Macau (2000), The Map of Sex and Love (2001), Bauhinia (2002), The Life and Times of Wu Zhongxian (2002), Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan (2004), Makrokosmos I & II (2004), The Maverick Piano (2007), Datong: The Great Society (2011), Two or Three Things About Kang Youwei (2012), The Rose of the Name: Writing Hong Kong (2014), Raise the Umbrellas (2016), Death in Montmartre (2017). www.evanschan.com Discussant Leo Ou-fan Lee is currently the Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph. D. degree from Harvard in 1970 and has taught at Harvard, UCLA, Chicago, Indiana, and Princeton Universities in the United States, as well as the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as visiting professor. His scholarly publications in English include: Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Form of Urban Culture, 1930-1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999), Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Indiana University Press, 1987), The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Harvard, 1973), City between Worlds: My Hong Kong (Harvard University Press, 2008), and Musings: Reading Hong Kong, China and the World (Hong Kong: Muse Books, 2011). In Hong Kong, he is known as both a scholar and cultural critic and has published more than 20 books in Chinese across a wide spectrum of subjects: literature, Hong Kong culture, film, classic music, and architecture. Moderator Stephen Ching-kiu Chan is Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University. He is the current Chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies, and the Chair of Board of Directors, The House of Hong Kong Literature. HKAC Website: https://www.hkac.org.hk/calendar_detail/?u=VEfBtuw6w_U&lang=e

Janus-faced Hana yori dango : Transnational Adaptations in East Asia and the Globalization Thesis

Theories of regional formation need to be rigorously examined in relation to East Asian popular culture that has been in circulation under the successive “waves” of Japanese and Korean TV dramas from the 1990s onward. Most overviews of the phenomenon have concentrated on the impact on the region of Japanese, then Korean, TV products as they spread southward to the three Chinese communities of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. In the voluminous studies devoted to the subject, most conspicuously represented by those of Iwabuchi Koichi, two outstanding points of emphasis are noteworthy. First, the majority of evidence is drawn from the so-called “trendy” love dramas, like Tokyo Love Story (1991), Long Vacation (1996), Love Generation (1996) and Beautiful Life (2000) from Japan as well as Autumn Tale (2000) and Winter Sonata (2002) from Korea. Many of them were so successful that they altered TV drama production in the receptor communities. Second, the preponderant concern in these studies is with the reasons for the spectacular successes achieved by these media products, and views are divided between those who champion the “cultural proximity” thesis, stressing the close links between the three East Asian traditions, and those who uphold the “quest for modernity” thesis, viewing the upbeat, fashionable lifestyles depicted in the dramas as the root appeal for a predominantly young, middle-class and Westernized audience living in the cities. Interestingly, in both camps, one sees illuminating echoes of issues and terms repeatedly theorized and problematized in recent adaptation studies, like manipulation, appropriation, rewriting, localization strategies, and the opposition between regionalization and globalization as explanatory modes for translation activity

Lily Briscoe's «Chinese Eyes» : the Reading of Difference in Translated Fiction

Since the eighties, translation scholars have increasingly turned to «differences» rather than similarities between the original and the translation. More important than the mere existence of these differences is the fact that they are experienced by the reader. Reading a translation can be characterized as a «border-crossing experience» in that the reader moves back and forth between two semiotic realms, one familiar, the other strange. My paper will take as its starting point the repeated references in Virginia Woolf's masterpiece To the Lighthouse to its central character Lily Briscoe's «Chinese eyes». That the Chinese reader of the translation should feel uncomfortable because Lily's «Chinese eyes» are said to be the main obstacle to her finding a husband is symptomatic of a more general problem concerning readers' reception of translated realist fiction. As a literary method, realism can be understood as a self-conscious effort to make literature appear to be describing directly not some other language but reality itself. Unfortunately, by their very nature, translations call attention to the target language in addition to describing a reality. In the case of Woolf's biased reference to «Chinese eyes», we have an interesting instance of how the reader's sympathetic identification with the characters (encouraged by the language used -Chinese in this case) can be suddenly shattered when his attention is drawn to an unpleasant feature he, as a Chinese person, possesses. The crux of the problem lies in the fact that in translations, one language is used to capture the reality normally expressed by another. Is there reality beyond language? Can reality exist outside of language?Des dels anys vuitanta, els especialistes en traducció s'ocupen cada vegada més de les «diferències» i no de les similituds entre l'original i la traducció. Més important que la mera existència d'aquestes diferències és el fet que el lector les experimenta. Podríem dir que llegir una traducció és una «experiència de frontera», en la qual el lector es mou endavant i endarrere entre dos camps semiòtics, un de familiar i un altre d'estrany. L'article pren com a punt de partida les nombroses referències a «els ulls xinesos» en l'obra mestra de Virginia Woolf, Al Far, del seu personatge central, Lily Briscoe. Que el lector xinès de la traducció s'hauria de sentir incòmode perquè es diu que «els ulls xinesos» de Lily són l'obstacle principal perquè no trobi marit, és simptomàtic d'un problema més general pel que fa a la recepció dels lectors de ficció realista traduïda. Com a mètode literari, el realisme es pot entendre com un esforç tímid per fer que la literatura sembli que descriu directament no una altra llengua, sinó la realitat mateixa. Malauradament, per la seva mateixa naturalesa, les traduccions criden l'atenció sobre la llengua de destinació, a més de descriure una realitat. En el cas de la referència esbiaixada de Woolf a «ulls xinesos», tenim un exemple interessant de com es pot, de cop i volta, destruir la identificació del lector amb els personatges (fomentat per la llengua utilitzada -el xinès, en aquest cas) quan es crida la seva atenció sobre un tret desagradable que té, com a xinesa. El cor del problema rau en el fet que en les traduccions es fa servir una llengua per a captar la realitat normalment expressada per una altra. Hi ha realitat més enllà de la llengua? Pot la realitat existir fora de la llengua

At the borders of translation : traditional and modern(ist) adaptations, East and West

Adaptation, as both a method and a textual category, has been a perennial favorite with text mediators who call themselves translators, appearing especially prominently in intersemiotic rather than interlingual translation. The present paper examines the concepts and practices of adaptation, drawing particular attention to examples from both the West and the Far East. Just as a preference for adaptive methods in translation can be seen in certain periods of Western literary history (e.g. seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France), there were times when adaptations were hailed in China, Japan and Korea. In the course of the discussion, reference will be made to (1) the modernist adaptations undertaken by Western writers through much of the twentieth century; (2) the sequences of novelistic adaptations spawned in Korea and Japan by Chinese classical novels; and (3) the adaptations of European novels by the prodigious twentieth-century Chinese translator Lin Shu. It will be shown that there is a need for translation scholars to question the theoretical validity of the dichotomy between the two modes of translation and adaptation, as well as an urgency to reconsider the supposed inferior status of adaptations. Adapted from the source documen