Giri Deshingkar Memorial Lectures are instituted in the memory of Professor Giri Deshingkar, former Director of the CSDS and founder member of the Institute of Chinese Studies. Earlier speakers in the series include Professors Prasenjit Duara, Wang Gungwu, Tan Chung, Hamashita Takeshi, Ashwani Saith, Richard Appelbaum, Elizabeth Perry and Wang Hui.

This lecture explored the connection between world literature and world history. Taking the world historical event of the global 60s as an example, it  reconsidered the place of China in that event from the perspectives of literary communities that may be considered the South to the Chinese North, such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and through this process, propose a new conception of world literature.

Shu-mei Shih is a professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA, and the Hong-yin and Suet-fong Chan Professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. Her book, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937(2001), is the authoritative study of Chinese literary modernism to date, and her Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific(2007), inaugurated a new field of study called Sinophone Studies. She is currently working on two book projects respectively entitled Empires of the Sinophone and From World History to World Literature.

Monday, 22 December 2014
CSDS Seminar Room