Symposium on “Ghostly Temptations: Artistic & Sexual Empowerment in Academia”
Organized by MA in Visual Culture Studies, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK
Supported by the Centre for Cultural Studies, CUHK
30 October 2017 (Monday)
19:00-21:00 | LT1 Swire Hall, Fung King Hey Bldg., CUHK
Registration
https://goo.gl/forms/xwnqzGTFkqsR7D6t1
Website
https://www.vcs.crs.cuhk.edu.hk/ghostly-symposium
Keynote Lecture by Prof. Judith Zeitlin (University of Chicago)
Spirit Marriage & Phantom Heroines:
From Chinese Literature to East Asian Film & Media
This talk will explore how the age-old Chinese ritual of spirit marriage is imaginatively reconfigured in traditional tales of the strange and visually transformed in film and TV. The influence of spirit marriage is often evident in the literary tradition of the ghost romance, in certain tales where a female ghost enters into a sexual liaison with a human male. Rather than simply reading such ghost stories as vestiges of this cultural practice, the talk argues that the interest of such narratives lies in their ability to animate ritual fictions, to play out the imagined consequences of ritual actions. Film and TV provide a particularly fertile medium for reinterpreting spirit marriage to explore issues of contemporary relevance such as colonialism and gender non-conformity. Response will be delivered by Prof. Pang Laikwan (Cultural & Religious Studies, CUHK).
Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD from Harvard in 1988 and taught on the faculty of Cornell and Harvard before moving to Chicago in 1994. Her work combines literary history of the Ming-Qing period (16th-19th centuries) with other disciplines, particularly visual and material culture, music and performance, as well as gender studies, medicine and film. Her many publications on Chinese fiction and drama include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (1993), and four co-edited works: Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (2014), “Chinese Opera Film,†a special issue of The Opera Quarterly (2010), Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (2007), and Writing and Materiality in China (2003). The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), she is currently writing a book on the culture of musical entertainment in early modern China. More information is available at https://ealc.uchicago.edu/faculty/zeitlin .
Conducted in English. All are welcome.
Free admission. Registration is required.
Enquiries:
Ms. Gloria FURNESS gloriaf@cuhk.edu.hk.