Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER
Dr. Fiona Yuk-wa LAW (Hong Kong University)
email: <lawfiona@hku.hk>
"Fabulating animals: journey to an affective sphere in Asian film scene"
When pet-keeping in the urban space is becoming a vogue as a sign of economic prosperity, stories about such human-animal relationship have illuminated the dialectics of alienation and intimacy of the city dwellers. At the same time, the “sentimental fabulations” (to borrow from Rey Chow) embedded in the life-and-deaths of these animal companions has triggered a critical reflection on the imagery of vulnerability in popular narratives. By looking at a selection of animal-related films produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, India, and the PRC in recent years, this paper attempts to map out a preliminary topography of an affective sphere mediated by the cinematic narratives about the animal-other and the human-self, and thus allow a contemplation about cosmopolitanism, modernity, and the increasingly globalized images shared within the claustrophilic time-space of cinema.
| Fiona Yuk-wa LAW, Ph.D. (HKU). Her research interests include film studies (Chinese-language cinemas, Asian cinemas in the context of globalization, the modernist tradition in European cinema, and cinematic nostalgia), visual cultures, and Hong Kong cultural studies. She has published an article on Chinese New Year films in Journal of Chinese Cinemas and an article on Center Stage and Rouge in In Critical Proximity: The Visual Memories of Stanley Kwan (in Chinese, Joint Publishing). Currently, while she is working on a book project about the cultural study of Chinese New Year films made in Hong Kong and the PRC from 1950s to the present, she has been developing a new research interest in animal studies and posthumanism. |