Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2018 – China and Cross-Cultural Humour 1890-1940: A Panel Discussion – 6/11/2018

An excellent academic event taking place as part of the HKILF 2018 at HKU…(and it’s free)

China and Cross-Cultural Humour 1890-1940: A Panel Discussion

This panel, featuring Professor Julia Kuehn and Dr Wendy Gan from the School of English, University of Hong Kong and Dr Anne Witchard from the University of Westminster, UK, will investigate the circumstances and motivations of cross-cultural humour during the period.

Looking at a range of comic texts, from chinoiserie-inspired tales, fin-de-siècle travel writing, cartoons, yellow peril propaganda to advertising and musical comedy theatre, the panel, moderated by Dr Anya Adair from the School of English, University of Hong Kong, will explore western discourses about China and cross-cultural humour at the turn of the 20th century. Is humour meant to be inclusive or exclusive? Does it challenge the status quo, and is it a productive negotiation of power relations? Might it demonstrate not superiority or ridicule, but common ground?

Wendy Gan is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She has published widely on British women’s middlebrow writing from the early twentieth century (with a regular focus on those novels set in China), as well as British women modernists. Wendy’s most recent book is Comic China: Representing Common Ground, 1890-1945 (2018).

Julia Kuehn is Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. She has published on China-related travel writing, especially in the nineteenth century, but also across time. Her publications include the edited collections A Century of Travels in China (2007), China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces (2009) and Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China (2013). Julia is currently working on First Opium War travelogues.

Anne Witchard is Reader in English Studies at the University of Westminster UK. She has published widely in the area of Sino-British cultural relations. Her most recent book is England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and The Great War (2014). She is currently working on a project titled Dancing Antic Hays: Performing Modernist Chineseries.