Description

Professor Jing Jing Chang’s presentation focuses on the history of the role of Cantonese film development in postwar Hong Kong in its reconstruction of Hong Kong as a new home for the ongoing influx of arrivals to the colony. In particular, she examines the cultural work of the Zhonglian film company (1952-1967), whose film artists became the new cultural elites in postwar Hong Kong. In addition to presenting a thematic analysis of the corpus of this film company, this talk deciphers the fan letters to Zhonglian’s fan magazine, the Union Pictorial, in order to re-conceptualize the role of audiences beyond Hong Kong in constructing a postwar moral universe of pan-Chinese patriotism in Cantonese style. In this very process of reinventing a moral universe amidst the new bipolar Cold War world order, Zhonglian and by extension, postwar Hong Kong, became a nodal site, where the didactic and moral message of Chinese patriotism was produced and from where such ideological ideas were disseminated to overseas Chinese communities beyond this British Crown Colony.

The seminar will include a half hour Q&A session, followed by light refreshment.

Jing Jing Chang completed her BA in Cinema Studies and French at the University of Toronto and her PhD in modern Chinese history and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her teaching areas are Asian and world cinemas. And her research interests include Cold War film cultures, Hong Kong cinema, and postcolonial studies.