Description

During the twenty-plus years of doi moi (economic renovation) policy, the spatial fabric of Vietnam’s cities has undergone significant transformation. In a now-familiar pattern from cities the world over, Hanoi has predictably though with alarming rapidity developed outward into seemingly ever-expanding suburbs, and upward into high-rise hotels and apartment complexes. More importantly, the landscape of urban everyday life has been resculpted through the middle class’ role in consumption, actual and aspirational, with effects on modes of shopping, leisure, transportation, and, critically, attitudes towards the use and users of public space. In this paper I consider the impact of socio-economic reform on the capital city of Hanoi, focusing specifically on the ways in which the middle class, made possible by doi moi, has and continues to alter the urban landscape.

Lisa Drummond is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. After living and working in Hanoi, Vietnam in the early 1990s, she completed a degree in Human Geography at the Australia National University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Singapore. Her research has focussed primarily on urban social life in Vietnam, including analyses of popular culture, specifically in television serials and women’s magazines, women’s roles in Vietnamese society, and the application of western concepts such as public and private to the use of space in Vietnamese cities. Her publications include several co-edited books, most recently Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam, with Mandy Thomas, and Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam, with Helle Rydstrom.

Description

TICKETS $10 GA | BUY TICKETS AT EVENT WEBSITE

CinemAsia GALA SCHEDULE:

6:30-8:15 Toronto premiere screening of MONDAY [Innis Town Hall]
8:15-8:30 Brief break
8:30-9:30 Japan/film lecture “FITS OF LAUGHTER” by Eric Cazdyn (Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies) [Innis Town Hall]
9:30-12:00 Post screening party [Innis Café transformed by Dinah Koo; catering by Koo & Co and herriott grace]

For more CinemAsia/Reel Asian co-presentations, please check the website on Nov 13 (6:00 pm Hong Kong panel) and 14 (2:30 pm THE BLESSING BELL by Sabu; 6:00 documentary films panel).

INTRODUCTION BY Joseph Wong, Director of Asian Institute at the Munk Centre for International Studies

This is the 12th edition of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. The festival has grown in size and reach to become the premier platform dedicated to Asian cinema and Asian-Canadian films in the country. This year also marks the debut of CinemaAsia, a collaboration of the Asian Institute at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and Reel Asian. Bridging filmmakers, film critics and scholars, CinemAsia offers a series of special screenings and crucial talks and panels supplementing the rich offerings of the film festival. The premier CinemaAsia features a retrospective of the extraordinary and challenging Japanese director Sabu and a presentation on his films by U of T Professor Eric Cazdyn, author of THE FLASH OF CAPITAL. During the festival itself, CinemaAsia will feature two panels, one on the past and future prospects of Hong Kong Cinema, in this its centenary year; and a second, a moderated conversation between Canadian doc-maker Yung Chang and American filmmaker and NYU professor Christine Choy.

The Asian Institute is Canada’s leading centre devoted to research and teaching, centred on Asian research and teaching. The Asian Institute is committed to bringing the community and university closer together and so we are thrilled to form this partnership with Reel Asian in the form of CinemaAsia. The festival’s strong support for Canada’s Asian communities in its programming and critical élan has always been one of its hallmarks. The 12th edition of the festival once again affirms a common spirit of intellectual curiosity and Canada’s cultural diversity in which the Asian Institute is an eager participant.

MONDAY
Special Feature Presentation | Tue Nov 11 | 6:30 PM | Director: Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka) | Japan | 2000 | 100:00 | 35mm | Toronto Premiere
Cast: Shinichi Tsutsumi, Naomi Nishida, Yuko Kirishima, Akira Yamamoto, Susumu Terajima

Waking to the Monday morning weather report, salaryman Koichi Takagi finds himself in an empty hotel room. He cannot remember where he has been or how he got here and he is suffering from an intense hangover. Reaching into his pocket, he begins to remove items that trigger his memory, slowly unravelling the events of the past few nights: an explosion at a bizarre funeral, a hysterically dull conversation with his girlfriend, accidentally falling in with the Yakuza, etc. The more he recalls, the more sinister his circumstances prove to be. Bouncing back and forth across moments in time in order to make sense of the present, director Sabu playfully confuses reality, emphasizing the instability and rewritability of history.

Shinichi Tsutsumi’s turn as the hapless salaryman should also be applauded, both for his nuanced, endearing performance of a man scrambling to reorder his life and for his jaw-dropping dance moves in a sequence that should be recognized among the great cinematic dances of all time.

MONDAY, winner of the Don Quixote Award and FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival (2000), is crafted with knife-sharp wit, astute social satire and a hypnotic cinematography that diffuses the film with an air of surrealism. Such qualities can be found in Sabu’s previous efforts, but in MONDAY they have been honed to perfection.

— synopsis by Eric Cazdyn and Peter Kuplowsky

SABU was born in 1964 as Hiroyuki Tanaka. He began his film career as an actor. His performance in Katsuhiro Otomo’s WORLD APARTMENT HORROR (1991) won him an award at the Yokohama Film Festival 1991, and he went on to appear in several other films, working under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and Takeshi Miike. In 1996, he debuted as both a writer and director with D.A.N.G.A.N. RUNNER. Celebrated for his inventive style and humorous storytelling, Sabu quickly became a highly regarded director in both Japan and overseas, particularly in Europe.

FITS OF LAUGHTER: SABU’S MONDAY
Following the presentation of MONDAY, and departing from Sabu’s MONDAY (with special attention granted to laughter), this lecture will discuss current cultural and political trends in contemporary Japan and beyond.

Speaker: Eric Cazdyn, Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, University of Toronto
In conversation with: TBA

CinemAsia GALA CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

— and generously sponsored by
Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
Donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Toben Food by Design
Koo & Co
herriott grace
Holiday Inn Midtown

Description

Praise for South Korea’s transformation from a “mission-receiving” country to the second largest “mission-sending” country in the world is typically accompanied by applause for Korea’s economic growth and advancement in the capitalist world order. Optimistic observers forecast that Korean Protestant missions will soon eclipse centuries of European and American-led missions and herald a new era of South-to-South mission flows. In such triumphant evangelical narratives, Korea is seen as having successfully progressed from poverty to prosperity as a result of Christianization and capitalist development. How do Christians missions nurture faith in capitalist deliverance, and what is at stake in this evangelical-capitalist assemblage in the era of neoliberal globalization? This talk draws from ethnographic research of missions in Tanzania and Uganda where Korean missionaries organized a month-long series of events including economic development seminars based explicitly on Korea’s model of state-led modernization and rural development. I will discuss how the missionaries presented Saemaul Undong from the 1970s—with its authoritarian roots trimmed and foundations recast in Christian terms—as a wellspring for a distinctly Korean/American political theology of development, and offered it as a blueprint for both economic and spiritual progress..

Ju Hui Judy Han is a doctoral candidate in geography with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Berkeley, California. Her dissertation concerns the geography of contemporary Korean/American evangelical Christian missions. Her research interests include the political economy of global English; perceptions of distance/proximity, stranger/neighbor; illegal aliens; and the narrative structures of class mobility and achievement.

Description

This year is the 100th anniversary of Hong Kong cinema. Films were shot in the colony by foreign cameramen as early as 1898, but it was a Russian-American, Benjamin Brodsky, who hired theatre director Lian Shaobo to make two comic shorts, RIGHT A WRONG WITH EARTHENWARE DISH (WA PEN SHEN YUAN) and STEALING A ROASTED DUCK (TOU SHAO YA). Lian Shaobo later joined two brothers, Li Minwei and Li Beihai, in the Minxin Company in Hong Kong and made the first HK feature, ROUGE (YANZHI, 1925). The fledgling era quickly formed a complex web, with Shanghai’s maturing industry and with the U.S., where Chinese-American filmmakers Kwan Manching and Chiu Ahu-sun first founded Hong Kong’s pioneering Grandview studio.

These inaugural developments foreshadowed the pragmatic commercialism that would drive Hong Kong cinema’s success in post-war Asia. Mandarin-speaking mainland studio veterans then joined in competition with Cantonese studios, and Hong Kong films dove headlong into the international arena. Commercial triumphs came soon with martial arts, urban stories, comedies and eventually a locally born art cinema that enabled a city of just six million to sustain the second largest film industry in Asia.
In the two decades since the 1980s, Hong Kong filmmakers have faced severe challenges in the cinema marketplace. They have also achieved ever-wider international critical recognition.

This panel of critics, archivist-historians and film programmers will discuss the past and prospects of Hong Kong cinema — 100 years after they started.

Panelists:
Kenneth Bi, director of “The Drummer”
Colin Geddes, Unit 8
Jessica Li, visiting fellow, York University
Raymond Phathanavirangoon, international programmer, Toronto International Film Festival and Reel Asian

Moderator:
Bart Testa, professor of Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto

*** Informal reception to follow ***

PANEL CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

SPONSORS
Hong Kong Economc and Trade Office (Canada)

Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Holiday Inn Midtown

Description

TICKETS $10 GA $7 Students | BUY TICKETS AT EVENT WEBSITE

Special Feature Presentation | Fri Nov 14 | 2:30 PM | Director: Sabu (Hiroyuki Tanaka) | Japan | 2003 | 87:00 | 35mm | Canadian Premiere
Cast: Susumu Terajima, Naomi Nishida, Seijun Suzuki

Laid off with the unexpected closing of a local factory, a laborer opts to take a walk rather then join his co-workers in protest. Hands in his pockets, wearing an aimless gaze and never uttering a word, his walk takes him to various places and people, including a ghost played by Seijun Suzuki. When he can go no further, he turns around and walks home.

Having established himself with energetic screwball crime capers like POSTMAN BLUES and UNLUCKY MONKEY, Sabu’s THE BLESSING BELL is a markedly distinct work. The bumbling of Yakuza, the lamentations of murderers and the Rube-Goldberg machine plotting that Sabu is so elegant at constructing persist from previous works, but what differs is how Sabu approaches these episodes visually. For the most part, Sabu has the camera capture the action on a proscenium. Like the unfurling of a tapestry the protagonist walks from the left to right across a series of shots, only to pass through them all again on his way home. The effect is an extremely absorbing cinematic representation of Zen philosophy.

In the pivotal role of the wanderer is veteran Japanese actor Susumu Terajima. A familiar face from both Takeshi Miike and Kitano, but rarely assuming anything more then a supporting role, Sabu takes advantage of Terajima’s wonderful face and its seemingly perpetual grimace for his patient protagonist. It is a deadpan, but moving performance of exquisite subtelty.

THE BLESSING BELL, winner of the Netpac Award at the Berlin International Film Festival (2003) and the Grand Jury Prize at Cinemanila International Film Festival, is a wonderfully accomplished film that manages to inspire a contagious sense of optimism despite its brushes with life’s tragedies and suffering.

— synopsis by Eric Cazdyn and Peter Kuplowsky

SABU was born in 1964 as Hiroyuki Tanaka. He began his film career as an actor. His performance in Katsuhiro Otomo’s WORLD APARTMENT HORROR (1991) won him an award at the Yokohama Film Festival 1991, and he went on to appear in several other films, working under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata and Takeshi Miike. In 1996, he debuted as both a writer and director with D.A.N.G.A.N. RUNNER. Celebrated for his inventive style and humorous storytelling, Sabu quickly became a highly regarded director in both Japan and overseas, particularly in Europe.

FILM CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

SPONSORS
Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
Donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Holiday Inn Midtown

Description

A must-attend session with Oscar-nominated filmmaker and chair of NYU’s graduate film and TV department Christine Choy (WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?) in conversation with Yung Chang, director of the acclaimed film UP THE YANGTZE.

Moderator: TBA

PANEL CO-PRESENTERS
CinemAsia [Asian Institute at the University of Toronto]
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

SPONSORS
Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program
Toronto After Dark
Donderdag
Photographer Joyce Wong
Holiday Inn Midtown

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

In recent years there has been increasing emphasis on environmental sustainability as a key component of urban development strategies in Chinese cities. This shift to greener forms of urban development is occurring against the backdrop of intense interurban competition and is guided by government programs that track the progress of cities towards more sustainable forms of economic growth. These regulatory initiatives resemble target-setting regimes and other technologies of performance often associated with neoliberal governance. However, in the case of China, the function, and ultimately effects, of indicator-based approaches cannot be understood without reference to governing practices of the earlier socialist period. In this paper, I trace the history of environmental assessment programs directed at improving environmental performance at the city level, and examine some of the economic and political factors that have facilitated the development of these programs, and at times, constrained them.

Alana Boland is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Program in Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on environmental governance and green developmentalism in China. Current projects include a study of state regulatory initiatives aimed at improving environmental conditions in cities and communities, as well as an archival-based study of water management in Chinese cities during the 1950s and 60s.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

While the ethnic Chinese in many Asian countries have achieved economic and other forms of success, those in Korea have a very different story. Though most of them were born in Korea, very few have local citizenship. Moreover their nationality belongs to Taiwan, although they originally came from the mainland China. Compared to the numbers of ethnic chinese population of over seven millions in Indonesia and Thailand, there are ONLY twenty thousands of them left in Korea now. What happened to them over the last 100 years, and what does the rapid multiculturalization of Korean society mean to them?

Kyung Tae Park is a professor of Sociology at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul, Korea. He has been working on the issues related to ethnic and racial minorities in Korea. In particular, his research interests focus on migrant workers, ethnic chinese, and biracial people in Korea. He is the author of several books and articles including the followings: Becoming Korean: The Experiences of Migrant Workers, Ethnic Chinese, and Biracial People (2008), Stories of The Others: Minorities and Human Rights in Korea (2007), “Social Causes of Minority Discrimination in Korea: Focusing on Ethnic and Racial Minorities” (2001).

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

Indonesia’s Islamic revival has coincided with democratization, an expanding middle class, and the growing involvement of women in many aspects of public life. Recently, divisive debates about issues like pornography, abortion, and polygamy have become distinct features of Indonesia’s still-emerging public sphere. While women are often positioned as symbols in debates about moral behavior, pious Muslim women in Indonesia are increasingly active participants in these struggles over the future of the Indonesian nation-state. Their activism begs the question: how is it that just a decade after the fall of a secular military dictatorship Muslim women have gone from being politically marginalized to becoming legitimate actors in the public sphere? My research shows that global processes, including the Islamic revival, have helped to empower women in the Indonesian public sphere. Women activists draw on global discourses of Islam, as well as feminism, to construct and deploy their own moral visions of modernity and Indonesia’s future. In this way,the global Islamic revival provides new possibilities for women’s agency in the public sphere, including the opportunity for women to produce themselves as modern political subjects.

Dr. Rachel Rinaldo is a Kiriyama Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2007. She is currently working on a book about women, Islam, and the public sphere in Indonesia.

Description

Many scholars have analyzed pathways to mobilization for myriad challengers confronting all types of governments. Fewer have examined the decisions of states to repress, accommodate, or ignore protesters – even though the importance of state response is universally recognized, particularly in authoritarian settings. When challenges come from groups who had benefited from the pursuit of one vision of modernity and progress, but who have lost out after the state changed direction ideologically, the influence of regime reactions to citizen activism is further heightened. In both contemporary China and New Order Indonesia, responses to contention have varied significantly over time and across place. Why do governments – even the most authoritarian and autonomous ones – fail to respond consistently to similar challenges? Drawing on a comparative analysis of contention by Chinese laid-off workers and Indonesian Islamic student groups, I argue that states with high capacity seek to accommodate protesters, while those with weaker capacity usually seek to repress unrest, and those lacking sufficient capacity to repress or accommodate implore outside entities to buy off resisters, enlist third party violent actors to repress them, or fail to mount any meaningful response at all.

Professor William Hurst, assistant professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 2005. His prior work has centered on contemporary Chinese labor, particularly the social and political impacts of mass lay-offs from state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 forthcoming) and an editor of Laid-off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009 forthcoming). He is currently working on articles comparing state repression of contentious challengers in China and Indonesia, and analyzing the social roots of contention and quiescence in rural China. His ongoing research focuses on the institutional workings of the Chinese legal system, as well as on labor markets, working class politics, and the legal system in Indonesia.

Description

The topic social capital which is the seminar series topic has been closely intertwined with migration studies and theory. We have heard
of migration chains, ethnic enclaves, ethnic entrepreneurship, transnationalism, all these turn on forms of social relations in which social capital is embedded , related to migration. But is there an accepted relationship between forms of social relations, and migration? What about push and pulls in migration? Our image of the uprooted and anomic migrant. The lure of the Orient ; the dynamic Chinese economy is a more recent layer of imagery. These are alternative or competing images with social relations. Our discussion traces the comings and goings of concepts of social capital in migration with reference to Chinese migrations.

Janet W. Salaff, Professor of Sociology, Emerita, University of Toronto, Visiting Scholar, Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong University
Arent Greve, Professor, Department of Strategy and Management, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration

Description

China’s post-Mao reforms provide a great opportunity to explore a number of important historical, political, and theoretical issues with respect to postsocialist transitions. Focusing on the late 1970s, this talk situates the inaugural moment of China’s liberalizing turn in the context of the organic crisis of the party-state and its ideological apparatus in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The early post-Mao years of the late 1970s is extremely important, as it was the time when ideological possibilities contrasting sharply from what was to become the new hegemonic formation of the 1980s and 1990s flourished briefly in what was a spontaneous movement of popular activism and criticism, cultural renaissance, and social mobilization. I examine the state’s maneuver as tactics of crisis management aiming to contain and neutralize the emergent opposition from below. As the combined results of political repression, ideological appropriation, and socioeconomic incorporation, a new “reform” model emerged to rearticulate popular demands and initiatives to a vulgar, official vision of “socialism” centering on market liberalization and economic modernization. In scrutinizing a key historical juncture in Chinese postsocialism, this paper interrogates the political and ideological meanings of the “post-Mao reforms” that have led to the Chinese present.

Dr. Yiching Wu is a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Assistant Professor in Anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, where he specialized in contemporary Chinese politics and culture, he is interested in popular social movements, class formation and consciousness, socialism and postsocialist transitions, and politics of hegemony and resistance. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the popular transgressions and radicalization within the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.

Description

Stanley Kwan, the architect of one of the world’s leading economic indicators, the Hang Seng Index, will help launch his memoirs, The Dragon and the Crown, at the Charles Lee Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto on Thursday, December 11, 2008.

The Dragon and the Crown – Hong Kong Memoirs is the personal story of Stanley Kwan and a fascinating account of 20th century Hong Kong: from entrepot to international financial centre; from a British colony to become part of 21st century China.

“Stanley Kwan is the master of the telling detail as he recounts the saga of his extended family, torn between capitalist, colonial Hong Kong and the Chinese Communist revolution,” writes Jan Wong, author of Red China Blues and Beijing Confidential. .

“Kwan’s own odyssey is gripping as a survivor of the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, wartime interpreter for US troops, creator of the influential Hang Seng Index and, ultimately, target of Communist China’s velvet-gloved attempt to recruit sympathizers among Hong Kong’s rich and famous.”

The book launch will feature a panel discussion on periods of Hong Kong history in which Kwan was an eyewitness to. Joining Kwan will be Senator Vivienne Poy, Professor Bernardl Luk, and Jan Wong. The event is co-sponsored by Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, Richard Charles Lee Canada Hong Kong Library, and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office.

Stanley Kwan emigrated to Canada in 1984 and now lives in Toronto. The book is co-authored with his niece Nicole Kwan, a former banking executive in Hong Kong. The Dragon and the Crown is published by Hong Kong University Press www.hkupress.org and distributed in Canada by University of British Columbia Press www.ubcpress.ubc.ca.

Description

Pakistan has been at the forefront of the war against terrorism since 2001. Pakistan had to take a U turn in its own policy towards the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, under the presidency of Pervez Musharraf. It is evident, while turning the pages of history, that Pakistan’s military and its intelligence services, hands in hands, with the US propped up the phenomena of Afghan Mujaheedins in the late 70’s to grapple with the invading Soviets in Afghanistan. Pakistan received tremendous amounts of both economic and military aid from the leader of the Capitalist world in return. After the demise of the ex USSR, Soviets left but Mujeheedins did not leave Afghanistan. Their purpose kept on inflating to give birth to Talibans.

Falling a victim to its own policies, the nuclear Pakistan has now become a hub of terrorism and its Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) present a strategic threat to USA and the rest of the world. In the meantime, Pakistan has also turned to be the most favored target of suicide terrorist attacks and the war on terrorism has been called to become one of its own. In this backdrop Ms Bokhari will focus on the current strategic and security situation enveloping Pakistan and the major US interests in this region, Pakistan’s relations with its nuclear rival India in the aftermath of Mumbai terror bombings and the role of ISI and the military in shaping Pakistan’s foreign and future outlook.

Sarah Bokhari holds three Master’s degrees: a recent one in Political Science from U of T, specializing in nuclear disarmament in South Asia. As well as, an M.Phil, Defense and Strategic Studies from QAU Pakistan and an M.Sc. International Relations from the same institute, specializing in South Asian nuclear politics. Ms Bokhari has the honor of being a Track II Diplomat (1999-2001) from Pakistan to India and played a crucial role in citizen’s diplomacy to see the success of the present peace process between India and Pakistan. Ms Bokhari has extensive experience of working with the Pakistani foreign office’s policy research institutes in Pakistan: Islamabad Policy Research Institute (2001).

Ms Bokhari has lectured and attended various peace and disarmament schools and conferences: Harvard University Program on Asia and International Relations, Cambridge University (UK), Itlay (ISODARCO), San Diego University (USA), Dalhousie University, Halifax, University of Beijing, China, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi. Ms Bokhari has drafted four international publications in the areas of war and terrorism peace, disarmament and nuclear confidence building measures and has lectured at various international forums. She is currently working on her fifth one. She has also appeared as a strategic analyst on OMNI TV (Toronto), and PTV(Islamabad) She has been affiliated with Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies (former) and has strong association with the Noble Peace Prize Pugwash Movements. She is a member of Canadian International Council.

TV INTERVIEWS
27th Dec 2007 on CTV
http://watch.ctv.ca/news/latest/pakistani-troops-move/#clip124630

29th November 2007 on CTV
http://watch.ctv.ca/news/latest/#clip117226

20th September 2007 on CTV
http://watch.ctv.ca/news/latest/hotel-blast/#clip94459

Description

This presentation explores how Amitav Ghosh mobilizes the unstable Hindu myth of the River Ganga into the vexed, subversive battlefield of Post-Imperial identity. Julie argues that in his invocation of the vexed history of the divine feminine Ganga, Ghosh suggests an alternative vision of the feminine, which lends itself to being read against contemporary Western feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray. The myth of the Ganga, in turn, is inextricably yoked to the phallocentric creation myths of the ascetic-erotic male deity Siva. In her study, Julie will chart out how the current paradigm shift in realising an Indian postcolonial identity, post- Independence, is inextricably linked to how woman as water acts as a subversive element against political hegemony by patriarchy, and how the contentious and hybrid representation of the divine feminine, as discursive continuum through the diversity of voices, morphs into a voice or image of resistance.

Julie Mehta teaches the Chancellor-endowed course Asian Cultures and Literatures in Canada in the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and is an independent scholar of Cultural and Religious Studies. A CGS-SSHRC scholar through her doctoral programme, and a Dr David Chu Asia Pacific Studies scholar, Julie is soon to submit her dissertation. She was a literary and arts reviewer of World literatures and cultures, while she worked in India, Singapore, Australia and Thailand (1990-2003). Julie is also the author of three books: Dance Of Life: The Mythology, History, and Politics of Cambodian Culture (2001), co-author with her partner, historian Harish Mehta of the best-selling biography of the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen: Strongman of Cambodia (1999), is author of A Walk Through Bangkoks Marketplaces (2002), a contributing author in Ramayana Revisited (Oxford University Press, New York: 2004) and the founder of the Cosmic Flute Foundation, an organisation that promotes cross-cultural understanding across borders through the arts.