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From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dr A.Y. Chau

Sent: 16 May 2011 09:14

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Cc: Dr A.Y. Chau

Subject: Professor Liao Ping-Hui --- Chuan-Lyu Lectures 5pm today and Wed



Dear All (apologies for cross-listing),



You are all cordially invited to the annual Chuan Lyu Lectures (info below and poster attached):



2011 Chuan Lyu Lectures (May 16 and 18)



Speaker: Professor Liao Ping-hui (廖炳惠), Chuan Lyu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, San Diego



16 May (Monday) First Lecture



5pm; Rooms 8 and 9, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies



Romancing the Strait: Love and Death in Li Ang’s Seven Prelives of Affective Affinity (李昂《七世姻緣之臺灣／中國情人》)



Li Ang’s allegorical novel, <Seven Prelives of Affective Affinity> (2009) deals with the complex relations between China and Taiwan, and in this first lecture Prof. Liao will describe how this gifted author analyses the similarities and differences in these two countries through the narrative of a love affair between a cosmopolitan Taiwanese writer He Fang and a Chinese official Chou Xiaodong. Sex and politics shape the dynamics of this personal relationship, that Li Ang uses to highlight problems that continue to trouble cross-Straits relations as well. Li Ang contrasts the search in Taiwan for an alternative modern identity within a wider global setting of the 21st century with the calculated aggression often found in the ranks of a contemporary Chinese officialdom that embraces almost everything materialistic from the modern West with a wilful manipulation of Chinese philosophical and literary traditions. Li Ang’s analysis operates on several levels—mythological, ideological, and factual—each of which Professor Liao will engage with in his diagnosis of Taiwan’s relation with its Mainland neighbour.



Tea will be served from 4:30pm before the start of the lecture in the Common Room and all are welcome.



18 May (Wednesday) Second Lecture



5pm; Rooms 8 and 9, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies



The Temple of Boom and the Tao of Creolised Second Harmony



Prof. Liao’s second Chuan Lyu Lecture will discuss the growing interest of the Chinese diaspora’s high-tech communities in using a modern technological imagination to shed light on traditional notions of the body and the environment. He focuses on the success of the HoChi/Heqi (和氣)

movement as a post-secular science religion in attracting hundreds of thousands of Overseas Chinese through its use of transnational music in simulated bio-medically engineered settings. In addition to analysing the growing role of these trans-regional institutions in espousing a new spirituality and bio-politics, he will explore how Heqi’s message has linked the search for true selfhood with the aim of achieving physical well-being through the elimination of harmful elements in the body, and the ways in which Heqi manages to develop creolized forms of trans-cultural and inter-disciplinary articulation to gain wide popularity among the largely rich Chinese in diaspora.



A wine reception will follow the lecture and all are welcome.



Brief biography of the speaker:



Professor Liao Ping-hui, the Chuan Lyu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, San Diego, is an internationally recognised authority in Taiwan Studies. Specialising in 20th century and contemporary Taiwan cultural history in its multiple forms, his writings have won numerous awards for their rare ability to locate the modernity of Taiwan’s fiction, film, poetry, popular culture, and critical theory within both an East Asian context and a global perspective. Since 1987 he has also taught at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, most recently as its Distinguished Professor of Literary and Critical Studies, and lectured and researched at a large number of eminent North American universities. Some of his well-known writings in English include Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, edited with David Wang Der-wei (Columbia UP, 2006) and Internationalizing Cultural Studies, edited with Ackbar Abbas, et al.

(Blackwell, 2004).





All are welcome!



Best,



Adam







--

Dr. Adam Yuet Chau

University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Modern China Department of East Asian Studies Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies University of Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, United Kingdom



Office phone: (44) 01223 335146



Fellow of Fitzwilliam College





The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013683.



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