Through the Lens of Cultural Icons: Translocal Relations, Community Building, and Shared Experiences

A Seminar co-organized with the Hong Kong Studies Group
12 May 2023 (Friday 1000-1150 online) Conducted in English

Through the Lens of Cultural Icons: Translocal Relations, Community Building, and Shared Experiences

Helena Wu University of British Columbia  Helena.Wu@ubc.ca

Blurb:
How does a place or an object become a cultural icon? What do cultural icons tell us about our relationship with places and objects in the city? This talk will explore the thing agency and the place-making power of cultural icons by examining the (trans)formation and the cultural reverberation of selected icons from Hong Kong. In order to unfold interactions and intersectionalities in/as relations, the talk will trace the cultural trajectories embedded in the actor-network of thing, place and body in the textual and material worlds. As a whole, this will enable us to better understand the undermined and the underrepresented, human and nonhuman, and uncover the community building potential in shared cultural experiences.

Bio:
Dr. Helena Wu is Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor of Hong Kong Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is also Convenor of the UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative. She has written on the topics of Hong Kong cinema, culture, literature, media, and identity for journals and edited volumes such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2018), Chinese Martial Arts and Media Culture (2018), Hong Kong Keywords (2019), Global Media and China (2020), Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2020), Asian Cinema (2022), HKU Journal of Chinese Studies (2023), and Screen (forthcoming). She is the author of The Handover After the Handover: Places, Things and Cultural Icons in Hong Kong (Liverpool University Press, 2020), where she explores the cultural reverberations of local icons in colonial and post-handover Hong Kong