Date: Thursday, 20 May 2021
Time: 5 – 6:30 pm (GMT +8)
Speaker: Kelly Tse, Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Alvin Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong
To view the talk recording, please click here.
This seminar offers both a critique and defence of Crazy Rich Asians (2018) from a postcolonial Southeast Asian angle. It first explores the film’s politics of erasure along racial and ethnic lines vis-à-vis Southeast Asia, a narrative that Singapore unwittingly participates in through its touristic self-branding. The discussion then traces an aesthetics of excess in the film’s cinematic parade of Chinese capital. This visually lush neoliberal excess paradoxically registers the film’s parodic potential. Overall, the seminar unpacks the contradictions of mediating Southeast Asia in relation to China and Asian America amidst Asia’s spectacular economic rise.
About the Speaker
Kelly Tse (BA. MPhil. HKU, DPhil. Oxon) is an Assistant Professor of English at the Education University of Hong Kong. Previously, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on postcolonial and world literatures (East and Southeast Asia in particular), environmental humanities, gender and media studies. Her work has appeared in The Oxford History of the Novel in English series, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of International Women’s Studies, New Writing, amongst others.
All are welcome.
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