Department of Comparative Literature
Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures
Empire and Its Afterlives – Book Launch: Love and Reparation
Date: Monday, 31 May 2021
Time: 5 – 6:30 pm (GMT +8)
Panelists: Danish Sheikh (PhD Candidate, Melbourne Law School); Marco Wan (Professor, Department of Law, HKU); Alvin Wong (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU); J Daniel Elam (Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU); Hong Kong Shax Theatre Group
On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. “LGBT persons,” the Court said, “deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’” But how definitive was this end?
In Love and Reparation, Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research, and personal memoir.
About the Panelists
Danish Sheikh is a playwright and activist-lawyer currently engaged in doctoral research at the Melbourne Law School. His writing has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in 2018, shortlisted for the Jan Michalski Award in 2017, and won the Publishing Next Award in the same year.
Marco Wan is Professor and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong.
Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research covers Hong Kong culture, Chinese cultural studies, Sinophone studies, and queer theory. Wong is writing a book titled Queer Hong Kong as Method. He has published in journals such as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Concentric, Cultural Dynamics, Continuum, and Interventions. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020).
Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com
Kong Kong Shax Theatre Group (HKSTG/ SHAX) is a registered non-profit society based in Hong Kong. With a focus on identity expression and cultural exchange, HKSTG takes a special interest in cultural adaptations and recontextualization in our creative productions. For more on Shax, please visit https://www.hkstg.org/
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Please register at https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=75402
All are welcome. For enquiries, please contact Christine Vicera at viceracn@hku.hk