Rey Chow, Ranciere, Bruce Lee...

An article entitled ‘Aberrant Pedagogy: JR, QT and Bruce Lee’, written by me, for the journal Borderlands, is here:

 

http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol8no2_2009/bowman_abberant.htm

 

 

Questions for Interview with Rey Chow

I'm composing some questions for an interview with Rey Chow. If you have anything you'd particularly like to see asked, please let me know by email [BowmanP@cardiff.ac.uk]

 

First Draft of a new paper on Bruce Lee, Rey Chow, Cultural Translation, Europe/China and 'Queer'

I’ve just finished a reasonable first draft of a chapter for a book on Europe and Queer. My chapter is provisionally called “Sick Man of Asia Crosses The River: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation”. It’s here:

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21136069/Sick-Man-of-Asia-Crosses-the-River-DRAFT

 

It’s too long and could doubtless benefit from a good edit and redraft. But here you are anyway.

 

 

PhD Studentship in Cardiff

Three Year AHRC Funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship Cardiff Docklands from the 1850's to the 1960's Cardiff University - School of English, Communication and Philosophy

 

IN COLLABORATION WITH BUTETOWN HISTORY & ARTS CENTRE

 

THIS IS A SECOND CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

 

APPLICATIONS ARE INVITED FROM WELL-QUALIFIED CANDIDATES FOR A 3-YEAR STUDENTSHIP BEGINNING 1 JANUARY 2010. THE PROJECT TITLE IS:

 

RACE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND REPRESENTATION IN PRESS COVERAGE AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF CARDIFF DOCKLANDS FROM THE 1850S TO THE 1960S

 

This project involves detailed analysis of how life in Cardiff Docklands (especially "Tiger Bay") was depicted in the press over 110 years from the 1850s until the redevelopment of the 1960s. Press coverage of the area will be compared and contrasted with memories and stories found in oral history interviews with local residents and in written life stories. A major resource for the research will be the rich, unique archive held by Butetown History & Arts Centre, a community-based initiative in Cardiff Docklands (www.bhac.org ).

 

The key focus of the research will be the representation of racialised, religious and ethnic differences and how these are constructed, reproduced and challenged. The student will spend 50% of his or her time at Butetown History & Arts Centre and will also be fully involved in the postgraduate research activities of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/research/ccct/index.html). The project will be supervised by Professor Chris Weedon (Director, Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory) and Dr Glenn Jordan (Director, Butetown History & Arts Centre).

 

Temporary AP posts at HKU

There are two temporary (but potentially renewable) AP openings in HKU:

 

https://extranet.hku.hk/cgi-bin/apptunit/senior/show_vacancy_new.pl?rf2009-221-5206-0000

 

Ref: RF-2009/2010-221
Closing Date: --

 

THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

Founded in 1911, The University of Hong Kong is committed to the highest international standards of excellence in teaching and research, and has been at the international forefront of academic scholarship for many years. Of a number of recent indicators of the University's performance, one is its ranking at 24 among the top 200 universities in the world by the UK's Times Higher Education. The University has a comprehensive range of study programmes and research disciplines, with 20,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students from 50 countries, and a complement of 1,200 academic members of staff, many of whom are internationally renowned.

Assistant Professor

in the School of Humanities (Comparative Literature)
(Ref.: RF-2009/2010-221)

Applications are invited for appointment as Assistant Professor (two posts) in the School of Humanities (Comparative Literature), tenable from August 2010 or as soon as possible thereafter.  The posts will initially be made on one-year temporary terms, but with the possibility of renewal.

Applicants should possess a Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature or a related field. The department seeks applicants who are strongly committed to teaching and research in literary, film, and cultural studies in China, Hong Kong, and China-West contexts. Applicants should be well-versed in literary, critical and/or postcolonial theory. They should have a good publication record and preferably experience in teaching courses at the postgraduate as well as undergraduate levels. Information about the department can be obtained at http://www.hku.hk/complit.  Enquiries about the post should be sent to Dr. Gina Marchetti, School of Humanities (email: marchett@hku.hk).

A highly competitive salary commensurate with qualifications and experience will be offered. Annual leave and medical/dental benefits will be provided.

Further particulars and application forms (152/708) can be obtained at http://www.hku.hk/apptunit/; by fax (2540 6735 or 2559 2058); e-mail (senrappt@hku.hk); in person or by writing to the Appointments Unit, Human Resource Section, Registry, Room 1001, Knowles Building, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong  Applicants should arrange to have three confidential reference letters (quoting Ref: RF-2009/2010-221) sent directly by the referees to the Assistant Registrar (Appointments), Human Resource Section, Registry, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. Review of applications will begin on October 20, 2009, and continue until the posts are filled.  Candidates who are not contacted within 4 months of their application date may consider their applications unsuccessful.
 

The University is an equal opportunity employer and
is committed to a No-Smoking Policy

Fist of (Con)Fusion: Bruce Lee and monolingual cultural translation

Here’s an abstract of a paper I’m working on at the moment:

 

The opening of Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972) depicts the funeral of a Chinese martial arts master, in a Chinese school in the Japanese-dominated area of the Shanghai International Settlement, circa 1908. This is already a fraught moment of cultural transmission: indeed the eulogists expend most of their energy emphasizing to the assembled martial art students that they know the correct way to preserve their master’s lineage and their tradition. But the funeral is rudely interrupted by the arrival of belligerent representatives of a Japanese martial arts school, who contemptuously present the Chinese with a large framed piece of calligraphic writing, which reads “Sick Man of Asia”. The Japanese issue a challenge, via their translator, the creepy and culturally and sexually ambiguous Hu En. The senior Chinese elders prevent any of the Chinese students from answering the challenge, in order to preserve decorum.

At one key point a senior Chinese teacher addresses the translator, Hu. In the dubbed English version, the Chinese senior asks Hu, “Look here, just what going on here?” In the English subtitles, however, this exchange is rendered as, “Look here, are you Chinese?” These are significantly different renderings. Hu’s answer in the subtitled version is that whilst he is Chinese he shares a different destiny to them. In the dubbed version, however, Hu shortly proceeds to speak of the superiority of “we Japanese”.

Deliberately without having sought to establish whether the different combinations of Dutch and Mandarin subtitles and dubbing replicate this disjunction or introduce others, this paper assumes the likelihood of these and other possibilities. It does so in order to explore several interconnected issues of translation. Firstly, various theories of translation and their imbrication in various models of culture and tradition; and secondly, Benjaminian arguments about the text as construct – Fist of Fury is clearly a complex (and internally contradictory) construct, with all sound added post-production and hence lacking any ‘original’ as such – and the complexity of such putatively ‘simple’ popular cultural texts as Fist of Fury when approached as the ‘arcades’ of ‘cultural translation’.

In order to explore such a massive set of problematics in such limited time and space, the paper will focus specifically on the two key dimensions of this opening scene: first, the fact that the funeral of the founder is already a fraught scene of rupture/tradition, transfer/loss, continuity/disjunction – indeed, of cultural translation – here supplemented – secondly – by the double, duplicitous (cultural) status of the (literal/linguistic) translator, Mr Hu. The reading of this scene will be organised by Rey Chow’s contribution to theories of translation in her essay, “Film as Ethnography; or, Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World” (1995), which itself begins from a consideration of the Italian expression “Traduttore, traditore” – “Translator, traitor”.

 

 

War, Technology and Vision

Our daily uses of the light switch, the television, the computer, the cell phone, and other types of devices are all examples of this paradoxical situation of scientific advancement, in which the portentous—what Heidegger calls “the gigantic”—disappears into the mundane, the effortless, and the intangible. We perform these daily operations with ease, in forgetfulness of the theories and experiments that made them possible. Seldom do we need to think of the affinity between these daily operations and a disaster such as the atomic holocaust. To confront that affinity is to confront the terror that is the basis of our everyday life. For Heidegger, hence, the explosion of the atomic bomb is “the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened”—a process of annihilation that began with the very arrival of modern science itself.

From a military perspective, the mushroom cloud of smoke and dust signals the summation of a history of military invention that has gone hand in hand with the development of representational technologies, in particular the technologies of seeing. As Paul Virilio asserts, “For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye.” Virilio argues time and again in his work that close affinities exist between war and vision. Because military fields were increasingly reconfigured as fields of visual perception, preparations for war were increasingly indistinguishable from preparations for making a film: “The Americans prepared future operations in the Pacific,” Virilio writes, “by sending in film-makers who were supposed to look as though they were on a location-finding mission, taking aerial views for future film production.”

 

Rey Chow – from The Age of the World Target.