Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Loving Ghosts

Résumé

A keynote lecture delivered at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University International Conference on Narrating Love and Care in Global China of Our Time: Mobility, Materiality and Multiplicity, 11 October 2024 under the title "Loving Ghosts. Is it ever too late to honour the dead?" For generations migrants attempted to hide themselves away, to make themselves small, to bury their stories. It is the storyline of many a diasporic story-teller attempting to write the story of those who never spoke. Whether recounting personal, family stories, or attempting to address collective, national and global wrongs, the weight of the present often seems even heavier than the past. Added to such obstacles, the current geopolitical configuration and the changed perception of China in the Western imaginary renders inaudible voices seeking the West’s reassessment of its own historic mistreatment of China and its people. As for the USA’s nineteenth-century exclusion from entry and citizenship of Chinese, the UK’s forced repatriation of thousands of Chinese seamen after World War 2, and more generally xenophobic hate campaigns against an imagined Yellow Peril, and more recently COVID-related anti-Asian hatred, the prospects of wrongs done to Chinese people in the diaspora being righted or even simply addressed becomes more difficult. Against the odds, can story-tellers, playwrights and poets make a difference in illuminating the woes suffered by those now long dead? References Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost: Memoir, London, Fourth Estate, 2003. 利大英/Gregory Barry Lee, 第八位中國商人同消失咗嘅海員/The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Seamen, Hong Kong, Typesetter/手民出版社, 2023. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Scattered Belongings, London, Routledge, 1999. Upajjhatthana Sutta Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, Allen Lane/Penguin Random House, UK, 2017. Étienne Balibar, La crainte des masses, Paris, Galilée, 1997. Michelle Lacy, Lili Man and Jessie Lim, Exploring our Chinese Identity, London, Lambeth Chinese Community Association,1992. Angela Hui, Takeaway: Stories From a Childhood Behind the Counter, Trapeze Books, London, 2022.

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Dates et versions

hal-05215203 , version 1 (19-08-2025)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-05215203 , version 1

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Gregory B. Lee. Loving Ghosts. International Conference on Narrating Love and Care in Global China of Our Time: Mobility, Materiality and Multiplicity, Eva Kit Wah MAN, Oct 2024, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR China. ⟨hal-05215203⟩
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