Elaine Yee Lin Ho | The University of Hong Kong (original) (raw)
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Papers by Elaine Yee Lin Ho
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Nov 1, 2010
Jointly organised by The University of Hong Kong and The University of Nottingha
Social Science Research Network, 2015
Session: What is Indigenous?While there is no shortage of touristic or exoticizing fiction set in... more Session: What is Indigenous?While there is no shortage of touristic or exoticizing fiction set in Hong Kong, English-language creative writing that attends to Hong Kong as place – its people, history, culture - remains largely invisible to a global readership. “Invisibility” is the point of departure toward locating anglophone literary writing in Hong Kong from the 20th to the 21st centuries. The paper will also reference other academically established starting points such as literary postcolonialism and world anglophone literature. Following through the logic of these beginnings leads, in turn, to the related issue of the “impossibility” of anglophone Hong Kong literature. This paper is grounded in a consistent point of reference to recent debates in Chinese about how (and how not) to tell the story of Hong Kong as colony and postcolony in order to articulate a framework for the description and explanation of the languages and narratives of anglophone Hong Kong literature. Through discussion of selected texts, this paper is an inquiry into the forms of languaging that enable anglophone Hong Kong literature’s legibility as both local and global
Organizer : Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Maca
as a reporter for Boxing News before becoming a full-time writer. His Chinese father and English ... more as a reporter for Boxing News before becoming a full-time writer. His Chinese father and English mother divorced when he was eighteen months old. The first nine years of his life were spent in Hong Kong where he was educated first in a Chinese convent school and then in a school for the children of English expatriates. This formative experience he relates in a little-known but important essay (Mo 1996) published long after he had achieved recognition as a novelist. The essay offers an explanatory narrative for the way his career and identity as a writer unfolded over two decades. In hindsight, Mo sees himself as a child "endowed through genes and upbringing with a precocious conceptual intelligence, adrift within an ideographic literary culture" (305), stifled by teachers who compelled him to read and write Chinese characters. In the English school, which he found liberating, he learnt boxing and developed a preference for anglo-western culture and stories of action and adventure.
Critical Zone
In his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1984), Chinua Achebe anatomizes the culture of misrule in... more In his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1984), Chinua Achebe anatomizes the culture of misrule in the fictional post-colonial nation of Kangan. There is a reference in the novel to Lord Lugard College where the three male protagonists, the leaders of Kangan, were educated, and through this reference, the novel identifies colonial education as a source of malaise in the new nation state.! Established by the British, Kangan's former colonial masters, the college is the training ground of the indigenous elite and institutionalized many of the inequities under colonialism which its graduates, confident in their own privilege, cannot perceive or comprehend even as they take up the reins of leadership. Lord Lugard College is very likely the fictional name of King's College Lagos, established by the British in southern Nigeria in 1909. In 1919, the last year when he was Governor-General of Nigeria, Frederick Lugard observed that the college, ''with a staff of three British masters, afforded the highest and most expensive education for the sons of leading 1. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann, 1984). The reference is in a comment by a sycophantic Attorney General to the Kangan president, Sam: "As for those like me, Your Excellency, poor dullards who went to bush grammar schools, we know our place, we know those better than ourselves when we see them. We have no problem worshipping a man like you. Honestly, I don't. You went to Lord Lugard College where half of your teachers were Englishmen" (22). 108 Elaine Y. L. Ho natives, or for boys of marked ability who had obtained scholarships. Some of its pupils completed their education in England .... "2 Anthills of the Savannah is not the only work by Achebe in which Lugard's dubious memory is invoked; the reader can track at least three other references to Lugard, implicit or explicit, in Achebe's writing. 3 In the context of Achebe's lifelong critique of the destructive effects British colonialism wrought upon indigenous African cultures, it is hardly surprising that Lugard should emerge as a point of reference. The name of Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, later Lord Lugard. of Abinger, is inextricably associated with Britain's military and colonial expansion in Africa in the last decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. He was born in India in 1858, his parents being evangelical Anglicans who worked in India. After public school and Sandhurst, he joined the British army in India, where he fought in the Afghan campaign of 1879 and later the Burma campaign in 1886. Disappointed in love, and apparently nearly driven to suicide, Lugard left India and sought employment in Africa with various Charter companies pursuing trade and trade-related military activities. He established himself as the leader of a number of successful campaigns first in East Africain Nyasaland and Uganda-and then in West Africa-in Nigeria, and Cameroons. At the same time, his reputation grew in Britain with the publication of articles he wrote about his campaigns in which he promoted military expansion, and justified his arguments in the name of humanitarian causes like anti-slavery. These publications, together with his speeches and lectures to professional organizations like the Royal Geographical Society and at various other interested public assemblies, earned him the reputation of being one of Britain's leading experts on Africa. Swayed by the expansionist Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain-"Pushful Joe"-and in face of intensifying French competition, the British government decided to proceed with the annexation of the territories that would become the protectorate of North Nigeria, and Lugard obtained the political appointment he had been seeking: he became High Commissioner of
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction
As a court reporter, Sybille Bedford wrote about a number of famous trials during the 1950s and 1... more As a court reporter, Sybille Bedford wrote about a number of famous trials during the 1950s and 1960s. In her court writings, however, the trial report is the point of departure for analytic and imaginative explorations of law and society. They focus on the social world of law as evidenced in ordinary trials and courtrooms and also move outside to scrutinize and speculate on law in society. Bedford’s court writing has attracted considerable praise from legal reviewers and readers including Richard Posner but has not been studied in any detail by either legal or literary scholars. This chapter questions why this has been so in order to elaborate an idea of the “literary” as a style, rhetoric, and mode of representation that fosters connections between law and the social world at large – or between “Common” (as in Common Law) and the “common”. As part of this elaboration, it will contrast Bedford’s writing with more established genres like the legal memoir or writing by legal professionals that address the lay or general reader.
... the cohabitation between men, ghosts, forest creatures and ancestral spirits that was part ... more ... the cohabitation between men, ghosts, forest creatures and ancestral spirits that was part of the ordinary Yoruba world(Jones 1998: 6). In different ways, Booth and Lam seek to convey the ordinariness of everyday Hong Kong in which childhood takes place; the child's ...
The HKU Scholars Hub is the institutional repository of The University of Hong Kong. It seeks to ... more The HKU Scholars Hub is the institutional repository of The University of Hong Kong. It seeks to collect the intellectual output of HKU and make it available to the widest possible audience. Records are made in the Hub for items that are fulltext open access, or for URLs that hyperlink ...
China Abroad, 2009
Information technology becomes increasingly important for modern information services. This techn... more Information technology becomes increasingly important for modern information services. This technology changes the traditional passive single service model of the traditional library and information, expands the collection volume of library and information institutions, and upgrades the information quality of library and information system staff. Besides, it also makes library and information service break through the time and space constraints, and speeds up the modernization process of library and information service. In China, various library and information service institutions should attach importance to the application of information technology, intensify the learning of information technology, change the management method of literature resources according to the development requirements of information technology, effectively improve service quality, and meet diversified needs.
World Literature Today, 2001
Wasafiri, 1995
... Mantumbusa. Mwewa Kunda had no decisions to make, no choice but to wait. He ... even. Only th... more ... Mantumbusa. Mwewa Kunda had no decisions to make, no choice but to wait. He ... even. Only the whistling stridulations of cicadas cut through the sullen stark silence as Mwewa looked up at the blood-red rising sun. Through ...
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2011
... 2007); and Double Trouble: Doing Gender in Hong Kong, Signs: Journal of Women in ... and ma... more ... 2007); and Double Trouble: Doing Gender in Hong Kong, Signs: Journal of Women in ... and many articles on anglophone world literatures and Hong Kong film, literature, and ... Her book Banana Bending: Asian Australian and Asian Canadian Literatures (2003) was published by ...
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Nov 1, 2010
Jointly organised by The University of Hong Kong and The University of Nottingha
Social Science Research Network, 2015
Session: What is Indigenous?While there is no shortage of touristic or exoticizing fiction set in... more Session: What is Indigenous?While there is no shortage of touristic or exoticizing fiction set in Hong Kong, English-language creative writing that attends to Hong Kong as place – its people, history, culture - remains largely invisible to a global readership. “Invisibility” is the point of departure toward locating anglophone literary writing in Hong Kong from the 20th to the 21st centuries. The paper will also reference other academically established starting points such as literary postcolonialism and world anglophone literature. Following through the logic of these beginnings leads, in turn, to the related issue of the “impossibility” of anglophone Hong Kong literature. This paper is grounded in a consistent point of reference to recent debates in Chinese about how (and how not) to tell the story of Hong Kong as colony and postcolony in order to articulate a framework for the description and explanation of the languages and narratives of anglophone Hong Kong literature. Through discussion of selected texts, this paper is an inquiry into the forms of languaging that enable anglophone Hong Kong literature’s legibility as both local and global
Organizer : Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Maca
as a reporter for Boxing News before becoming a full-time writer. His Chinese father and English ... more as a reporter for Boxing News before becoming a full-time writer. His Chinese father and English mother divorced when he was eighteen months old. The first nine years of his life were spent in Hong Kong where he was educated first in a Chinese convent school and then in a school for the children of English expatriates. This formative experience he relates in a little-known but important essay (Mo 1996) published long after he had achieved recognition as a novelist. The essay offers an explanatory narrative for the way his career and identity as a writer unfolded over two decades. In hindsight, Mo sees himself as a child "endowed through genes and upbringing with a precocious conceptual intelligence, adrift within an ideographic literary culture" (305), stifled by teachers who compelled him to read and write Chinese characters. In the English school, which he found liberating, he learnt boxing and developed a preference for anglo-western culture and stories of action and adventure.
Critical Zone
In his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1984), Chinua Achebe anatomizes the culture of misrule in... more In his novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1984), Chinua Achebe anatomizes the culture of misrule in the fictional post-colonial nation of Kangan. There is a reference in the novel to Lord Lugard College where the three male protagonists, the leaders of Kangan, were educated, and through this reference, the novel identifies colonial education as a source of malaise in the new nation state.! Established by the British, Kangan's former colonial masters, the college is the training ground of the indigenous elite and institutionalized many of the inequities under colonialism which its graduates, confident in their own privilege, cannot perceive or comprehend even as they take up the reins of leadership. Lord Lugard College is very likely the fictional name of King's College Lagos, established by the British in southern Nigeria in 1909. In 1919, the last year when he was Governor-General of Nigeria, Frederick Lugard observed that the college, ''with a staff of three British masters, afforded the highest and most expensive education for the sons of leading 1. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (London: Heinemann, 1984). The reference is in a comment by a sycophantic Attorney General to the Kangan president, Sam: "As for those like me, Your Excellency, poor dullards who went to bush grammar schools, we know our place, we know those better than ourselves when we see them. We have no problem worshipping a man like you. Honestly, I don't. You went to Lord Lugard College where half of your teachers were Englishmen" (22). 108 Elaine Y. L. Ho natives, or for boys of marked ability who had obtained scholarships. Some of its pupils completed their education in England .... "2 Anthills of the Savannah is not the only work by Achebe in which Lugard's dubious memory is invoked; the reader can track at least three other references to Lugard, implicit or explicit, in Achebe's writing. 3 In the context of Achebe's lifelong critique of the destructive effects British colonialism wrought upon indigenous African cultures, it is hardly surprising that Lugard should emerge as a point of reference. The name of Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, later Lord Lugard. of Abinger, is inextricably associated with Britain's military and colonial expansion in Africa in the last decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. He was born in India in 1858, his parents being evangelical Anglicans who worked in India. After public school and Sandhurst, he joined the British army in India, where he fought in the Afghan campaign of 1879 and later the Burma campaign in 1886. Disappointed in love, and apparently nearly driven to suicide, Lugard left India and sought employment in Africa with various Charter companies pursuing trade and trade-related military activities. He established himself as the leader of a number of successful campaigns first in East Africain Nyasaland and Uganda-and then in West Africa-in Nigeria, and Cameroons. At the same time, his reputation grew in Britain with the publication of articles he wrote about his campaigns in which he promoted military expansion, and justified his arguments in the name of humanitarian causes like anti-slavery. These publications, together with his speeches and lectures to professional organizations like the Royal Geographical Society and at various other interested public assemblies, earned him the reputation of being one of Britain's leading experts on Africa. Swayed by the expansionist Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain-"Pushful Joe"-and in face of intensifying French competition, the British government decided to proceed with the annexation of the territories that would become the protectorate of North Nigeria, and Lugard obtained the political appointment he had been seeking: he became High Commissioner of
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction
As a court reporter, Sybille Bedford wrote about a number of famous trials during the 1950s and 1... more As a court reporter, Sybille Bedford wrote about a number of famous trials during the 1950s and 1960s. In her court writings, however, the trial report is the point of departure for analytic and imaginative explorations of law and society. They focus on the social world of law as evidenced in ordinary trials and courtrooms and also move outside to scrutinize and speculate on law in society. Bedford’s court writing has attracted considerable praise from legal reviewers and readers including Richard Posner but has not been studied in any detail by either legal or literary scholars. This chapter questions why this has been so in order to elaborate an idea of the “literary” as a style, rhetoric, and mode of representation that fosters connections between law and the social world at large – or between “Common” (as in Common Law) and the “common”. As part of this elaboration, it will contrast Bedford’s writing with more established genres like the legal memoir or writing by legal professionals that address the lay or general reader.
... the cohabitation between men, ghosts, forest creatures and ancestral spirits that was part ... more ... the cohabitation between men, ghosts, forest creatures and ancestral spirits that was part of the ordinary Yoruba world(Jones 1998: 6). In different ways, Booth and Lam seek to convey the ordinariness of everyday Hong Kong in which childhood takes place; the child's ...
The HKU Scholars Hub is the institutional repository of The University of Hong Kong. It seeks to ... more The HKU Scholars Hub is the institutional repository of The University of Hong Kong. It seeks to collect the intellectual output of HKU and make it available to the widest possible audience. Records are made in the Hub for items that are fulltext open access, or for URLs that hyperlink ...
China Abroad, 2009
Information technology becomes increasingly important for modern information services. This techn... more Information technology becomes increasingly important for modern information services. This technology changes the traditional passive single service model of the traditional library and information, expands the collection volume of library and information institutions, and upgrades the information quality of library and information system staff. Besides, it also makes library and information service break through the time and space constraints, and speeds up the modernization process of library and information service. In China, various library and information service institutions should attach importance to the application of information technology, intensify the learning of information technology, change the management method of literature resources according to the development requirements of information technology, effectively improve service quality, and meet diversified needs.
World Literature Today, 2001
Wasafiri, 1995
... Mantumbusa. Mwewa Kunda had no decisions to make, no choice but to wait. He ... even. Only th... more ... Mantumbusa. Mwewa Kunda had no decisions to make, no choice but to wait. He ... even. Only the whistling stridulations of cicadas cut through the sullen stark silence as Mwewa looked up at the blood-red rising sun. Through ...
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2011
... 2007); and Double Trouble: Doing Gender in Hong Kong, Signs: Journal of Women in ... and ma... more ... 2007); and Double Trouble: Doing Gender in Hong Kong, Signs: Journal of Women in ... and many articles on anglophone world literatures and Hong Kong film, literature, and ... Her book Banana Bending: Asian Australian and Asian Canadian Literatures (2003) was published by ...