The Guest’s View: Objectivity, Disposability, and Ann Hui’s Cinema

A still from Ann Hui’s film 天水圍的夜與霧 / Night and Fog (2009)

With reference to the acclaimed Hong Kong director Ann Hui (許鞍華), this lecture discusses the notion of “the guest’s perspective” in relation to Chinese idiom, cinematic form, and the class politics of contemporary migranthood. The lecture will include remarks on Hui’s thought-provoking film 天水圍的夜與霧 / Night and Fog (2009).

Rey Chow is the Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University.  Chow’s research comprises theoretical, interdisciplinary, and textual analyses. Since her years as a graduate student at Stanford University, she has specialized in the making of cultural forms such as literature and film (with particular attention to East Asia, Western Europe, and North America), and in the discursive encounters among modernity, sexuality, postcoloniality, and ethnicity. Her book PRIMITIVE PASSIONS was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association. In her current work, Chow is concerned with the legacies of poststructuralist theory (in particular the work of Michel Foucault), the politics of language as a postcolonial phenomenon, and the shifting paradigms for knowledge and lived experience in the age of visual technologies and digital media.