The Hunger of the Republic (共和國的饑餓：回顧我們的當下)

RUNDOWN

05:45pm    Registration
06:00pm    Opening Remarks and Introduction
06:10pm    Moderated Panel Discussion
06:55pm    Q&A from Audience
07:25pm    Closing Remarks
07:30pm    End

Free Admission

In his latest work, The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (共和國的饑餓：回顧我們的當下), editor Ashish Rajadhyaksha brings together texts and images published over the last 50 years and collected from across academic disciplines and cultural practices to take a fresh look at past events as they shape India’s present. This important work, volume 1 of the 6-volume India Since the 90s series, was recently translated into Chinese and published in Hong Kong.

Asia Society Hong Kong Center is proud to present a discussion with Mr. Rajadhyaksha, Alastair McClure of the University of Hong Kong, Brian Tsui of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Enoch Tam, Editor-in-Chief of Typesetter Publishing, moderated by Anjuli Gunaratne of the University of Hong Kong, about this fascinating collection, the significance of publishing it in Chinese translation, and how specters of the past haunt our present reality.

Alastair McClure is a historian of South Asia and the British Empire based at the University of Hong Kong.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha is an independent film studies and cultural theorist, based in Bangalore, India, and the Editor of The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect. 

Brian Tsui is a historian at the Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, author of China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949 (Cambridge, 2018) and co-editor, with Tansen Sen, of Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s–1960s (Oxford, 2021). 

Enoch Tam is Editor-in-Chief of Typesetter Publishing, and Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries, Lingnan University.

Anjuli Gunaratne (moderator) works on the literatures of former British and French colonies, and is based at the School of English, the University of Hong Kong

About the book:

The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (Volume 1 in the India Since the '90s series) is a text and visual assemblage. Across the 1990s and early 2000s, key concepts of democracy – of welfare and justice, of people and citizen-subjects – got mutated into unrecognizable avatars. It was a change being recorded in real time by artists, academics and diverse cultural producers. Brought together and viewed in hindsight, their work appears unexpectedly prescient. Documentary and art images, maps and letters combine with essays on politics, economics, cultural studies and aesthetics to produce a retrospective account for how our present came to be.

About the series:

India Since the 90s (general editor: Ashish Rajadhyaksha) is a series of six titles exploring recent history from the standpoint of the present moment. As we face new and unprecedented phenomena in the twenty-first century, along with the new, there is also a ghostly re-evocation of things we have seen and done that relentlessly suggest that we may have been here before. Familiar forms and arguments become curiously prescient revealing new relevance. This series includes texts and images from diverse academic disciplines, curated and assembled by practitioners looking back to reconsider our past.

Purchase a copy of The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect during the program or online at the AS Store

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and participants and, unless expressly stated to the contrary, do not reflect the opinion, position or official policy of Asia Society Hong Kong, its members, or its committees. Asia Society Hong Kong does not endorse or approve, and assumes no responsibility for the content of the information presented.