University of Hong Kong

This course examines empire-building, colonialism, and settler militarism across the Pacific world. It covers how the everyday work of imperialism and colonialism across the region has always been grounded in the geographical management of racialized and gendered bodies, transnational circulations, andintimate encounters, paying special attention to the linkages between the various US, British, and Japanese imperial projects that shaped and transformed the geographies of everyday life across the Pacific. It also consider how the story of imperialism in the Pacific is not only a story of power and violence, but also one of revolution, liberation, and collective struggle.

This course examines the complex interactions between literature and the law. Even though the two disciplines may seem distinct, both law and literature are products of language and have overlapped in significant and interesting ways in history. Topics include: why do legal themes recur in fiction, and what kinds of literary structures underpin legal argumentation; how do novelists and playwrights imagine the law, and how do lawyers and judges interpret literary works; could literature have legal subtexts, and could legal documents be re-interpreted as literary texts.