Narrating Cold Wars

AN INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

11–13 NOVEMBER 2021, HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY

The year 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the “Cold War”, a half-century of superpower rivalry that left few societies untouched. Now, there are concerns about a new great power contest between the United States and China. Our conference will interrogate “Cold War thinking” — from the primacy it gave to relations between nation-states, to assumptions about zero-sum competition. It will critically examine how these frames are constructed, circulated, mobilised and contested through media and culture.

Five keynote speakers, seven roundtable participants, a filmmaker, and more than sixty paper presenters will explore the ways in which cold wars have been narrated, what these narratives have left out, and how alternative possibilities may be imagined. “We put together interdisciplinary panels that address a range of issues including transnational cultural production, soft power, humanitarian and ecological trauma, migration and exile, and twitter diplomacy,” says Kenneth Paul Tan, who curated the programme. 

The conference is online and all are welcome to attend by Zoom. Admission is free of charge, but registration is required. Click below to go to our registration form.

PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS

THURSDAY 11 NOVEMBER (HONG KONG TIME)

KEYNOTE: Issues in Cold War Historiography – Louis Menand, Harvard University

FILMMAKER LECTURE: The Shortest Speech – Naeem Mohaiemen, Columbia University

KEYNOTE: Sadequain Naqvi: a ‘Pakistani Picasso’ for the Cold War – Caroline Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ROUNDTABLE: Plural Histories, New Imaginaries – Ute Meta Bauer, Nanyang Technological University; Caroline Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology


FRIDAY 12 NOVEMBER (HONG KONG TIME)

KEYNOTE: The Galaxy Empire – John Keane, University of Sydney; He Baogang, Deakin University

KEYNOTE: China at the Dawn of the Cold War: Between Class War and the New Internationalism – Rana Mitter, Oxford University

ROUNDTABLE: Cold War 2.0? – Kanti Bajpai, National University of Singapore; Ian Johnson, Former New York Times correspondent in China; Maria Repnikova, Georgia State University


SATURDAY 13 NOVEMBER (HONG KONG TIME)

Graduate Student Panels


Privacy: Your registration details will only be accessed by the organisers and used only for the purpose of organising this conference. Please note that the entire conference will be recorded and that the videos will be posted publicly. Any comments or questions you contribute will be included in the publicly accessible video recording.

ORGANISERS

This conference was organised by the HKBU School of Communication and Film in collaboration with the Academy of Visual Arts and the Department of Government and International Studies. MORE.

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