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Join us for the book talk presented by Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan Li , Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, York University, about her book "Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self Translation” (2025). 📆 Wednesday, 11 March, 2026
⏰ 2:00 - 2:45pm
🎞️ Auditorium, Asian Centre, UBC
All are welcome. Registration required: https://hksi.ubc.ca/events/event/bhk2026-book-talk-jessica-li/
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About the book:
The book focuses on the self-translation of Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 (Eileen Chang, 1920–1995), one of the most important Chinese writers of the twentieth century. It goes beyond current studies of self-translation by proposing a new hypothesis of theorizing self-translation as a performative act, characterized by its in-betweenness and the aesthetic freedom that the self-translator enjoys, contextualized within larger debates about translation and the specific practice of self-translation in Chinese history in comparison to its Western counterpart.
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About the speaker:
Dr. Jessica Tsui-yan Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University.
She is Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film, Chinese Canadian literature, and comparative literature.
She is the author of Eileen Chang: The Performativity of Self-Translation (Brill, 2025), the chief editor of The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities (McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2019), and the guest editor of special issues of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature: “Engaging Communities in Comparative Literature” (June 2017, 44.2) and “Garnering Diversities in Comparative Literature” (June 2018, 45.2). Her work has also appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
This is part of the special program of the Backreading Hong Kong Symposium 2026 at University of British Columbia, hosted by UBC Hong Kong Studies Initiative, and UBC Asian Studies; and is supported by the UBC Centre for Chinese Research, UBC Department of English, UBC Campus + Community Planning, and the Sustainability Initiative Committee of the UBC Department of Asian Studies, as well as Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
#ubchongkongstudies
#ubchksi #translation #sinophoneliterature #ChineseLiterature
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607–1871 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada, British Columbia V6T 1Z2
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