{"id":19117,"date":"2018-01-25T11:28:35","date_gmt":"2018-01-25T03:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.english.hku.hk\/alumni\/?p=19117"},"modified":"2019-02-22T17:14:27","modified_gmt":"2019-02-22T09:14:27","slug":"interview-with-assistant-professor-elizabeth-ho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/19117\/interview-with-assistant-professor-elizabeth-ho\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Assistant Professor Elizabeth Ho"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Collier Nogues, 3rd<\/sup> year PhD candidate<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nElizabeth Ho<\/p>\n

CN: Welcome to HKU\u2019s School of English! In the talk you gave as part of our seminar series last year, I remember that you discussed the 150th anniversary map of Hong Kong that HSBC just installed in the floor of its atrium in Central, and the politics of that map as public space. The talk was fascinating! Can you say a little about that project, and how you came to be interested in it?<\/p>\n

EH: My work on neo-Victorianism had been about time: how we return to the nineteenth-century British past in contemporary cultural texts in order to work through the multiple temporalities and anachronisms that define the postcolonial condition.\u00a0 But as the project developed, I realized that neo-Victorianism is also about space.\u00a0 Not only do geographical locations have different \u2018structures of relation\u2019 to the nineteenth-century past – so, Australia, for example, has a different relationship to the memory of the Victorian than Hong Kong –<\/p>\n

but different spaces also accrete and secrete neo-Victorian memories differently.\u00a0 Colonial cities like Hong Kong and, let\u2019s say, Toronto, will also manage their colonial history differently via official public spaces and heritage projects.\u00a0 While I didn\u2019t focus on public neo-Victorian spaces in my monograph, I did recently publish an article on Heritage: 1881 in Tsim Sha Tsui.\u00a0 In that essay, I traced tensions between how \u2018official\u2019 and sanctioned memories of British imperialism and militarism are adapted for reuse as commercial property and how the public\u2019s use of the space, primarily for wedding and tourist photos, creates new intimacies in an affective relationship with the nineteenth century past thereby creating a more healthy, or at least useful, version of postcolonial space.<\/p>\n

It was probably the Umbrella Movement sites that made my current project on maps in contemporary fiction \u2018click\u2019 into place.\u00a0 I was struck by the number of maps that appeared at the protest sites, so many of them part of the large repertoire of protest art that was created during that time.\u00a0 The coincidence, if you will, between those ad hoc, participatory maps and the map of 19th<\/sup> century Central that is installed in the plaza of HSBC, was too hard to ignore \u2013 I was instantly drawn to these maps and once I started looking, Hong Kong seemed filled with maps and mapping practices being used to make arguments about the contemporary moment.\u00a0 My current GRF project, \u201cMap-able: The Turn to the Map in Contemporary Fiction and Culture\u201d, is my first attempt at putting some of these maps into perspective.\u00a0 Aside from maps in Hong Kong, I\u2019m also working on maps that appear in novels speculating on European space and the shared language and visual tropes between maps and comics.<\/p>\n

CN: At your former position at Lingnan University, you taught a course on the graphic novel. How do you see that genre\/form as fitting into the study of English literature? Is it particularly suited to the study of literature in Hong Kong?<\/p>\n

EH: I see graphic novels and comics as an important component of contemporary literature; their unique combination of text and image in the construction of narrative adds richness to our arts of the present.\u00a0 I find that students in Hong Kong, like students anywhere, respond really well to reading graphic novels. They are particularly attuned to interpreting visual elements and have had much practice reading HK comics and manga.\u00a0 Teaching graphic novels has opened up discussions about issues like adaptation; the limits of language in the face of historical and personal trauma; the visual representation of gender dynamics and power relations; race and diversity; etc.\u00a0 Many of these arguments rely on visual as well as textual elements and graphic novels help us \u2018see\u2019 these better. \u00a0I hope to offer a course, \u201cComics, Graphic Novels and Theory\u201d, in the near future.<\/p>\n

CN: Are there Hong Kong resources and\/or events in the field of graphic novels and comix\u2014and further, about cultural and literary mapping\u2014our readers may not know about, but should?<\/p>\n

EH: Comix Homebase in Wan Chai has a remarkable archive of Hong Kong comics and visual studies texts.\u00a0 Their library is an excellent resource for anyone interested in a basic introduction to visual literature but also a history of Hong Kong comics. In addition, Comix Homebase is an excellent example of adaptive reuse\/heritage development done right in Hong Kong.\u00a0 They lead wonderful tours for students and their knowledgeable docents can run lectures in English and Chinese on HK comics and other topics. \u00a0<\/p>\n

My ENGL 1014 class, \u201cImaginary Geographies: The Art of Writing Place\u201d, just took a \u2018haunted tour\u2019 of Wan Chai, part of St James Settlement\u2019s \u2018Hong Kong House of Stories\u2019 program. We were taken on a tour of some of the spooky areas of Wan Chai and learned a lot about the myths and legends of the area.\u00a0 The tour was a really nice way of learning more about home, in the sense that we sometimes need to un-learn the familiar in order to gain new appreciation about how we experience space and make place.\u00a0 Also, it\u2019s nice to know that Hong Kong has a rich and diverse \u201cpsychogeography\u201d, if we know where to look!<\/p>\n

CN: Can you point our readers to some of your favorite examples of graphic novels and literary cartography if they\u2019d like to explore further?<\/p>\n

EH: Some of my favorite graphic novels about maps and mapping include Dylan Horrocks\u2019s Hicksville<\/em>, a wonderful story of comics from the margins of New Zealand, and Alan Moore\u2019s From Hell<\/em>, a psychogeographic tour de force of the Whitechapel murders of 1888.\u00a0 For contemporary fiction, I highly recommend China Mieville\u2019s The City & The City<\/em> and also Colson Whitehead\u2019s Zone One<\/em>; both novels encourage us to think about urban spatiality in radically different ways (plus, Zone One<\/em> has zombies).\u00a0 For a more theoretical way to think about literary cartography, I would start with Franco Moretti\u2019s Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900<\/em> \u2013 you\u2019ll never think about the setting of Jane Austen novels in the same way after reading it!<\/p>\n

CN: Finally, do you have any advice for our Research Postgraduates?<\/p>\n

EH: Love your project: that love and passion will carry you through many a dark hour in the dissertation process. Try to write every day: there are many resources available on the internet about writing groups, accountability groups and other kinds of activities. Even better, start your own writing group! Be flexible about the kind of writing you produce: it\u2019s all useful. Be organized: never throw any document away and know where to find it later!\u00a0 Ask for and get support \u2013 whether it\u2019s academic or emotional \u2013 when you need it. Be kind to yourself: exercise, eat, sleep.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/h4>\n

Published on:\u00a0January 25, 2018 < Back<\/a> ><\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Collier Nogues, 3rd year PhD candidate Elizabeth Ho CN: Welcome to HKU\u2019s School of English! In the talk you gave as part of our seminar series last year, I remember that you discussed the 150th anniversary map of Hong Kong that HSBC just installed in the floor of its atrium in Central, and theContinue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19117"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19117"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19756,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19117\/revisions\/19756"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.hku.hk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}