Backreading Hong Kong Symposium: Anglophone and Sinophone
Website: https://backreading.com/
November 17-18, 2025
University of Toronto
Call for Abstracts
Deadline: September 7, 2025
About the Symposium
The Backreading Hong Kong symposium brings together scholars, writers, translators, and artists to share their cross-disciplinary humanities research and findings on the city that we call home: Hong Kong, and to ignite stimulating and rigorous discussion. Building on the momentum of previous editions, the 2025 symposium explores the entangled, and at times antagonistic, relationship between the Anglophone and the Sinophone in the study of Hong Kong’s cultural and literary fields.
The Anglophone and the Sinophone are often understood as linguistic domains, geopolitical categories, or literary traditions. But in the context of Hong Kong, these labels are never stable or self-evident. They emerge from colonial legacies and Cold War formations, shape diasporic imaginaries and media ecologies, and constitute sites of aesthetic contestation, translation, and reinvention. This symposium aims to revisit these categories not as fixed binaries, but as historically situated and conceptually porous frameworks for rethinking identity, creativity, and resistance in and through Hong Kong.
Possible Topics
We welcome proposals from scholars across disciplines (literature, media, translation, cultural studies, history, political theory, and beyond) that engage critically with the theme “Anglophone and Sinophone.” Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Literary circulations between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds
Translation, mistranslation, and translingual practices in Hong Kong
Diaspora, language politics, and identity formation
Intersections of race, gender, class, and language
Writing and reading across linguistic borders
Case studies of bilingual or multilingual authors
Comparative approaches to Anglophone and Sinophone studies
Submission Details
Please send a 250-word abstract outlining your paper’s main argument, methodology, and contribution, along with a short biographical note (max 150 words) to Chris Song (chriszj.song@utoronto.ca) and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (tammyho@asiancha.com)
Proposal Deadline: September 7, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: September 15, 2025
Selected participants will be invited to present at the in-person symposium held at the University of Toronto on November 17-18, 2025. There are no registration fees.
Organisers:
Department of Language Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough
Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
Posted by: Chris Song chriszj.song@utoronto.ca
