Symposium
Bidisha Banerjee
Friday, 11.30 – 12.15
Hong Kong Reads:
Shaun Tan A One City One Book Project
Hong Kong Reads Shaun Tan: A One City One Book Project
In 2019, I directed Hong Kong’s first ever One City One Book project, a community reading that encourages as many people as possible to read and discuss a single book with an aim to promote literature, reading and civic engagement. The selected book for Hong Kong’s first 1C1B was Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel, The Arrival, a perfect choice for a city that speaks several languages and has its own history of migration. In this presentation, I will share my experience of directing the project and discuss the wide appeal and rich affordances of a text like The Arrival.
Dr. Bidisha Banerjee is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities at The Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include postcolonial and migration studies, photography studies, graphic narratives and South Asian diasporic fiction. Her work has appeared in journals like Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Visual Studies and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Her current book project attempts to study the narrated image in postcolonial literature, which functions as a photographic metaphor to enhance the themes of the literary text. She directed Hong Kong’s first ever One City One Book project in 2019.