A distinguished group of 100 experts from various universities and scientific research units in Asia, Australia, and North America attended the Tsinghua-Harvard Advanced Forum on Post-Colonialism June 25.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Foreign Languages, the Comparative Literature and Cultural Research Center, and the Post-Modernism Research Center of the Chinese Comparative Literature Institute, the event was held in the Wang Zesheng Hall in the Building of Architecture.
Wang Ning, professor of the Department of Foreign Languages, Dean of the Comparative Literature and Cultural Research Center, and Vice Chairman of the Post-Modernism Research Center of the Chinese Comparative Literature Institute, presided over the forum and gave a welcoming speech.
Other speeches were given by Hu Xianzhang, president of the School of Humanities and Social Science, and Lu Jiande, vice chairman of the Foreign Culture Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Science.
The special guest speaker was Homi Bhabha, a scholar of English and American literature. Bhabha became a member of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences last semester. He now holds the title of Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature. As one of the leading figures in the study of post-colonial ideology in modern times, Bhabha emphasized the linguistic structure of the critical speeches made by people in under-developed countries and in areas inhabited by minority nationalities. She said that due to its antagonism and criticism against aggressive imperial cultural supremacy, the trend of post-colonial ideology has become influential in the discussion of post-modernism among Western academics.
In recent years, the School of Humanities and Social Science has placed emphasis on the theoretical research of some internationally recognized frontier disciplines. And the department of foreign languages has not only invited some world-class scholars to give lectures, but also encouraged its faculty and students to write academic papers in English so as to make contributions to the international research work on post-modernism and post-colonialism.
