James Chandler, Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Chicago, will present “Narcotics and Empires: Opium in Literature, History, and Film. The talk illuminates the role of British opium in China as an invisible inspiration in literature and film, from Charles Dickens to D.W. Griffith. R. Bin Wong, Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the UCLA Asia Institute, will follow with commentary contrasting the political and economic significance of the Opium War to Britain in the 1840s with its political and economic significance to China today. Together the presentations suggest ways of understanding how Asia’s place in the Humanities can be expanded at the same time as we pay more attention to how the Humanities figure in Asian settings. This dialogue exemplifies one way of bringing Asia into the Humanities that the “Asia in the Humanities, the Humanities in Asia” is meant to encourage.
For more about the Asia Institute Asia in the Humanities/Humanities in Asia initiative, please visit http://international.ucla.edu/asia/humanities.