The second session of the Bentobox Lecture Series for the 2019-2020 academic year was held last Thursday, the 10th of October. The session attracted around 20 participants who brought many interesting questions and contributed to fruitful discussions. The session featured talks by Prof. Tan See Kam (Department of English) and Prof. Roberval Teixeira e Silva (Department of Portuguese).
Prof. Tan’s presentation entitled “Global Hollywood and Chinese-language film studios” looked at the business practices of transnational Chinese film studies, in particular Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers (1958-1986) and Golden Harvest (1970-) and Mainland China’s Wanda Dalian (1988-), exploring the risks and challenges they have had to tackle on the road to global Hollywood. Global Hollywood remains the world’s largest and most lucrative film market. In world cinema, North American film studios historically have comparative advantages in terms of resources and technologies and so continue to be the major player in this market. For film studios elsewhere, global Hollywood has the allure of prestige which precipitates desires of participation. Seeking access is thus a normative business practice for film studios with global ambitions.
Prof. Teixeira e Silva’s presentation entitled “Indexicality and Scales revealing the discursive experience of (im)mobility of Chinese children in Brazil” focused on the movement and characteristics of Chinese immigration in Brazil, especially in urban areas. Following this movement, the growth of relations between China and Brazil in the economic field has promoted a significant increase in Sino-Brazilian interactions in non-institutional and institutional contexts. In the process, the wave of Chinese immigrants arriving in Brazil also bring with them a special group of immigrants, their kids, who have started to constitute the human demographic of Sao Paulo, Brazil. However, the way these children and adolescents interact with Brazil and Brazilians, and particularly, how they engage in the daily life of the city still needs to be better known. In his presentation, taking into consideration concepts such as linguistic performance, some discursive experiences of those young people were shown, which indicated necessary adjustments to the political, social, cultural, educational and linguistic spheres that those children inhabit.
Their presentation was followed by a dynamic Q&A session. Both speakers had to address a broad range of questions from the audience, which resulted in a mutually enriching exchange. This was the second bentobox of the autumn semester of 2019-2020. The next one will be held on the 14th of November and will feature talks from Prof. Manuela Carvalho (Department of Portuguese) and Prof. Wang Shan (Department of Chinese).
We are looking forward to seeing you there!