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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Alvin K. Wong, "Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone" (Duke UP, 2025)
Description: How do we compare across languages, media, and histories, all without flattening differences? And what might Hong Kong teach us about doing comparison differently?
Alvin K. Wong examines these and other questions in Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone (Duke UP, 2025), a wide-ranging and thought-provoking study of queerness in Hong Kong. Bringing together Sinophone literature, independent and commercial cinema, documentary films, and visual art, the book asks how Hong Kong’s queer productions might help us rethink the work of comparison itself.
Rather than treating Hong Kong as a marginal or derivative space — a space...