This workshop will explore creative ways to tell a Hakka story. The workshop will be led by Professor Tao Leigh Goffe and Henry Chang, Hakka published authors.
Tao Leigh Goffe received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. A native of London, she also grew up in New York and New Jersey. As a Princeton undergraduate, Dr. Goffe received her A.B. in English with a certificate in African American Studies. Currently a professor at NYU, her research explores the intersections between black and Asian diasporic literature in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Caribbean. Goffe’s book project, "Chiney Royal: Afro-Asian Intimacies in the Americas" maps a network of Afro-Asian intimacies in the metropolises of New York’s Chinatown and Toronto as well as the plantations of the West Indies and the American South. Analyzing spy thrillers, travelogues, beauty pageant photography, radical romance novels, indenture contracts, recipes, ship manifests, reggae songs, and family photographs, all of which encompass a rich archive of Afro-Asian intimacies in the Americas, Tao reads cultural objects against the grain of colonial history by drawing on methodologies of literary criticism and cultural history. Goffe's most recent article, "007 versus the Darker Races: Black and Yellow Peril in Dr. No," which offers a reading of a Jamaican Chinese James Bond and the orientalist coding of Ian Fleming’s Jamaica, was published in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal.
Chinatown native son and author Henry Chang is Hakka. He vaguely remembered his "Nine Rivers" Hakka connection, recently recalling his cultural ancestry when he was informed about the New York Hakka Conference earlier this year! Now he will be reading passages from his acclaimed detective stories, Year of the Dog and Chinatown Beat which include Chang’s experiences growing up Hakka in a Punti Chinatown. His poems have appeared in the seminal Yellow Pearl anthology, and in Gangs In New York’s Chinatown. He has written for Bridge Magazine, and his fiction has appeared in On A Bed Of Rice and in the NuyorAsian Anthology. His debut novel Chinatown Beat garnered high praise from the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, among others. Henry Chang is a graduate of CCNY (City College of New York). He has been a lighting consultant, and a Security Director for major hotels, commercial properties, and retail businesses in Manhattan. He resides in the Chinatown area, and his ‘Chinatown Trilogy' of CHINATOWN BEAT (2006), YEAR OF THE DOG (2008), RED JADE (2010) and DEATH MONEY (2014) are currently being developed for television and movies. ‘LUCKY’, the fifth book in the series was published in March.
Panelists:
- Professor Tao Leigh Goffe
- Author Henry Chang