Location: Robarts Theatre RL 3-025, 3rd Floor John P. Robarts Research Library, 130 St. George St, Toronto, ON M5S 1A5
Register at chk.library@utoronto.ca.
To view the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRe36MLpQZk
For more information about the documentary, please visit http://deltamove.org.
Based on forty years of field research, Metamorphosis of the Bay Area narrates the making and unmaking of the Pearl River Delta in South China from the Ming Dynasty to the present. Using historical images and vivid ethnographic encounters, the film illustrates how a mobile, water-based people became "landed" over time. They turned river marshes into fields, built lineage communities, performed rituals, and cultivated literati language to engage the imperial state. Today, they face the challenges of state-led urban development, and struggle, against all odds, to maintain a regional ecology with rich cultural meanings that transcend rigid administrative boundaries.
About Helen F. Siu 蕭鳳霞
Helen is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and former chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. Her teaching interests are political and historical anthropology, urban and global culture change. She has conducted fieldwork in Southern China since the late 1970s, exploring agrarian change and commerce, the nature of the socialist state, and the refashioning of identities. Lately, she explores rural-urban interface in China, inter-Asian connections, China-Africa encounters, popular music and new political space in Hong Kong.
She is the author, co-author, and co-editor of multi-lingual publications. The most recent publications are Asia Inside Out, Tracing China: A Forty-year Ethnographic Journey, and the Chinese edition of Tracing China, entitled 《踏跡尋中: 四十年華南田野之旅》.
She is the founding director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (www.hkihss.hku.hk) (2001-2012), which focuses on inter-regional and cross-disciplinary research.
Read more about Helen here: https://anthropology.yale.edu/profile/helen-siu
Moderator: Ting Guo 郭婷
Assistant Professor, Department of Language Studies, UTSC
Honorary Researcher, Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library
She is the author of Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (2025) and co-editor of the special forum "Religion and Social Movements in Hong Kong," Journal of Asian Studies. She co-hosts the 時差 in-betweenness podcast (@shichapodcast).