Ackbar Abbas is a professor of

comparative literature Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role similar to that of the study ...

at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...

. Previously he was chair of comparative literature at the

University of Hong Kong The University of Hong Kong (HKU) (Chinese: 香港大學) is a public research university in Hong Kong. Founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, it is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong. HKU was also the f ...

and also co-director of the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures. His research interests include

globalization Globalization, or globalisation (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English; American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), see spelling differences), is the process of foreign relation ...

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...

and

Chinese culture Chinese culture () is one of the world's oldest cultures, originating thousands of years ago. The culture prevails across a large geographical region in East Asia and is extremely diverse and varying, with customs and traditions varying grea ...

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

cinema Cinema may refer to: Film * Cinematography, the art of motion-picture photography * Film or movie, a series of still images that create the illusion of a moving image ** Film industry, the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking ...

, postcolonialism, and critical theory. His book ''Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance'' was published by the

University of Minnesota Press The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota. It had annual revenues of just over $8 million in fiscal year 2018. Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its boo ...

in 1997. He previously served as a Contributing Editor to '' Public Culture,'' an academic journal published by

Duke University Press Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 D ...

Early life and education

Born in 1947, Abbas was raised in

Kennedy Town, Hong Kong Kennedy Town is at the western end of Sai Wan on Hong Kong Island in Hong Kong. It was named after Arthur Edward Kennedy, the 7th Governor of Hong Kong from 1872 to 1877. Administratively, it is part of Central and Western District. Due to its ...

to a family of Indian, Malaysian, and Chinese descent.interview with Abbas
/ref> Ackbar Abbas holds an MPhil from the

. He is married to Chinese vocalist and writer Liu Sola.

Contributions

Abbas has written extensively on Hong Kong culture, architecture, and cinema.

Publications

Books

*''Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance.'' Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. *''Internationalizing Cultural Studies.'' Co-edited with John Erni. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. *''Chen Danqing: Painting After Tiananmen.'' Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, Cultural Studies Series No. 6, 1995. *''The Provocation of Jean Baudrillard.'' Ed. Hong Kong: Twilight Books, 1990. *''Literature and Anthropology.'' Co-edited with Jonathan Hall. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 1986. *''Rewriting Literary History.'' Edited with T.W. Wong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1984. *''Literary Theory Today.'' Edited with T.W. Wong. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 1981.

Editing

*Book Series Editor (with Wimal Dissanayake), ''The New Hong Kong Cinema.'' University of Hong Kong Press, 2002–present. *Special issue editor (with Wu Hung), ''Hong Kong 1997: the Place and the Formula.'' ''Public Culture'', May 1997.

Essays

*"Culture as Event in China’s Socialist Market Economy," in ''Proceedings of the 2005 Venice Biennale'', ed. Robert Storr, forthcoming. *"Faking Globalization," in ''Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age'', ed. Andreas Huyssen (2008). Reprinted in ''A Visual Culture Reader'', ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 3rd ed., (2012). *"The Fake as Anthropological Object," in Konzept Böll. Thema 2: Alles eins? Die Globale Zukunft von Kultur und Demokratie (forthcoming). *"Asian Phantasmagorias of the Interior," in ''HK Lab II: An Experience of Hong Kong's Interior Spaces'', ed. Laurent Gutierrez, Valérie Portefaix, and Laura Ruggeri (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2005), 290–298. *"The Turns and Returns of Beauty," in ''Uber Schonheit/About Beauty'' (Berlin: House of World Cultures, 2005), 91–103. *"Framing the City Through Cinema," in ''Migrating Images'' (Berlin: House of World Cultures, 2004), 112–118.

References

External links

Faculty profile from University of California Irvine
Hong Kong emigrants to the United States University of California, Irvine faculty Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Alumni of the University of Hong Kong University of Hong Kong faculty {{US-academic-bio-stub