Speaker:
Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine
Moderator:
Daniel Vukovich, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, December 15, 2025 Time: 4:00–6:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
All are welcome. Registration is required.
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=104144
In this talk, Professor Catherine Liu, the author of the acclaimed book “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class” (2021) among other titles, will present one of her current book projects, “Gangster Capitalism.” She will lay out an approach to reading the gangster of 1930s American gangster film as tragic hero of a certain kind of crisis in capitalism. Robert Warshow wrote that the gangster film describes the opposite arc of the self-made man myth. The gangster is a working class, immigrant outsider caught in a rags to riches to rags narrative in which the valued traits of the American entrepreneur (hard work, willingness to take risks, 24/7 availability to the boss) culminate in violent downfall. The gangster film actually describes the impossibility of achieving individual agency or autonomy under a liberal state protected by the brutality of gatekeepers and bosses. This in turn helps illuminate the current moment where the United States, among other places, appears to have reached peak gangster capitalism at national and global levels.
Catherine Liu is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. She has published widely on psychoanalysis, critical theory and intellectual history. She is the founder and director of the Palm Springs School for Social Research, an independent research institute that promotes a historical materialist, pragmatic approach to critical theory and popular political and cultural education. She is the author of “Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class” (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Her book “Traumatized: the New Politics of Suffering” will be published by Verso in 2026. She is at present working on two book projects, one on Gangster Capitalism and finance capital and the other on Zombie Liberalism and the decay of liberal institutions in the West.
