A consideration of what the culture of Hong Kong tells us about the
state of the world at the fin-de-siecle.
"In a space of disappearance, in the unprecedented historical
situation that Hong Kong finds itself in of being caught between
two colonialities (Britain's and China's), there is a desperate
attempt to clutch at images of identity, however alien or cliched
these images are. There is a need to define a sense of place
through buildings and other means, at the moment when such a sense
of place (fragile to begin with) is being threatened with erasure
by a more and more insistently globalizing space".
On June 30, 1997, Hong Kong as we know it will disappear,
ceasing its singular and ambiguous existence as a colonial holdover
and becoming part of the People's Republic of China. In an
intriguing and provocative exploration of its cinema, architecture,
photography, and literature, Ackbar Abbas considers what Hong Kong,
with its unique relations to decolonization and disappearance, can
teach us about the future of both the colonial city and the global
city.
The culture of Hong Kong encompasses Jackie Chart and John Woo,
British colonial architecture and postmodern skyscrapers.
Ironically, it was not until they were faced with the imposition of
Mainland power -- with the signing of the Sino British Joint
Agreement in 1984 -- that the denizens of the colony began the
search for a Hong Kong identity. According to Abbas, Hong Kong's
peculiar lack of identity is due to its status as "not so much a
place as a space of transit", whose residents think of themselves
as transients and migrants on their way from China to somewhere
else.
Abbas explores the way Hong Kong's media saturationchanges its
people's experience of space so that it becomes abstract, dominated
by signs and images that dispel memory, history, and presence.
Hong Kong disappears through simple dualities such as East/West
and tradition/modernity. What is missing from a view of Hong Kong
as merely a colony is the paradox that Hong Kong has benefited from
and made a virtue of its dependent colonial status, turning itself
into a global and financial city and outstripping its colonizer in
terms of wealth.
Combining sophisticated theory and a critical perspective, this
rich and thought-provoking work captures the complex situation of
the metropolis that is contemporary Hong Kong. Along the way, it
challenges, entertains, and makes an important contribution to our
thinking about the surprising processes and consequences of
colonialism.
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