Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Volume 2)

by Ackbar Abbas

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 Chan 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.

Genres: China, Cultural Studies, Nonfiction, History, Film, Literary Criticism, Politics

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Elias]

Um dieses Buch überhaupt so spontan lesen zu können, musste ich nach Sachsen-Anhalt fahren xD aber es hat sich gelohnt. Nicht umsonst wird es in jeglichen Texten zum cinematischen und kulturellen Hong Kong der 90er Jahre erwähnt. Ackbar Abbas bietet einen tiefen Einblick in was es bedeutet auf der Suche nach Identität zu sein ab den zwei großen Traumata 1984, 1989 und der Übergabe 1997. Also falls sich überhaupt noch jemand für dieses Thema interessiert kann ich es nur wärmstens Empfehlen.

[aerialxav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter 1, 2, 4, 5, 7
Love the framework of disappearance, so poignant; but hate the writing lol

[Hayley]

solid??? posits hong kong culture as being generated by the threat/possible actuality of its disappearance which i want to disagree with (and maybe still do...) but also articulates the argument really well. not so into the hybrid stuff but has such good reads on production of space by capital w/o neglecting the socio-cultural. if u want to see virilio/lefebrve/spatial turn theorists dealt with in a v concrete way this is the book to read.

[Kaitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abbas has done so many commendable things with this text. It is as accessible as it is ambitious, sincere as it is rigorous. Reading it in 2018, more than two decades since the handover, it is remarkable how urgent his argument for a a nuanced understanding of postcolonial identity reads. I am also impressed with how seamlessly he weaves analyses of local architecture and cinema into this sociopolitical text. In this book, Abbas sensitively brings together the various elements of the every day: the spaces we occupy, the images and sounds thrust upon us, and how our experience of a place is tied up in ideas created long before we ever existed.

As a Hong Kong citizen who recently moved back here, I am so grateful for the exciting possibilities that this text proposes. Rather than a place that is acted upon, Hong Kong, and by extension its citizens, are granted enormous agency in this book.

[Jeremy Hung · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Joint Declaration ... made Hong Kong people look at the place with new eyes. It is as if the possibility of such a social and cultural space disappearing, in the form we know it today, has led to our seeing it in all its complexity and contradiction for the first time, an instance, as Benjamin would have said, of love at last sight."

[Josephine E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly theoretical, I think at times the argument strays too abstract with little empirical support. But given Prof. Abbas’ foundation in primarily anthological comparison, his arguments were clear and not unfounded entirely. I really appreciate his terminology — its artistic and merges the fields of psychoanalytics and cultural study.

[Brij Howard-Sarin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this really interesting but I was clearly out of my depth. I resonated with some of the more surface level observations about the evolution of HK cinema/architecture, but I’m sure I missed some of the deeper points and didn’t enjoy it as much because of it.

[KENSHIN ARCHIVE · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful capture of an in-between world's identity.