CINEMA 3: TOWARDS A 'MINOR HONG KONG CINEMA'

This article canvasses the way Hong Kong cinema became modern, at the moment and the place when/where it had to come up with new cinematic images in response to new geo-historical situations. I call it a ‘minor Hong Kong cinema’ in the sense that it is a cinema that deterritorializes within the heart of what is considered major. This minor cinema is not at all just a cinema at the margin. It is rather a strategy to conceptualize and develop certain suggestive examples in order to respond to specific geo-historical situations. While this minor cinema cannot represent the whole of Hong Kong cinema, it also highlights the potentialities of Hong Kong cinema that cannot be covered by dominant discourses on Hong Kong. This article focuses upon the films of Fruit Chan. In Fruit Chan's ‘Hong Kong 1997 Trilogy’, 1997 is neither the beginning of recollections nor the end of Hong Kong. These films dwell upon the failed, the vanished, and the underrepresented to make Hong Kong appear at the intriguing moment of 1997. They explore new perspectives for re-channelling Hong Kong and its histories.     

DOUBLE NEGATIONS: HONG KONG CULTURAL IDENTITY IN HOLLYWOOD'S TRANSNATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS

This article attempts to develop a critical understanding of the reconstitution of Hong Kong identity in Hollywood productions involving Hong Kong film talents. It argues that the ‘local’ in the city's historical context of the nineties no longer refers to any entity pertaining to a particular locality and culture but is always already determined by the framework of the transnational, which structures the perception of its local social reality. In particular, the paper suggests that the remaking of Hong Kong cultural identity in Hollywood films could be grasped in terms of the notion of a double negation. While the formation of such an identity is based on a negation of Chineseness, Hong Kong's transnational crossing to Hollywood initiates another negation that negates the very symbolic realm common to Chineseness. Jackie Chan's Hollywood blockbuster, Rush Hour, is used to illuminate the ways in which Hong Kong film stars and directors working for the global entertainment syndicate re-appropriate their agency in the production of a transnational narrative of their identity.     

BECOMING HONG KONG,RAZING BAOAN,PRESERVING XIN'AN: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT OF URBANIZATION IN THE SHENZHEN SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE

Located just north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, the largest and oldest of China's Special Economic Zone (SEZ) has been both a project and symbol of post-Mao modernization. In this paper, I trace how the Shenzhen built environment mediates images and experiences of ‘Hong Kong’, arguing that transnationality in the SEZ is an everyday practice where tradition, colonialism, and the Cold War provide raw materials for the local reworking of the changing relationship between the Chinese state apparatus and finance capital. My story has a double focus: the ideology of urbanization as modernization and historic preservation. On the one hand, the ideology of urbanization-as-modernization legitimates a spatial order in which the rural is always posed to be superseded by the urban. Both the rural and the urban are empty signifiers that are created through comparison and deployed to guide action. In this important sense,‘Hong Kong’ has been urban with respect to rural ‘Shenzhen’ (formerly Baoan County), even as ‘Shenzhen’ has been urban with respect to the Chinese hinterland (neidi). On the other hand, historic preservation domesticates ‘Hong Kong’ as Shenzhen's past through the figure of Xin'an County, the geographic predecessor of both Shenzhen and Hong Kong. These complimentary displacements produce a nostalgia peculiar to the SEZ: a desire for a past that entitles contemporary Shenzhen residents to Hong Kong's prosperity. This nostalgia is structured with reference to a shared origin - Xin'an County - where Hong Kong's postwar history (1950–1979) becomes the past that Shenzhen (rural Baoan) would have had, if not for a cruel twist of socialist fate.     

INTERFACING FEMINISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN HONG KONG: A CASE OF EVERYDAY LIFE POLITICS

Cultural studies, as a cultural and political re-articulation of common sense, knowledge and community practices, aims at opening up new cultural space for criticisms, reflections and action. Originating from the women' movement and later flourishing in the academy as well, feminism espouses similar aims to cultural studies. Both cultural studies and feminist/gender studies have a strong sense of intervening into everyday life politics. This paper is an attempt to discuss how feminism and cultural studies interface with each other, largely based on examples of gender-related everyday life politics taken from the feminist movement in Hong Kong. It will examine issues concerning the conflict of consumption and female subjectivities, the reconceptualization of home and housewives, and the representation of everyday life for women and history writing. It is argued that by blurring, negotiating or deconstructing the boundary or division between positions, identities and domains–such as subject and object, housewives and workers, private and public, personal and political, consumption and production–the re-articulation of knowledge about ‘victim’, ‘exploitation’, ‘home’ and ‘history’ in the feminist movement will not only provide the movement with new impetus and insight to reconsider its strategies in fighting for more cultural, social and economic space for women and other marginal groups at large in Hong Kong, but will also ‘metabolize’ the newly developed discipline of cultural studies in Hong Kong by providing a platform to strengthen the dynamic arm of cultural studies education and research. Based on her feminist and teaching experiences in Hong Kong, the author has highlighted activism and pedagogy as the two important dimensions of feminism and cultural studies in this paper.