Hong Kong Cinema as Ethnic Borderland

Lo, Kwai Cheung

doi:10.1002/9781118883594.ch3

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…In short, without the co-production and the Mainland market, Bodyguards and Assassins would not have been possible. However, it was ironic that, as noted by Kwai-cheung Lo (2015), the film was an effort "to take sides and show its dedication to the 'politically correct' nationalist revolution" (p. 71). Moreover, the movie was also seen by Hong Kong critics as a poignant summary of the impasse faced by Hong Kong cinema in/ as a besieged city (echoing the Chinese title) after the 1997 handover.…”

Section: Singing the Main(land) Melodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Hong Kong (in China) studies: Hong Kong popular culture as example

Yiu-Wai

2020

Global Media and China

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“China has become a predicament as well as a condition for Hong Kong culture” in the age of China, especially after the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement in 2003. This has become even more acute for Hong Kong culture in the integration of the Greater Bay Area, which can be seen as incorporating Hong Kong and Macao’s development into the overall development of the country. At this particular juncture, the issue of integration with the Mainland has become a topic that is of utmost importance for any consideration of the future of Hong Kong culture and the city as a whole. In this special context, the transmission of Hong Kong popular cultures in the Mainland are related topics that need to be explored. For example, what are the implications behind the success of Hong Kong directors and producers who took the helm of immensely popular Mainland television series? After Cantopop crossed the border, to what extent did the singers and the songs that they sang in Mainland music reality shows represent Hong Kong? These would be very good case studies of Hong Kong culture in cross-border ventures, and studying their transmissions would have long-term implications for not only Hong Kong culture in particular but also Hong Kong Studies in general. This essay endeavors to use these cross-border experiences as examples to offer a prolegomenon to Hong Kong (in China) Studies, which will in turn contribute to the possibility of generating a cultural studies response to the new configuration of the Greater Bay Area.

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Section: Singing the Main(land) Melodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Hong Kong (in China) studies: Hong Kong popular culture as example

Yiu-Wai

2020

Global Media and China

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“…The childhood encounters between Little Cheung and Fan demonstrate Hong Kong's awareness of borders, or to Lo (2015), a form of recognition of its status as an ethnic borderland within the proximity of a nation:…”

Section: Borders and The Reconciliation Of Time: Fruit Chan's Little mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The childhood encounters between Little Cheung and Fan demonstrate Hong Kong’s awareness of borders, or to Lo (2015), a form of recognition of its status as an ethnic borderland within the proximity of a nation:Hong Kong, as an ex colonial space, is historically sensitive to the implications of boundaries and the way in which a nation state relies upon territorial construction of a border to separate “us” from “them” in order to constitute its citizenship as a collective identity. But unlike a modern nation state that divinizes, sacralizes, and hence absolutizes its borders, (colonial) Hong Kong not only deprives border of its designated meaning, but also relativizes its function and detaches it from the idea of sovereignty by making border a midway zone and an object of constant transgression.…”

Section: Borders and The Reconciliation Of Time: Fruit Chan’s Little mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond nationhood: Border and coming of age in Hong Kong cinema

Chan

2020

Global Media and China

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The 1950s of Hong Kong manifests the initiation of a communal imagination oscillating in between the sovereignty of a British colony and the reality of a Chinese territory. The influx of immigrants from the north and, as a result, the establishment of a border during the 1950s not only restructured the demographic composition of the city but also brought along new momentum for mass cultural productions. Along the contestations and reconciliations between different ethnicities, languages, and identities, Hong Kong cultural configuration has since then embarked on a trajectory of its own, including the conceptualizations of childhood, border, and national ambiguity. Whether this piece of land was once desecrated by colonialism or this reclaimed territory is now alienated by renationalization, the formation of childhood serves as a critical lens to examine the meaning of border and nation from the colonial to the postcolonial eras of Hong Kong. Capitalizing on two titles produced in the early 1950s and in the late 1990s of Hong Kong cinema, namely, Fung Fung’s The Kid (1950) and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999), this article aims to explore the correlation between border, community, and nationality through the life adventures of the child protagonists, whose transitions and explorations are entangled with a political and territorial border that polarizes our sinophonic imagination in the ongoing present of China–Hong Kong division. In this context, the cultural configuration of Bildungsroman, apart from manifesting Franco Moretti’s “the symbolic form of modernity” or Marc Redfield’s “acculturation of the self,” should embody the struggles with an obscure nationality, as here exemplified from the footprints of childhood tiptoeing on and off the borders of Hong Kong.

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“… 14. Kwai-cheung Lo, Hong Kong cinema as ethnic borderland, in Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Esther C. M. Yau (eds) A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema , Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: John Wiley, 2015, 72–3. …”

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confidence: 99%

Tea cafés and the Hong Kong identity: Food culture and hybridity

Chan

2018

China Information

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This article examines the meanings of caa caan teng (茶餐廳, local cafés) in Hong Kong and the implications of such cafés on the Hong Kong identity. It argues that the local café is a representation of Hong Kong culture because it reflects Hong Kong’s political, economic, and social developmental paths and mirrors the everyday life of its people. I investigate how the interaction of different immigrant cultures in Hong Kong has resulted in the invention of hybrid foods at the local café. These foods demonstrate hybridity as the transgression of boundaries through the negotiation of cultural differences among migrants, as well as those between migrants and colonialists. I argue that hybridity in local cafés reflects the power relations among the locals in Hong Kong, between locals and colonialists, and between locals and the new authorities in Beijing. Hybridity found in local cafés symbolizes the Hong Kong identity, as an entanglement between the multiplicity of Chinese ethnicities and the colonial modernity as characterized by flexibility, efficiency, choice, and diversity. These features differentiate the Hong Kong people from the colonialists and the mainlanders, thus constructing their identity and subjectivity, as former colonial subjects now living in the ‘periphery’ of the motherland.

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Hong Kong Cinema as Ethnic Borderland

Cited by 7 publications

References 4 publications

Hong Kong (in China) studies: Hong Kong popular culture as example

Hong Kong (in China) studies: Hong Kong popular culture as example

Beyond nationhood: Border and coming of age in Hong Kong cinema

Tea cafés and the Hong Kong identity: Food culture and hybridity

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