Narratives of travel: The cultural discourses of displacement in Hong Kong

Through examining the metaphors of travel in Hong Kong cultural discourses in the larger context of global cultural circulation, this dissertation calls attention to the imagination and politics of displacement and location in the twentieth Century Hong Kong. It raises questions of how and when notions of home and diaspora, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation that attract international academic attention come to play a role in the local context. I also place these discourses of displacement in the tradition of Chinese travel literature and discuss their continuation and discontinuation, and point out the neglect of gender factor. There is no doubt that travel generates a complex system of cultural representation and seems to offer promises of deconstructing dominations and hegemonies which are particularly important in postcolonial Hong Kong. Nevertheless, I argue that politics of identity and displacement must be historicized and locally situated if it is to be of any practical meaning.