| This dissertation studies Hong Kong culture in relation to the 1997 issue since 1984 when the Sino British Joint Declaration was signed between Britain and China. The agreement declared that China would gain sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. Hong Kong is on the edge of Time. This does not merely mean that the colony has stepped into a new historical phrase full of uncertainty, anxiety, and false hope because of the 1997 hand-over, but it also points to the decadent fin-de-siecle image of the city. How to frame the 1997 issue in its colonial context and historical background? What were the social impact and the political significance of the 1997 issue upon the local people? Did the 1997 hand over mean an end of colonialism? What was so anomalous in the case of Hong Kong's coloniality? How to re-interpret the colonial project of Hong Kong's modernization in terms of its historical and social settings? Sandwiched between Britain and China, how would the city negotiate its own future? My dissertation engage these key questions. The period that I choose to work is from the signing of the Joint Declaration in 1984, through the transitional period of the 1980s and the 1990s, to the hand-over in 1997. The topics I discuss include spatiality of Hong Kong's political economy, representation of urban space in architecture, cultural identities in literary writings and social nostalgia in filmmaking. My project is to examine how cultural workers, literary writers and filmmakers of Hong Kong developed and reconstructed their own positionality under the impact of the 1997 issue. What I try to build a solid ground for the study of Hong Kong and to give an interdisciplinary approach to contextualize the “local narrative” of the suppressed subjectivity of the colony beyond the doctrine of British colonialism and Chinese nationalism. |
