Browsing by Subject "Hong Kong"

Hong Kong has long been ensnared in the problems of limited housing and soaring land prices, which renders its physical space one of the most visible criteria embodying its social inequalities. Regarding space as an overarching concern andframework, this thesis mainly focuses on the representations and portrayals of Hong Kong’s urban space in Fruit Chan and Ann Hui’s films and further examines how the directors engage with social spaces in reality through depicting various cinematic spaces. All of these films explore the grassroots space of the underprivileged and marginalized people, which constitutes the underside of Hong Kong’s glamorous urban space shaped by economic developments and globalization. Fruit Chan’s Handover Trilogy including Made in Hong Kong (1997), The Longest Summer (1998), Little Cheung (1999), as well as the first two installments of his Prostitute Trilogy, Durian Durian (2000) and Hollywood Hong Kong (2000) hence reflect on how economic, political and social conditions are factored into the uncanny mutations and distortions of varying spaces ranging from public housing estates, cemeteries, streets to squatter villages. Ann Hui’s companion films, The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009), offer a detailed characterization of public housing estates and discuss the notion of housing in metropolitan contexts. The two directors deploy and recreate these paradigmatic spaces of Hong Kong as a critique of the history and social hierarchy of Hong Kong, which are intimately involved with the complexity of postcoloniality, neoliberalism, and globalization. Based on theories of spatiality, psychoanalysis, and urban sociology, this thesis argues that these cinematic spaces can be viewed as a site to negotiate with urban planning, spatial practices, transregional and transnational movements. On the one hand, space registers the hierarchical division of the society that renders the underprivileged more vulnerable. On the other hand, connections and a sense of community can also emerge from the space appropriated by its inhabitants. Furthermore, by engaging with border-crossing subjects, these films explore social spaces beyond Hong Kong and provide possibilities of investigating the broader social reality of post-socialist China, destabilizing the static binaries between local and global, periphery and center.

From North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, the social movements of the past decade have, without being in explicit dialogue with one another, resembled the same march into the public street. Despite the breadth of the cultural, political, and topographical variations in the spaces and places that these movements cover, even in a city like Hong Kong, where the development of urban space has taken a trajectory and assumed a quality of unique status, protest seems to march to the beat of the same drum in Hong Kong’s tropical, urban financial center as it does in St. Louis’ suburban neighborhoods. Why, despite the obvious differences from city-to- city and street-to-street, does protest seem to look the same across societies, cultures, and regimes?

This paper explores the theoretical matrix by which discourses of the street have emerged alongside the imperialisms of the nineteenth century to take inventory of the ways in which the street speaks and is spoken about in the city, in politics, in poetry and literature. While these discourses illuminate the coordinates and mediations in the implicit conception of the street, they only complement the very real emergence and mutations of urban space in Hong Kong in the twentieth century driven by finance capital. I chart the contours of the history of the street in Hong Kong and the ways of capturing the assemblies that have always taken place on it in a step towards understanding how social movement and political assembly can be made effective in contemporary urban space.