| dc.description.abstract |
<p>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?</p><p>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.</p>
|
|
