Hong Kong's protest movements have created a repertoire of symbolism in artworks and artefacts that make statements about the political status of the city. This article analyses the protest art... Show moreHong Kong's protest movements have created a repertoire of symbolism in artworks and artefacts that make statements about the political status of the city. This article analyses the protest art that emerged during the 2019 anti-extradition protests. We explore how actors produced a sense of “Hong Kong-ness” and distributed political meanings through networked agitprop: a form of strategic communication that links people and ideas together in both physical and digital contexts, through emotional appeals in the service of a grassroots political programme. By analysing examples of such agitprop, we show how the movement organically constructed networks of meaning to promote its ideas of people, nation, and even independence. However, we also find that the commitment to nationalist frames of reference ultimately prevents such art from re-imaging Hong Kong outside the confines of nations and that it even inadvertently reproduces the systems of power it ostensibly sets out to challenge. Show less
This paper proposes perceptual multilingualism as a research interest within the broader folk linguistic enterprise. By drawing on the geolinguistic mapping tasks popular in perceptual dialectology... Show moreThis paper proposes perceptual multilingualism as a research interest within the broader folk linguistic enterprise. By drawing on the geolinguistic mapping tasks popular in perceptual dialectology – whereby participants are asked to draw and depict dialectal diversity in a given region – we show that perceptual multilingualism can elicit knowledge and reasoning in the community about linguistic diversity more broadly. To do this, we analysed and discussed 41 perceptual multilingualism maps produced by high school students in Hong Kong about societal multilingualism across the Hong Kong region. On the one hand, the maps allowed us to quantify which languages manifest in the youths’ metalinguistic awareness and where. On the other hand, we positioned the maps as discourses to be compared and analysed through a critical social theoretical lens. Doing so revealed implicit and contested power relations as they manifested in epistemic claims in dialectic relation to broader sociopolitical narratives in Hong Kong. This included Hong Kong’s contentious transition to governance by Beijing and the marginalisation of the blue-collar workforce. Beyond the empirical metalinguistic data, our paper shows that perceptual multilingualism can contribute to critical sociolinguistics by helping to reveal power relations, hegemonies and ideologies, and resistance. Show less
This dissertation advances a new interpretation on the national formation of modern China through the lens of Chinese cinema. Primarily, this project explores how cinema—a modern invention imported... Show moreThis dissertation advances a new interpretation on the national formation of modern China through the lens of Chinese cinema. Primarily, this project explores how cinema—a modern invention imported from the West—has shaped China’s sociopolitical transition from a dynastic empire to a nation-state. It is argued that, the concurrence of motion picture’s arrival and nation-state’s advent in China at the turn of the twentieth century, is not to be considered as isolated events, but rather as a dialectical dynamism in which the imagined community of modern China has largely relied on cinema for its symbolic construction, and yet encountered constant resistance from cinematic representation. Viewing the formation of the Chinese nation-state from a cinematic perspective, this study centers on the conflicts between marginal figures and central categories in Chinese films. In approaching this unresolved dilemma, Jiyu Zhang dedicates his study to mapping out a dialectical relationship between China’s internal and external tensions. Through an extensive investigation of cinematic embodiment, Zhang hones in on four groups of characters that he terms the “central frontiers” of modern China’s cultural imaginary: children, women, ethnic minorities, and diaspora. Show less
This dissertation is about Peking Opera in Hong Kong. I (re)construct its history, from the early twentieth century to the present day, through the life stories of six individuals who are... Show moreThis dissertation is about Peking Opera in Hong Kong. I (re)construct its history, from the early twentieth century to the present day, through the life stories of six individuals who are significant to the topic in various periods and respects. The theoretical base of this project derives from Igor Kopytoff’s notion of Cultural Biography and from (qualitative) Social Network Analysis. I collect my data by ethnographic methods, which include interviews, participant observation and archival research. In addition to the production of a critical history of Peking Opera in Hong Kong, this dissertation shows how various individual and institutional stakeholders envision and embody their versions of “Chinese-ness” through Peking Opera. I argue that after the 1997 handover, Peking Opera has become a space for the authorities and performers to negotiate their Chinese identities between the “local” (i.e. Hong Kong) and the “national” (i.e. The People’s Republic of China). This identity-building consequently affects their stance toward, or practice of, Peking Opera. My research also shows that some of these identity-driven practices have made a “reverse impact” on presentational conventions in the Chinese mainland. Show less
