Lecture | China Seminar
From Disappearance to the End Game: Reflecting on the Politics of Decolonization in Hong Kong
- Date
- Wednesday 15 May 2024
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Huizinga 0.04
Abstract
This paper revisits the ways Hong Kong’s existential crises have been articulated and theorized since the 1980s up to the present moment. The discourses on Hong Kong society and its internal logic of cultural production have always been cast under the shadow of disappearance and death. Yet if the slow death of the city feels like a condition of eternal reoccurrence in the past two decades, what we find between the dominant themes of disappearance and the end-game is neither empty time nor inaction, but a fervent period during which assorted paths have been taken in a collective struggle for democracy and subjectivity. From the discourse of disappearance to the imagination of an end-game so distinctively marked the 2019 anti-ELAB movement, this paper examines how the various discursive formations on Hong Kong society and culture situate the political, conceptualize history and temporality, and envision its postcolonial future.
Bio
Chun Chun (Isha) Ting is Research Fellow at IIAS, and previously Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Ting received her PhD from the University of Chicago. She is currently working on her manuscript on the social movements and artistic activism in post-handover Hong Kong. Ting’s publications appear in positions: asia critique, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, among others.