Revisiting Hong Kong: Fruit Chan's 'Little Cheung'
Series/Report No.
Aspects of Urbanization in China Shanghai Hong Kong Guangzhou
Part Of
Aspects of Urbanization in China Shanghai Hong Kong Guangzhou
ISBN
[9789089643988, 9781040779323]
Date Issued
2025-10-01
Author(s)
Abstract
This chapter uses Hong Kong director Fruit Chan's city film Little Cheung as a case study in order to tease out specific aspects of the postcolonial narrative of the global city. The central argument is that in the global city, the 'localness' in the postcolonial dis- course can never be taken for granted but must be realized as a kind of 'construction'. As seen in the film, one of the formative logics of the postcolonial discourse is the naturalization of the global: when urban space replaces rural landscape as the site to anchor one's local consciousness, the spatial geographies of glo- bal cities have to be erased or rendered unseen. Therefore, in the film the population flow in the global city becomes naturalized, and another salient sign of the global city - the monumental buildings - is represented as local landmarks rather than a sym- bol of global capital. My analysis of Little Cheung intends to fore- ground the dilemma that East-Asian cities face. On the one hand, to represent the subalterns, postcolonial narratives have to be written, and only in that way can the 'local' be recognized. Chan's representation of back streets and alleyways as the central setting of the film is clear evidence of this point. Without such narratives, the subalterns of East-Asian cities will remain the invisible other, marginalized in the grand narrative of contemporary globalization. On the other hand, as seen in Hong Kong's case, to construct an 'authentic' local, the first task to tackle in the postcolonial writing is the spatial characteristics of global cities. If the postcolonial writing of the 'local' erases the global to such an extent that the representation of the local turns into a de-territorialized myth, the postcolonial narrative, which originally is meant to speak for the local, might at the same time unconsciously facilitate the opera- tion of global metropolises, and hence become an ideological instrument undetected by city-users.
Subjects
Operations research
Case-studies
Global capitals
Global cities
Globalisation
Hong-kong
Monumental buildings
Population flow
Rural landscapes
Spatial characteristics
Urban spaces
Urban growth
Publisher
O
Type
book part