[
    {
        "id": 214788,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 203,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "168\n\nfollowing Foucault, raised such questions of the interlocking of forms of knowledge, with forms of power, and it is worth reflecting on this discursive power a little in the Hong Kong context, and the formation of 'post-colonial subjects' in Hong Kong.\n\nI cannot at all agree with Abbas' (1997) strange claim that the invention of the Hong Kong subject took place in a cultural 'space of disappearance' or 'disappearing space', nor with his remarks that Hong Kong had no pre-colonial history to speak of or was until recently a 'cultural desert', nor generally that Hong Kong occupies a unique position in the history of colonialism when we think of the range of differences and unique situations that colonialism has brought about. Nor does Chan Hoi-Man's deeply conservative critique of Hong Kong's 'lack of a unifying cultural foundation' or 'hegemonic foundation of high culture' work very well when one thinks (in Gramscian terms) of the alliance of hegemonic interests represented by British and (mainland) Chinese cultures (Chan 1994).\n12 Rozanna Lilley's (1998) argument that the 'muting of local identity' in Hong Kong in the past was achieved with reference to two master narratives, those of Chinese and European history, seems to me far more to the point. And it is precisely from these sorts of colonialist disjuncture that strong senses of local identity eventually emerge. Evans and Tam (1997) trace the history of the interest in the emergence of a particular Hong Kong sense of identity, from Baker (1984) to Wong Siu-lun (1986) and Lau and Kuan (1988). Guldin's pioneering work on ethnicity also stressed the significance of a 'Hong Kong' identity (Guldin 1977a; 1977b; cf. Guldin 1997). Gary Hamilton (1999) emphasises the transition of the people of Hong Kong from temporary migrants from south China to 'Hong Kongers', people who identify deeply with the locale and its urbane outlook'. Graham Johnson (1997) similarly notes a ‘sense of Hong Kong identity that was not apparent until the 1970s', and Gordon Mathews (2000) also remarks the emergence of a 'sense of Hongkongese as an autonomous cultural identity' from the post-war generation, emphasising (1997) that Hong Kong people are 'not chameleons' who can easily adopt or transmute their senses of cultural identity.\n13 In this formation of a specific local identity, however much it may be confined to a particular generation or sector of the population, and however much it may now be challenged by the future political status of Hong Kong, Hong Kong's role in a global",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214790,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 205,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "170\n\nplace, with a hearty lack of nostalgic longings for ancestral roots - yet the sentimental or strategic nostalgia of overseas Chinese for their ancestral homes in China has also been well documented and described.1\n\nNostalgia is of course now commodified, fragmented and eclectic, as befits a late capitalist era in which global capital determines shifting allocations of labour. Nostalgia, and pastiche of the past, is almost commonplace, and through what was called the 'post-modern' eclectically mixes emblems of diverse eras of the past to provoke a momentary pang. The irony of Flagstaff House's transformation from a military site to a tea museum, noted by Abbas (1997), is a good example of this post-modern bricolage of meanings and historical ironies typified by Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (Harvey 1989), which we can find too in the toothless attendants and bright paints of restored Colonial Williamsburg (Lowenthal 1985), or the imaginary nostalgia of Disneyland disguising the unreality of America itself (Baudrillard 1994). But here I should like to draw attention to the importance of nostalgia as, if you like, a strategic resource for knitting together communities which have become dispersed and fragmented.\n\nWhile nostalgia adopts a temporal form (nostalgia for the past), it essentially implies the sense of belonging to a place (nostalgia for a place), as in its etymological roots. Can there be nostalgia for a taste, a face, an experience of abandon, a vanished emotion or capacity? Of course there can, but these experiences are all associated with a particular locus, a particular time and place (in the past). That place may never have existed, as writers from Lowenthal and Lovell to Mitchell remark, or not have existed for those who pine for it; the remembered, longed-for experience may be purely fictive and imaginative. Then again, it may have been very much a reality the loss of which is regretted; it was a real, living community we mourn the passage of. In any case, through the power of memory and recollection, that experience, that community, that place, can hardly be recollected exactly as it was, so that there is an inevitably imaginative, fictive quality to the faculty or power of nostalgia.\n\nIn one sense, it may not matter very much whether the lost object was, or was not, a reality, since that reality will have been transformed through the nostalgic recollection of it. Yet, in another sense, it does matter that not all nostalgia is necessarily imaginary; that real separations, real partings, may be what are being mourned.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214801,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 216,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "181\n\nREFERENCES\n\nAbbas, M Akbar 1997 Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press.\n\nAgamben, Giorgio 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford. Stanford University Press.\n\nAnderson, Benedict 1994 'Exodus' Critical Inquiry 20.2. 314-27 Winter\n\n1983 (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London. Verso Editions.\n\nBahloul, J 1996 The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962. Cambridge and New York. Cambridge University Press.\n\nBaker, Hugh 1984 'Life in the Cities: the Emergence of Hong Kong Man'. The China Quarterly (467-79).\n\nBaudelaire, Charles 1863 (1981) Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.\n\nBaudrillard, Jean 1994 Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan.\n\nBell, Daniel 1976 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York. Basic Books.\n\nCampbell, Colin 1987 The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford and Cambridge (Mass). Basil Blackwell.\n\nChambers, Iain 1994 Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London, Routledge.\n\nChan Hoi-man 1994 'Culture and Identity' in The Other Hong Kong, ed. P. Choi and L.S. Ho. Hong Kong. The Chinese University of Hong Kong.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214810,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 225,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": ".... \n\n190 \n\nby unnatural ones, namely nations and states', an argument against the discourse of the authentic/inauthentic which raises some of the problems of real/virtual communities dealt with here in Conclusion. \n\n6 Baudelaire (1863) in Harvey (1989). \n\n7 \n\n8 \n\nAs Lowenthal (1985) noted of the whole industrial era, \"The great changes of the time...made nostalgia pervasive. By the turn of the century all Britain seemed bent on nostalgic quest'. \n\nCf. Evans and Tam (1997) on the expatriate interest in 'tradition' in Hong Kong. \n\nFor a detailed assessment of the works of some of these local scholars, see Law (1998). \n\nIt is not only the colonialist 'who becomes defender of the native style', as Fanon had it, but to some extent the colonial subject and the post-colonial. For a very general overview of Chinese globalisation, see Ong (1999). \n\nAbbas (1997) confuses the discussion of Hong Kong as a place with its people, and talks of the 'cult of the ephemeral' as if modernity had only happened in Hong Kong. This is poetry (and somewhat hysterical poetry), not analysis. It is easy to say that 'the difficulty with locality in Hong Kong is locating it', or to emphasise as Siu (1999; cf.1996) does that 'the Hong Kong identity is attached to a territory without clear boundaries', or to emphasise as Wong Siu-Lun (1999) does the skilled manipulation of multiple identities by migrants from the south China coast. But Wong emphasises that these identities are also ‘effective shields to deflect state domination', while Siu (1999) speaks of ‘a distinct Hong Kong ethos' which is unique and has emerged from a particular history; 'Hong Kong was not a barren rock when the British came'. \n\n12 Chan (1994) starts from an outmoded notion of culture which he thinks is anthropological'. He then finds it difficult to understand how Hong Kong can have contradictory or diverse cultural values. \n\n13. The notion of 'Chinese' here, though, would repay further examination. Is it zhongguoren which is meant (citizens of China), or tongren, the conventional term for the southern Chinese? \n\n14 Dirlik (1994) too, seeing the post-colonial as a critique of the ideology of global \n\nPage 225\n\nPage 226",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214873,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 288,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "257\n\nAs I reported to Mr. (later Sir Ronald) Holmes, the villagers had changed their minds about letting the work proceed \"a further three times\" in the four days that had elapsed since my first visit to the village to deal with the difficulty. Enquiring into the reason for the renewed stoppage of work, I was told by the village representative and elders that the deities in the two local temples had had to be consulted, and that the propitious day for resuming work would be a day or two later.\n\nFrustration and annoyance are writ large in my report on these events:\n\nI replied that I certainly hoped that this would be the case since I was not possessed of second sight sufficient to enable me to know what they had not said to me on my first visit [about the need to consult the deities].\n\nNor could I be expected to understand their frequent changes of mind during the past two weeks when they would say one thing to Mr. Abbas [the land bailiff], quite another to the contractor and the Roads Engineers when they wished to resume work, and yet another to myself; not once but several times all round.\n\nMasters indeed in the art of creating confusion and uncertainty!\n\nOn this visit, it had soon appeared that the villagers had thought up extra reasons for causing us delays. On our way to Tong Fuk, passing by the South Lantau Rural Committee office at Pui O, we had been given letters from the Village Representatives of Tong Fuk and the adjoining village of Shui Hau, making some additional points in the ongoing dialogue with the District Office. These concerned what I described as \"an entirely new series of complaints\" about the crop compensation to be paid in connection with the engineering works, the villagers professing themselves worried about the compensation schedules and about rates of compensation:\n\n... \"All this, mark you,\" [as I told the Commissioner], “though in their large-scale airing of perplexities on the Monday not one word of these matters had been breathed, saving only their concern about [the date of] payment.\"",
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