[
    {
        "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",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215498,
        "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-2001",
        "page_number": 275,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "224\n\nIs that they're not the sort\n\nTo ever be thought of as frantic.\n\n13 Diana and Charles\n\nThis group of ours includes all manner\n\nOf people. There's one who's a spanner.\n\nThere's no end of ditches\n\nHe's spanned with his bridges.\n\nHis wife's quite nice too - that's Diana.\n\n15 Giovanna\n\nC'è anche una bella signora\n\nDa Padova in Italia, allora.\n\nShe 'as a bag-a, più grande.\n\nShe say: 'Is a-very ‘andy,\n\nWhenever I go on a tour-a.'\n\n17 Jenny\n\nShopping, and more shopping yet.\n\nShe'll be at it tomorrow, I'll bet.\n\nWith her hats and her scarves\n\nShe don't do things by halves.\n\nBut remember, it's a very small jet.\n\n19 Christopher\n\nA classical scholar, a star,\n\nHe's been high and low, near and far.\n\nHe's come quite a journey, This pukka attorney.\n\nHe'd go anywhere if called to the bar.\n\n21 Brian\n\nOn account of her glasses,\n\nBut what does she say? 'No thank 'ee.'\n\n14 Alan\n\nThere is one other engineer,\n\nFrom whom every day you will hear:\n\n'It's better by far\n\nWith the KCR.'\n\nBut not in Bhutan, I fear.\n\n16 Helen and Ian\n\nAustralia has regulations.\n\nIt's one of those fussier nations.\n\nBut he wants to take back\n\nThe tail end of a yak.\n\nSays she: \"This will strain our relations.\"\n\n18 Rupert\n\nThere is one geographical gent\n\nWho has quite a musical bent.\n\nHe gets his horn off the shelf\n\nAnd plays with himself.\n\nNO - BY himself, that's what I meant.\n\n20 Felicity\n\nThe style of this lady is simplicity.\n\nSo calm, yet so much tenacity.\n\nShe has to be so.\n\nIt's her husband, y'know You all know her name - it's Felicity!\n\n22 Robert\n\nI've been up\n\nI didn't have time to do me.\n\nhalf the night, y'see.\n\nThere is one chap who's made our lives hell,\n\nFor he's constantly ringing his bell.\n\nBut his job's been quite tough\n\nWith a group that's so rough.\n\nNapoleon - we all think you're swell!\n\nBut I suppose if I must\n\nI could... maybe... just.\n\nLeave it with me a while and we'll see.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]