[
    {
        "id": 214789,
        "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": 204,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "169\n\neconomy and the experience of emigration and global diaspora have surely been crucial (cf. Wang Gungwu 1994).\n\n\"The post-colonial is about the diasporic consciousness\", complains Friedman (1999), defining it as a 'discourse of hybridity' concerned with a 'conscious critique of the colonial in all its forms, from the economic to the cultural'.\" And it is in this context that I should like to raise the question of nostalgia and its power to overcome barriers of time and space. Jon Mitchell, a former colleague of mine in Edinburgh, has described how a displaced urban Maltese community made use of nostalgia as a 'strategic resource' to reconstruct through imaginary means a vanished community and a sense of community which had been inevitably destroyed (Mitchell 1998), and similar work has taken place for the Algerian-Jewish community in France.1 More detailed work by Paerregord (1997) on migrants returning to their native village in the Peruvian Andes contrasts nostalgic images with other kinds of image which are held by different groups of migrants and which affect life back in the village in different ways.\n\nNostalgia implies the displacement from an origin, and in an age of the flexible accumulation of capital (Harvey 1989) and globalised flows of people, commodities and signs (Lash and Urry 1994) in which local contexts have become increasingly problematised as imaginary constructs, the emotion of nostalgia provides perhaps the most important and appropriate vehicle for the sentimental articulation of links between the global and the local, the present and the past. As the direct corollary to the idealism of utopianism, the idealism of nostalgia adopts a temporal structure, expressing a dissatisfaction, an unease or disenchantment with the present, together with a yearning for an imagined, or recollected, what-went-before.\n\nLowenthal (1985) reminds us that nostalgia (like melancholy and consumption) was for a long time thought of as a particular disease. In the seventeenth century nostalgia was common among travellers far from their native homes, who pined and sighed for their remembered pasts, in a kind of anomie which has probably always had a particular association with travelling, and with the Voyage which was to become institutionalised through the European Grand Tour pioneered by the Romantics. Nosos (return to native land) with algia (suffering). Hong Kong has often enough been characterised as a forward-looking\n\n16\n\n17",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214983,
        "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-2000",
        "page_number": 79,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "35\n\nOn the British side, other nationalities were considered for recruitment for use in Labour Corps, including Egyptians (thought to be reliable), Indians (considered to be lazy and would be affected by the climate), Maltese (whom Kitchener thought bad workers), as well as conscientious objectors, but were deemed for various reasons to be unsuitable. There were Labour Corps serving in France from Egypt, Fiji, India, Malta, Mauritius, Seychelles, the British West Indies as well as a Native Labour Corps from South Africa.\n\nFollowing protracted negotiations between Beijing, the British Government and the War Office, the first contingent of 1078 coolies, under six officer candidates, one doctor and one regular Army captain, left Weihai Wei on 18th January 1917, three months after recruitment commenced.\n\nThe (British Army) Labour Corps was formed in April 1917 from various ASC, RE and infantry labour units which had come into existence from the early days of the war to meet the need for unskilled labour in large numbers for handling stores, constructing rear lines of defence, making and repairing roads, etc.\n\nAt the same time a Directorate of Labour was formed at GHQ, BEF, to take over the control, administration and allocation of all labour. Companies belonging to the Chinese or similar Labour Corps were included but not RE technical units.\n\nChinese were recruited both directly and through the Wei-min and other recruiting companies while Chinese-speaking British personnel for officers were contacted directly through the British Legation in Peking. Later, advertisements were placed in newspapers throughout the British Empire seeking Chinese-speaking Europeans to enlist as officers and NCOs in the CLC.\n\nThe Chinese, invariably from the “up-country” farming class, were mainly recruited from the provinces of Shandong and Zhili [Chihli in the former romanisation, and the metropolitan area covering much of present-day Hubei province]. They were considered physically strong and were used to adverse weather conditions. Others also came from the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, Jiangsu, Hubei, Hunan, Anhui and even as far as Gansu. This was ascertained from the graves of those visited.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    }
]