Dr. Chao Long4
4Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
The turbulent social context in Hong Kong over the last decade has time and again directed people’s attention to the city’s increasingly fraught relationship with mainland China. What remains deeply problematic at its core is arguably the unsorted relationship between the localism in Hong Kong, Chinese nationalism and Western imperialism borne out of colonialism. In light of this, this paper argues for an understanding of how local literary production can generate a decolonizing impetus that will hopefully inspire an alternative approach to matters of Hong Kong’s coloniality and its connection to the mainland. This is done by looking into local writer Dung Kai-cheung’s 2005 novel Works and Creation: Vivid and Lifelike, in which Dung interrogates how the knowledge of self is historically created within networks of power. My analysis focuses on how Dung purposefully constructs a way of writing history revolving around thirteen modern artifacts that collectively have helped to shape generations’ identity in the city. Such a way of remembering the past, as told through the narrator’s single point of view, thus draws attention not only to the deficiencies of existing historical discourse but also to the discursive nature of what is often considered as a dialogical connection between the past and the present. Despite written at the beginning years of the 21st Century, Works proves to be an insightful source, as this paper ultimately tries to demonstrate, to turn to in the long run of Hong Kong’s continuous decolonizing effort.
Biography
Long Chao obtained his Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore in 2019. His doctoral thesis studies Hong Kong fiction under the framework of Sinophone studies in which he looks at Chinese- and English-language fictional works written by local writers through a comparative lens. He is currently taking up a post-doctoral position in the School of English Studies at Shanghai International Studies University. His post-doctoral research project involves a further exploration of the theoretical vitality of Sinophonicity, especially centering on the comparative studies of Shanghai and Hong Kong literature.