Hong Kong, China and the New Feelings Between Them: the Sentimental Politics of the Great Prosperity Dream

Professor Tsung-yi Michelle Huang, Department of Geography, National Taiwan University

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Abstract

This talk will introduce Professor Tsung-yi Michelle Huang's new book Happiness and Distress in China and Hong Kong: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in Developmentalism (Chinese)（《中港新感覺：發展夢裡的情感政治》）(2020). Across the time span of early 2000 to 2015, and through the analytic frame of cultural politics and structure of feelings, the book investigates how new Sino-Hong Kong-Taiwan development narratives form in urban spaces, with special focus on how such processes of formation help shape emerging social subjects. The new development narrative makes localization its demand, anti-China sentiment its internal structure, and sentimental politics its reliance. Through analyzing cultural texts and discourses, this book attempts to construct the possibility of translocal perspectives, so as to overcome the limitation and blind spots of perspectives enclosed within national or local bound.

In the second part of the talk, Professor Huang will talk about what inspired her to write the book.

About the speaker

Tsung-yi Michelle Huang is currently a Professor of Geography at National Taiwan University. Her works on East Asian urban cultures have been published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video; Journal of Narrative Theory; positions: east asia cultures critique, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies , among others. She is the author of Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai (2004), Articulating New Cultural Identities: Self-Writing of East Asian Global City-Regions (Chinese) (2008), and Happiness and Distress in China and Hong Kong: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in Developmentalism (Chinese) (2020).

Registration

This webinar will take place online via Zoom. Click here to register .

Chair: Professor Steve Tsang (Director, SOAS China Institute)

Organiser: SOAS China Institute

Contact email: sci@soas.ac.uk