1st Edition

Hybrid Hong Kong

Edited By Kwok-bun Chan Copyright 2012
    10 Pages
    by Routledge

    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    Hybrid Hong Kong attempts to attract and excite the intellectual, cultural, economic and political elites as well as the intelligent laymen of Hong Kong - hopefully enough for them to take a closer look at their society - while engendering a public discourse on the city's identity, its past, present and future. Hong Kong is at its crossroads. With a colonial past and having been handed over, and back, to China in 1997, the city has since been going through a process of re-sinification and re-integration (not entirely wanted) into the Pearl River Delta region of mainland China, all of which have far-reaching consequences for identity politics, culture, loyalty and attachment, and everyday livelihood.

    The hybridity concept offers an in-between space, and time, to narrate, describe and make sense of the many layers of entanglement of cultural, anthropological, economic and political forces that impinge, impact, sometimes confuse, even disturb, the everyday lives of the Hongkongers who have decided to call the city home. The book probes a range of sites and locales of a Hongkonger's natural habitat, including film and television, ethnicity, popular music videos, gay identities, fashion, art, theatre, Cantopop electronic dance music, museum, visual arts, the Muslim youth, food and cuisine, and Chinese and western medicines. Based on ethnography, fieldwork and participant observation, Hybrid Hong Kong intends to display and explain hybridity as it is performed in the public as well as private spheres of city life.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Anthropology.

    1. Introduction: Hybridity and the Politics of Desertion Chan Kwok-bun and Chan Nin

    2. The Constitutive Rift: Hong Kong and its Politics of Hybridity Chan Nin and Chan Kwok-bun

    3. Home But Not Home: Four Vignettes of Return Migrants in Hong Kong Chan Wai-wan and Chan Kwok-bun

    4. Blowing in the China Wind: Engagements with Chineseness in Hong Kong’s Zhongguofeng Music Videos Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen De Kloet

    5. Brand Hong Kong: Asia’s World City as Method? Stephen Yiu-wai Chu

    6. Structural Hybridization in Film and Television Production in Hong Kong Joseph M. Chan and Anthony Y.-H. Fung

    7. Hybridization in the Visual Arts: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t Frank Vigneron

    8. A Museum of Hybridity: The History of the Display of Art in the Public Museum of Hong Kong, and Its Implications for Cultural Identities Eva Kit-Wah Man

    9. From "Made in Hong Kong" to "Designed in Hong Kong": Searching for an Identity in Fashion Wessie Ling

    10. Danny Yung In Search of Hybrid Matter and Mind: His Experimental Xiqu for Zuni Icosahedron Jessica Yeung

    11. Hybridity, Empowerment and Subversiveness in Cantopop Electronic Dance Music Matthew M. Chew

    12. Hybridization and the Emergence of "Gay" Identities in Hong Kong and in China Day Wong

    13. Traditionality and Hybridity: A Village Cuisine in Metropolitan Hong Kong Chan Kwok Shing

    14. Mix of Medicines Derrick Kit-Sing Au

    15. Everyday Hybridity & Hong Kong’s Muslim Youth Paul O'Connor

    Biography

    Chan Kwok-bun, Hong Kong Baptist University’s first Chair Professor of Sociology, is Founder and Chairman at Chan Institute of Social Studies (CISS) (www.ci-ss.org). Professor Chan teaches classical and contemporary social theory and advanced qualitative research methods at Sun Yat-sen University Business School, and University of Macao, China. He is Senior Research Consultant, Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School. He is an expert in migration, identities, hybridity, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, the family, and race and ethnic relations. Recent books published in the past three years include Online Dating As A Strategic Game (2013), Living Together in Hong Kong: Adaptation Dilemmas of Immigrant Professionals, Artists and Cultural Workers (2013), Art and Heart: Home in Children's Drawings (2013), Charismatic Leadership in Singapore (2012),The Chinese Face in Australia: Multi-generational Ethnicity among Australian-born Chinese (2012), and Hybridity: Promises and Limits (2011).