1st Edition

Urban Humanities through Hong Kong Literature and Film The Materiality of Crisis

By Ann Tso Copyright 2027
156 Pages
by Routledge

156 Pages
by Routledge

Through a lens of literary urban studies, Ann Tso offers fascinating insight into perceptions of Hong Kong as a city in crisis in contemporary film, novels, and memoir. Through close readings of six pivotal works spanning three decades, Tso reveals how cultural creators encode dissent within the mundane. Divided into two parts, the first explores cannibalism within Hong Kong’s apartment plots... Read more

Acknowledgments

Excessive and Extensive: Introduction to the Citiness of a City in Crisis

1. The Deconstructed Pork Bun: Herman Yau’s The Untold Story (1993)

2. ‘Hoarding’ in the Hong Kong Apartment: Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood for Love (2000), Fruit Chan’s Dumplings (2004), and Nate Ki Tse Ka-kei’s Back Home (2023)

3. Resonant Lacunae in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016); Or, the Elliptical Ties between China’s Past and Hong Kong’s Present-Future

4. Dissonant Urban Sounds and Temporalities in Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (2022)

Conclusion: Towards an Elliptical Narrative of Global Urban Crises

Index

Biography

Ann Tso is English Instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is the author of The Literary Psychogeography of London: Otherworlds of Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair (2020).

‘Ann Tso’s new book provides an invaluable framework for understanding cities riven by conflicting histories and cultural identities, with a particular focus on Hong Kong. Developing concepts of ‘citiness’ and ‘crisis objects’, she illuminates how Hong Kong’s dissonant post-handover identity manifests in contemporary film and literature. This book provides not just an illuminating perspective on Hong Kong but also a new theoretical paradigm for narrating urban crisis.’

– Stephen Joyce, Associate Professor in Media, Communication, and Culture, Aarhus University