Between postcolonialities: Hong Kong’s postcolonial self-writing reconsidered

Abstract

Hong Kong people have been witnessing heated debates on their identities over the past decade. The reversion to China in 1997 was expected to bring a new sense of belonging to a nation and/or possible hybridization of the local, the global and the national to Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s identity crisis, however, is enduring despite these anticipations. The so-called “new Hong Kong” identity engineered by the government was more of a hindrance than a help. This essay endeavours to explore the elusiveness of the Hong Kong identity from the perspective of postcolonial theories. In the light of Vivek Chibber’s recent challenge of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s account of postcoloniality and the artifice of History, this paper re-examines the issue by reflecting on Gayatri Spival’s famous question “Can the subaltern speak?” As contended by Chibber, the non-Western world must be conceptualized, to the contrary of the arguments of subaltern studies, through the same analytical framework used to understand developments in the West. This paper argues that the formation of postcolonial Hong Kong identity “between colonizers” - to borrow the words of Rey Chow - has been caught in the paradox between two postcolonialities. As a postcolonial anomaly, Hong Kong would need to imagine a future in this particular context.