Oceanic Hong Kong?

Abstract

Within an archipelago of over 260 islands, Hong Kong offers a compelling contrast of two distinct views of islandness, one embodied in Hong Kong Island, historically the urban core and the political and business center of the SAR, the other in the Islands District, the largest of the SAR’s eighteen districts in terms of area yet home to just 2% of its population. Although it is readily perceived as a contrast between city and island, the former displacing the latter, I am interested in the way the two manifestations of the island deconstruct this opposition, allowing us to analyze shifting meanings of islandness (and urban space) that resist the separation of the metaphorical from the literal and destabilize claims to priority in ways that bear on current confrontations and arguments over Hong Kong’s development. I will trace the formation of these two strands of meaning, based on ‘island logic’ and ‘island life’ respectively, and sketch their geographical, economic, social and political interaction, with particular interest in the way these interactions remove and relocate the boundaries between land and sea. I will argue that these cultural formations of islandness connect Hong Kong to distinct and overlapping oceanic histories and imaginaries and that recognition of these connections might be relevant to Hong Kongers’ efforts to overcome insularity and to plot their course as (part of) a global city in relation to mainland China and the world.