Hong Kong, despite its increased prominence in world news in recent years, has an unfair reputation as being a cultural desert, a reputation that continues to dog the city. Hong Kong culture, especially literature, has been overlooked. While Hong Kong in the views of global capital is considered as a resource to be extracted, literature and culture are clearly less fungible and readily lucrative than finance. Neil Lazarus remarks, as quoted in Lucas Klein’s abstract, that “literary scholars working in the field [postcolonial studies] have tended to write with reference to a woefully restricted and attenuated corpus of works” (424). “We should not be particularly surprised,” therefore, “...—though we might still find it deplorable—that writers like ... [Hong Kong writer] Xi Xi [西西] remain pretty much completely unknown to a majority of scholars in postcolonial literary studies” (428).

The papers in this panel, making use of the ideas of code-switching and heteroglossia—at times literally (in a linguistic sense), at times metaphorically—examine literary texts and output from Hong Kong that speak to the city’s creative energy that belies the notion of it being a “cultural desert”. The panel opens with Chris Song’s “Heteroglossic Poetry of 1930s Hong Kong: Poetic Influences and Ideological Conflicts”, which draws attention to a Chinese-English bilingual hybridity in the poetry of pre-handover Hong Kong. This poetry portrays urban landscapes and working class anxieties. It also attests to the enduring practice of borrowing inspiration from other languages and movements. In this case, the poetic style of the loose Xiandai pai 現代派 (modernist school) in the early 1930s Shanghai and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s futurist poetry. The second paper in this panel is Lucas Klein’s “Visual and Verbal Heteroglossia in Xi Xi’s Marvels of a Floating City”. Focusing on the simultaneous literary and visual-art readings of Xi Xi’s text, Klein argues the dual presentation of text (by Xi Xi) and image (by Magritte) functions as an analogue to the negotiation by the UK and the PRC over the future of Hong Kong.

Michael Tsang’s conceptual paper “Beyond Ornamental: Code-mixing and Polyphonic Politics in Post-Handover Hong Kong Anglophone Writing” attempts to widen the scope of understanding different types of mixing (including the use of ‘non-language’) and considers code-mixing as the very embodiment of Hong Kong’s polyphonic politics, instead of merely the plurality of voices. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho’s “Cantonese and Creative Resistance in Hong Kong Literature in Translation” concludes the panel and homes in on English-language texts of different genres translated from the Chinese which explicitly emphasise Cantonese elements or include Cantonese expressions as an integral part of the narrative. Even in English, they demonstrate that Cantonese need not be supplanted by the dominant strain of Chinese, but rather it can get a new lease of life in an altogether different linguistic environment. Issues discussed include authenticity, translation, politics, knowledge production and publication.

Each presentation will be between 13 minutes. There will be a Q&A session afterwards.