Between Colonizers: Hong Kong's Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s

Abstract

Most debates on postcolonial politics center on issues that are by now familiar to those working in cultural studies. There are, first, the disputes and conflicts concerning the ownership of particular geographical areas, an ownership whose ramifications go beyond geography to include political representation as well as sovereignty over ethnic and cultural history. Though these “postcolonial” disputes and conflicts date back to the days of territorial colonialism, they remain the reality of daily life in places like South Africa, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Second, there are the debates around reclaiming native cultural traditions that were systematically distorted by the colonial powers in the process of exploitation. In the case of India, for instance, historians argue for the need to wrest India’s past from colonialist historiography—that is, from the ways in which India was ideologically as well as economically and territorially dominated by the British. In other words, even though India has been territorially independent since 1947, the Indian people’s “postcolonial” struggle against British colonialism remains an urgent cultural task. Third, there is the question of neocolonialism in countries that were once European colonies and that, after national independence, have been targeted for aggression and exploitation by the United States during its period of global power. We think here especially of its “client states” in Central and Latin America, and the Middle East.

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