Abstract

This chapter uses Hong Kong director Fruit Chan's city film Little Cheung as a case study in order to tease out specific aspects of the postcolonial narrative of the global city. The central argument is that in the global city, the ‘localness’ in the postcolonial discourse can never be taken for granted but must be realized as a kind of ‘construction’. As seen in the film, one of the formative logics of the postcolonial discourse is the naturalization of the global: when urban space replaces rural landscape as the site to anchor one's local consciousness, the spatial geographies of global cities have to be erased or rendered unseen. Therefore, in the film the population flow in the global city becomes naturalized, and another salient sign of the global city – the monumental buildings – is represented as local landmarks rather than a symbol of global capital. My analysis of Little Cheung intends to foreground the dilemma that East-Asian cities face. On the one hand, to represent the subalterns, postcolonial narratives have to be written, and only in that way can the ‘local’ be recognized. Chan's representation of back streets and alleyways as the central setting of the film is clear evidence of this point. Without such narratives, the subalterns of East-Asian cities will remain the invisible other, marginalized in the grand narrative of contemporary globalization. On the other hand, as seen in Hong Kong's case, to construct an ‘authentic’ local, the first task to tackle in the postcolonial writing is the spatial characteristics of global cities. If the postcolonial writing of the ‘local’ erases the global to such an extent that the representation of the local turns into a de-territorialized myth, the postcolonial narrative, which originally is meant to speak for the local, might at the same time unconsciously facilitate the operation of global metropolises, and hence become an ideological instrument undetected by city-users. Hong Kong and its (post)coloniality

Hong Kong and its (post)coloniality