Description - Staging Hong Kong by Rozanna Lilley
This book examines contemporary cultural production in Hong Kong and its links to representations of 'Hong Kong identity'. The author argues that issues of local identity are wrapped up in a politics of culture whose result is to strengthen indigenist ideologies. These indigenist ideologies are viewed as part of an agonising process undertaken by local people to renegotiate 'Chineseness' in the light of the Mainland's resumption of sovereignty over the territory in 1997. The book examines the political forces shaping discourses about identity in Hong Kong and the ways in which identity is constituted within representation as part of an ongoing effort to dramatise an increasingly uncertain present. Local cultural products demonstrate the radical possibilities for the construction of novel identities by means of a hybridizing tendency which critically, and often ironically, appropriates elements from dominant cultures. This hybridizing tendency is investigated in film and the performing arts, with particular stress on the performance work of Zuni Icosahedron.
This group has been singled out both for the ways in which they resist the stranglehold exerted by hegemonic versions of 'Chinese' and 'Western' tradition in Hong Kong and for their refusals of essentialization as they play upon the fundamental instability of being, or becoming, Hongkongese. The importance of these refusals is traced to the near presence of a Communist orthodoxy which forces representation into a standardised mode in the name of Revolution and the continuing influence of a British administration whose dominant cultural norms were anxiously monolithic.
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