CLIT2065: Hong Kong culture: Representations of Identity in Literature and Film (Spring 2024)

6 Credits | Dr. Alvin WONG

This course aims primarily to examine the transformation of identity in Hong Kong through the analysis of the tropes of crisis, home, and “border-crossing” in contemporary Hong Kong literary and filmic texts. We shall explore how various crucial moments of transition in Hong Kong history have produced identity crises in the people of Hong Kong. Some of these intriguing moments include the communist takeover in 1949, the 1997 handover, as well as more recently the SARS outbreak and the urban redevelopment debates. We will discuss critically the relation between nation and home, self and other, the individual and the collective, memory and forgetting so as to critique the cultural problems bound up in a space of flows called “Hong Kong.”

Assessment: 100% coursework.