Inroduction

This dissertation scrutinizes the works on filmmaker Fruit Chan and photographer Michael Wolf that foreground the back streets and alleys in Hong Kong.

Employing neo-Marxist, spatial and vital materialist theories, this study seeks to identify how they use the symbolic backdrop of alleyways to reveal and complicate the economic discourse underpinning the postcolonial construction of Hong Kong's cultural and political reality.

To articulate such postcoloniality, Chan and Wolf allegorise the all-encompassing capitalist colonisation of everyday life in Hong Kong amidst the city's postcolonial search of its identity and consciousness. Despite their different art forms, they both home in on the subalterns and matters inhabiting the fringes and chasms of the glitzy cityscape -- the alleyways of Hong Kong.

Despite their [Chan and Wolf] different art forms, they both home in on the subalterns and matters inhabiting the fringes and chasms of the glitzy cityscape -- the alleyways of Hong Kong.

LIN Ting Ting, Jacky: Posted on Facebook and IG on Jan 10, 2022

Highlights

• Fruit Chan's Durian Durian follows the diasporic experience of Peking Opera aspirant-turned-prostitute Yan.
• Streetwalkers are the apparent symbolism of both patriarchal and capitalist inscription and exploitation of the human body.
• Wimal Dissanayake delineates in Marxist terms, 'prostitutes do not create objects for sale but are themselves up for sale.' Peddling not just the human body, prostitutes put their reputation and dignity in the marketplace 'through being subject to the instrumentalities of commodification.'

Highlights

• Just as local researcher Esther Cheung underscores the importance of 'small narratives of neglected lives', or petits récits in cultural productions, there are phenomenal cultural values to unearth qualities of the quotidian for critical commentary.
• Hong Kong film scholar Winnie Yee also cautions the 'dominant economic discourse of capitalism has reduced Hong Kong to a mere product of financial systems and structures, and deprived it of the possibility of enchantment.'

Highlights

• To counter that, Yee says that such petits récits are sine qua non in constructing the 'historical bricolage of Hong Kong' by creatively transforming and defamiliarising the ephemeral everyday space.
• Based on that, the foregrounding of alley-dwellers and matters in Informal Solutions, Little Cheung and Durian Durian correspond fittingly to what she calls, 'the city... conceived as a spatial representaion, and individual habitats [as] sites of creative potential' (408).

Experience at MALCS

MALCS has offered me the opportunity to amp up the research toolkits to critically historicize, theorize and philosophize the symbolic nuances and complexities behind the ever-evolving forms of cultural phenomena and industries.

Apart from the thoughtfully structured curriculum, I am very thankful to have been under the tutelage of professors who not only made important contributions to their fields, but are also willing to go above and beyond in helping us with our learning and research work every step of the way.

If you are intellectually curious in the field of literary, film and cultural studies, and would like to tap into a comminity of like-minded individuals, I encourage you to check out this master's programme - you might discover much more of what it has to offer.