Drifting bodies, monstrous forms, cosmic meanings: a new materialist geography of Hong Kong’s sandy grounds

Of the many environmental and ecological crises engulfing human societies, one of the less remarked upon is a global sand crisis. This article asks how thinking with sand’s liveliness, dynamism, and agency might serve as an imaginative exercise in developing new ecological habits and sensibilities. It asks whether thinking with sand’s characteristic forms of drift and movement might help in thinking and writing dynamic eco-social rhythms through a new materialist lens. The chapter develops a style that thinks through and as drift. Drawing on Bennett’s retheorization of material agency via the ‘middle voice’, I argue that drift offers a distinctive way of thinking and writing in the middle voice. The chapter then starts to flow in drifts of granular particles, influenced by the material agencies of sand and its distinctive styles of granular flow, drawing on Benjamin’s and Caillois’ evocation of a mimetic faculty as a way of becoming non-human that opens up a world of ‘cosmic meaning’. Empirically, the chapter works through archival records of Hong Kong’s endlessly-repeating catastrophe of colonial sand extraction and environmental degradation, as well as accounts of the 2019 ‘Water Revolution’.