City of the Anthropocene Surreal

Abstract This article examines Hong Kongese writers Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse's cowritten A Dictionary of Twin Cities (雙城辭典) (2012) in relation to the question of urbanity in the Anthropocene era. While much attention is paid to anglophone literature about ecological crises, discussions of how East Asian writings of the city articulate the Anthropocene in local Asian contexts remain inadequate. Focusing on urban space, sociality, and affect, this article shows that Dictionary offers surreal cityscapes that speak to specific dimensions of urban life in Hong Kong and weird nature-cultural entanglements symptomatic of the Anthropocene. The article proposes an ecocritical reading of Dictionary, arguing that it reimagines Hong Kong as a city of the Anthropocene surreal. This demonstrates a crucial connection between Anthropocene aesthetics and surrealism, reorients our attention to the experiential and imaginary dimensions of urbanity, and helps us rethink the efficacies of literature in our time.