Counterspace of Nostalgia: British and Hong Kong Literature in the 1980s and 90s

Hong Kong and Britain have usually been contextualized in terms of binary relationships such as former colony/colonizer, slave/master, and periphery/center in political, social and literary discourses. However, this dissertation moves beyond such reductive portrayals and reconsiders these two places against one another by reviewing their nostalgic cultural productions in the 1980s and 90s as a response to their respective situations: Hong Kong’s political and social uncertainty due to the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997 and Britain’s political and economic decline since the Suez Crisis in the 1950s. Specifically, this dissertation weighs Hong Kong and Britain against each other by analyzing four novels written and published during the same time period: Xi Xi’s My City: A Hong Kong Story (1993), Kai-cheung Dung’s Atlas: An Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and Julian Barnes’ England, England (1996). The purpose of this comparison is to evaluate how these authors interpret Hong Kong and British subjectivities constructed in the very process of negotiating the forces of colonialism, capitalism, patriotism, and nationalism. These texts are usually analyzed in terms of historical-political perspectives without much reference to the conceptions of lived space in time. Therefore, this dissertation adopts Edward Soja’s Thirdspace as an investigatory tool in concert with Svetlana Boym’s notions of Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia as key concepts to analyze the aforementioned authors’ creative uses and imaginative reconfigurations of nostalgic space and offers a socio-historical-spatial reconsideration of the four texts. I argue that these narratives of nostalgic space of home function as a mode of existence in British and Hong Kong literary discourses of the 1980s and 90s. Specifically, in examining how these nostalgic narratives serve as a coping mechanism, I theorize Hong Kong’s mode of existence as a floating status, a product of its colonial history, and Britain’s as a backward glance, a symbolically productive dimension of its imperial history.