Alienation in the fiction of Hon Lai-chu : the politics of space

Abstract

This dissertation peruses the question of alienation through two short stories by the local writer Hon Lai-chu. The first objective is to delineate the exact form and content that the phenomenon of alienation assumes, its particularity in specific spatio-temporal settings, and the necessary relation of it to space and people within the contexts. At the centre of my materialist analysis lies a deprivation of what I call the right to space, and concomitant resistance by the narrators. The clarification of the specificity of alienation helps an understanding of it in and beyond any (con) text: It is but one form of an exploitative logic, of man imposed on man. Thus the urgent task now is as much to trace the various major ramifications of human exploitation, in different cultures across different periods, through which the nature of human condition can be gauged, as to pave a way to articulation of localisms instead of Localism, with respect to the situation of Hong Kong. The second objective so registers a refusal of a reductive and totalizing rubric of describing our city. I instead seek to ascribe the validity of this description to the average person. It is through their actions and voices in everyday life that they regain, however briefly, the right to space, and therewith constitute personal resistance which I give the name localisms.