Locating Anglophone Writing in Sinophone Hong Kong

Abstract

While there is no shortage of touristic or exoticizing fiction set in Hong Kong, English-language creative writing that attends to Hong Kong as place – its people, history, culture - remains largely invisible to a global readership. “Invisibility” is the point of departure toward locating anglophone literary writing in Hong Kong from the 20th to the 21st centuries. The paper will also reference other academically established starting points such as literary postcolonialism and world anglophone literature. Following through the logic of these beginnings leads, in turn, to the related issue of the “impossibility” of anglophone Hong Kong literature. This paper is grounded in a consistent point of reference to recent debates in Chinese about how (and how not) to tell the story of Hong Kong as colony and postcolony in order to articulate a framework for the description and explanation of the languages and narratives of anglophone Hong Kong literature. Through discussion of selected texts, this paper is an inquiry into the forms of languaging that enable anglophone Hong Kong literature’s legibility as both local and global.