Contemplating Land: An Eco-critique of Three Hong Kong Documentaries

Abstract

In The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011), Timothy Clark argues that “ecologically, national borders have always been unreal” (132). One should start to cultivate ecocritical thinking beyond geographical, national, and cultural boundaries. In what ways does eco-cosmopolitanism enable us to cultivate ecocritical thinking that addresses environmental issues in various scales (local, national, transnational, global), while resisting the risk of reproducing the deep ecological cliché that everything on earth is simply connected as a global unity? By focusing on three Hong Kong documentaries, The Way of Paddy (2013), Open Road after Harvest (2015) and Kong Rice (2015) – which contemplate upon Hong Kong’s agricultural industry, rural-urban conflicts in the name of development, and the material significance and symbolic meaning of “leisure farming”, this paper explores the ideological conflicts between place attachment and eco-cosmopolitanism tendencies, rural and urban, individual and government, intellectual and the masses. To offer a post-urban perspective, this paper explores whether the phenomenon of “leisure farming” hints at a possibility of going beyond the boundary set between the rural and the urban? To phrase it in another way, would the “rural” turn in Hong Kong hints at a shift from urban to rural, and see rural not as a metaphoric or social construct but instead focus on soil’s material agency as a matter that “produce (helpful, harmful) effects in human and other bodies.“ (Bennett, 2010: xii).