Cravings for ghosts : temporal redemption and Hong Kong cultural hauntings

Abstract

Beyond the common expectations of fear, surprise and awe, hauntings in Hong Kong are endowed with the imaginary strength to redeem temporalities that have long been distorted or truncated in between colonialism and nationalization. Ghosts are the most faithful teller of time for Hong Kong in comparison with the calendars implemented by the colonists and the nationalists. In other words, the cravings for ghosts in Hong Kong manifest how the cultural diversity and imaginative flexibility of the city are best sustained in the form of national ambiguity – a cultural and political existence that is situated beyond coloniality and nationality. In the same vein, to explore the ghostly imaginations of Hong Kong in literary, poetical and cinematic productions is to trace and liberate the imaginative formations of a community whose sustainability has long been trapped in the conflicting polarities between the past and the present, remembrance and amnesia, the foreign and the local, the colonial and the postcolonial as well as the national and the regional. By unraveling these intersecting and, at times, overlapping intricacies, ghosts are summoned and given the ultimate responsibility to tell the true significance of the Hong Kong experiences. While struggling with the ideas or practices of nation and colony, tracing the footprints of ghosts in the cultural productions of Hong Kong is to see how temporalities can be resuscitated beyond the calendar. This is also the same reason for this dissertation to explore the ways ghosts are summoned for the creative endeavors in narration, poetry and film for the re-imaginations of originalities, borders and transitions. While the colonists and the nationalists subdue Hong Kong to the temporal confines of economic progress, capitalist development or ethnic reawakening, ghosts reconfirm the plurality of time and attempt to settle the debts of imaginary for this peculiar community.