New sitelines of the floating city : how we see Hong Kong texts?

Abstract

Through the lens of the multilingual built environment is a critical update on a new ecosystem of language and text, located in Hong Kong, instrumental to exploring how we see. And it is where this thesis begins: New Sitelines of the Floating City: How Do We See Hong Kong Texts? This study fundamentally reexamines non-isolationism situated through language acts. Acts of what I will call “looming,” drawn from nautical heritage that I will investigate at length, open a horizon of new approaches to the act of reading, while augmenting capacity on the multilingual playful encounter. Further, unexpected grounds of seeing open out to new constructions and design of plural constructs of identity, with attention paid to engaging, analyzing, and opening further the notional “in-between” on mixed material encounters. In such multifaceted habitation of the multilingual environment, we participate in a generative identity-formation that becomes visible on contemporary ideological grounds: prominently resisting the well-travelled “binary,” too often a narrowing lens of key histories and cultural self-identifications. These generative and simultaneous co-habitations in Hong Kong built environments, whether of letters and/or characters, English and Chinese, and/or image, and/or text, all, are performative and multilingual practices that move us into both updated understandings and a remaking of our complex environment of signs, on plural acts of intersection and valuation. These new sightlines, therefore, will recalibrate the “singular” anew, offering wider axes and intersections of identity construction in our era. What we will see opening, through explorations of the multilingual environment, and with an emphasis on the regions of Hong Kong texts, are ever more inclusive sight-lines and site-lines, where a fuller dimensionality of relating and of living flourishes.