Abstract
This chapter traces the development of Xu Xi’s novelistic oeuvre over two decades, from Chinese Walls (1994) to That Man in Our Lives (2016). Lee depicts how Xu Xi’s “outsider-insider” perspective allows her to indigenize her own creative works within Hong Kong by yoking together local and cosmopolitan sensibilities, even as she emphasizes the contradictions of writing about a territory that is constantly being reconfigured by the forces of cultural nationalism and neoliberalism. Lee argues that Xu Xi’s formulation of a Hong Kong literature resists convergence with an increasingly modish yet recognizable global “Chinese” literature and, that by positing her writings on Hong Kong rather as a subset of global fiction, she is reframing Hong Kong Anglophone writing as a form of glocal literature.
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Notes
- 1.
Rey Chow (1992), “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s” (158).
- 2.
William Tay (2000), “Colonialism, the Cold War, and Marginal Space: The Existential Condition of Five Decades of Hong Kong Literature” 32.
- 3.
Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” 5.
- 4.
Chu Yiu-Wai, Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China, 4.
- 5.
Ackbar Abbas (1997), Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 71.
- 6.
Ibid., 69.
- 7.
Ibid., 117.
- 8.
Leo Ou-Fan Lee (2008), City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong, 276.
- 9.
Roland Robertson (1995), “Glocalization: Time-space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” 35.
- 10.
Ibid., 35.
- 11.
Chu, Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China, 3.
- 12.
Rey Chow (1998), “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” 3.
- 13.
Ien Ang (1998), “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” 225.
- 14.
See in particular Tammy Ho’s “Writing Hong Kong’s Ethos” (this volume).
- 15.
Louise Ho (2000), “Hong Kong writing and writing Hong Kong,” 383.
- 16.
Mike Ingham (2003), “Writing on the Margin: Hong Kong English Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction,” 5.
- 17.
Xu Xi (2000), “Writing the literature of non-denial,” 422–423.
- 18.
Ibid., 417.
- 19.
Ibid., 417.
- 20.
Ibid., 416.
- 21.
Shih, Shu-mei (2008), “Hong Kong Literature as Sinophone Literature,” 16–17.
- 22.
Huang Yu, Heidi (2015), “The Hong Kong Dilemma and a Constellation Solution,” 386.
- 23.
Ibid., 383. See also Huang’s “World Literary Dialogism and Writing Hong Kong: Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas” (this volume) as a specific case study using her methodology.
- 24.
Xu Xi, Chinese Walls, 76.
- 25.
Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” 17.
- 26.
Xu Xi, Chinese Walls, 123–124.
- 27.
Xu Xi, Hong Kong Rose, 131.
- 28.
Ibid., 272.
- 29.
Xu Xi, “Writing the literature of non-denial,” 423.
- 30.
Xu Xi, The Unwalled City, 307.
- 31.
Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 143.
- 32.
Xu Xi, “Writing the literature of non-denial,” 416.
- 33.
Xu Xi, The Unwalled City, 245.
- 34.
Xu Xi, The Unwalled City, 1.
- 35.
Ibid., 124.
- 36.
Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 78.
- 37.
Ibid., 73.
- 38.
Xu Xi, Evanescent Isles: From My City-Village, 98 (emphasis added).
- 39.
Mike Ingham (2010), “From Xu Xi to the Chief Executive: Hong Kong in the Dock,” 102.
- 40.
Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” 26.
- 41.
Xu Xi, Habit of a Foreign Sky, 20–21.
- 42.
Ibid., 240.
- 43.
Ibid., 75.
- 44.
Xu Xi, That Man in Our Lives, 4.
- 45.
Ibid., 140.
- 46.
Ibid., 87 (emphasis in original).
- 47.
Ibid., 107.
- 48.
Ibid., 121.
- 49.
Ibid., 133.
- 50.
Ibid., 69.
- 51.
Ibid., 72.
- 52.
Ibid., 106–107.
- 53.
Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 112.
- 54.
Homi Bhabha (1994), The Location of Culture, 1.
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Lee, J.E.H. (2018). Glocalizing Hong Kong Anglophone Literature: Locating Xu Xi’s Writing Across the Decades. In: Polley, J., Poon, V., Wee, LH. (eds) Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1_16
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