Bidisha Banerjee

There’s Something in the Air Becoming-With Research Practices

This article engages with air from a posthuman performative perspective to prompt new thinking about postcolonial Hong Kong. Drawing from a small experiential study of Hong Kong air, this article shows how three becoming-with research practices; sensing air, tracing childhood memories, and cominglings were enacted to engage with data differently. Becoming-with Hong Kong air illuminates how new connections are made with data through inter- and intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and the material and discursive. This article argues that becoming-with practices are productive and necessary to rethink postcoloniality in Hong Kong.

Creating a ‘well-fitted habitus’: material culture, homemaking and diasporic belonging in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Academy award winning illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2006 graphic novel The Arrival, poignantly tells the story of the typical immigrant experience through a series of beautifully rendered, sepia toned images. Tan’s illustrations provide us the perspective of the immigrant to whom the new city appears strange, alienating and even fantastical. Throughout the novel, Tan depicts a number of objects- some are familiar, iconic images of iteration such as a suitcase and a family photo, while others are the strange and alienating objects the man encounters in the new country. Using theories that bring together material culture and identity formation, this paper posits that Tan presents his narrative of the immigrant experience as a project of familiarization and naturalization, of home making and the creation of a comfortable “well-fitted habitus.” Domesticating and familiarizing himself with the alien objects he encounters and furnishing his home with these objects alongside the familiar ones from home, allows the protagonist to construct his immigrant being within the space of the host nation.

What lies within: misrecognition and the uncanny in Hong Kong's cityscape

The city-state of Hong Kong had a unique postcolonial birth in 1997, when it was handed over to the motherland, China, after the expiration of a hundred year lease on Hong Kong held by the British. In this paper, I suggest that Hong Kongs unique attainment of postcoloniality, and the evolution of her subsequent complicated relationship with Mainland China, leads to a deep sense of anxiety in Hong Kongs identity as a global city. This anxiety, I further argue, is mapped on to the physical landscape of Hong Kong. By analysing the portrayal of Tin Shui Wai, a marginal and isolated area of development in Hong Kong, and the contrasting depiction of public and private spaces in Ann Huis 2009 film Night and Fog, I attempt to explore the Freudian “uncanny,” the return of the repressed, which constantly threatens to erupt. In the concluding section of the paper, I use Kristevian theories of abjection and the spatialization of identity to argue that the figure of Ling, the Mainland mother in Huis film, brings to the fore Hong Kongs anxiety about its postcolonial identity and relationship with China. She epitomizes the othered self, the return of the repressed, the foreigner who must necessarily be expelled (through murder) from within the nation-space of Hong Kong.

Utopian Transformations in the Contact Zone: A Posthuman, Postcolonial Reading of Shaun Tan and John Marsden's The Rabbits

The 1998 picture book The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, is an allegory of the colonisation of Australia. The book has been controversial for a number of reasons. While some have read it as too politically correct, others have argued that the portrayal of the Aboriginals is patronising and silencing, and still others have been confounded by its categorisation as childrens literature. For the author of this article, the overwhelming message of the book is the destruction of the landscape due to colonialism. In the reading of The Rabbits in this article, the author attempts to bring together the postcolonial and the posthuman ‘contact zone’ perspectives, as theorised by Mary Louise Pratt and Donna Haraway respectively. The author analyses the textual pages of The Rabbits as representative of a troubled contact zone where text and image exist in tension with each other such that two separate but interwoven strands ultimately come together to deliver a poignant message. The author further argues that the book can be read as a deeply transformative text, mainly because of Tans illustrations which subtly counter Marsdens sharply polarised representation of the coloniser and the colonised.

Diaspora’s “Dark Room”: Photography and the Vision of Loss in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hema and Kaushik”:

In the long story “Hema and Kaushik” that comprises Part II of Jhumpa Lahiri’s most recent collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), we find the recurrent trope of photographs and photography. Kaushik, the child of immigrants, becomes a photojournalist who visits war-torn areas documenting the destruction with his camera. The loss of homeland for second-generation immigrants like Kaushik is a phantom loss, since they cannot access the originary moment of departure in their memories. I argue that photography allows Kaushik to counter his unrootedness by providing him with a sense of presence. However, given photography’s double edge — its ability to capture a moment and preserve it for posterity and, conversely, its inalienable connection with absence, loss and even death — it ultimately renders his efforts false and exacerbates his sense of phantom loss and diaspora mourning. Using writings on photography theory by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and others, I posit a relation between the desire to photograph and the immigrant condition.

An unapologetic feminist response

In the spirit of reformulating notions of critique, this response builds on the creative research experimentation that the authors enacted to consider air differently. The authors continue to be lured by generosity, curiosity, surprise, and wonder and suggest two feminist responses that relate to and generate knowledge in alternative ways. Two experimentations (collective experimental story writing and erasure poetry) are offered to readers with the aim of activating new thinkings, doings, and relations with air.

Looking beyond ‘buildings of chrome and glass’: Hong Kong’s ‘uncanny postcoloniality’ in photographs of Tin Shui Wai

Hong Kong has a unique postcolonial identity. After being colonised by Britain for over a century and a half, it was ceremoniously handed over to China in 1997, without necessitating any bloody wars or even skirmishes. Hong Kong has continued to enjoy a privileged status within China due to the doctrines enshrined in the ‘one country two systems’ policy. She has benefited from becoming part of a nation with the fastest growing economy in the world, and the people of Hong Kong have for the most part acquiesced to the reduction in levels of political freedom. However, recent events like the Umbrella Movement spearheaded mainly by student protesters has brought to the fore the cracks in Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity and the city finds itself once again precariously poised in a moment of transition. Theorising a connection between Hong Kong’s postcolonial predicament and the city state’s physical landscape, I analyse Hong Kong photographer Derrick Chang’s photos of Tin Shui Wai, a remote new town located on Hong Kong’s northwestern edge. Tin Shui Wai is a failed new town – it was developed to house workers who would serve the industries that were projected to develop there in the 1990s. However, these labour-intensive industries never materialised due to the meteoric rise of Guangdong’s manufacturing industry. Instead Tin Shui Wai has now come to be known as the ‘city of sadness’, notorious for its gruesome murders, high rate of domestic abuse and tragic suicides. Through an analysis of Chang’s photographs of Tin Shui Wai depicting isolation, stagnation and urban detritus, this article argues that the uncanny, spectral spaces of encounter raise questions and provide an alternative and more disquieting narrative of Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity.

Kinship between “companion species”: A posthuman refiguration of the immigrant condition in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Abstract Academy Award-winning author and illustrator Shaun Tan’s 2007 graphic novel The Arrival poignantly tells the story of the typical immigrant experience. Tan creates an ostensibly alienating and unfamiliar terrain which may be described as a “posthuman landscape”. Instead of presenting the traditional native-versus-immigrant framework typical of diasporic stories, Tan chooses to delineate an inter-species relationship where the immigrant man is assisted by a native animal. An odd-looking creature becomes the protagonist’s guide in the new country and assists him in a myriad of ways throughout the story. This article explores the implications of such a relationship in the age of the Anthropocene where the privileged anthropocentrism of western humanism has been replaced by an egalitarianism of species. Using Donna Haraway’s notion of “companion species” and Rosi Braidotti’s recent articulation of the posthuman, it suggests a connection between the posthuman and the postcolonial in Tan’s text and thereby explores the significance of a non-human Other coming to the assistance of the immigrant Other within the space of a posthuman, postcolonial world. Thus the article seeks to study the reconfiguration of otherness in the face of incommensurable difference, and articulate its implications for diasporic thought.