Hybrid Hong Kong

Book excerpt: Hybrid Hong Kong attempts to attract and excite the intellectual, cultural, economic and political elites as well as the intelligent laymen of Hong Kong - hopefully enough for them to take a closer look at their society - while engendering a public discourse on the city's identity, its past, present and future. Hong Kong is at its crossroads. With a colonial past and having been handed over, and back, to China in 1997, the city has since been going through a process of re-sinification and re-integration (not entirely wanted) into the Pearl River Delta region of mainland China, all of which have far-reaching consequences for identity politics, culture, loyalty and attachment, and everyday livelihood. The hybridity concept offers an in-between space, and time, to narrate, describe and make sense of the many layers of entanglement of cultural, anthropological, economic and political forces that impinge, impact, sometimes confuse, even disturb, the everyday lives of the Hongkongers who have decided to call the city home. The book probes a range of sites and locales of a Hongkonger's natural habitat, including film and television, ethnicity, popular music videos, gay identities, fashion, art, theatre, Cantopop electronic dance music, museum, visual arts, the Muslim youth, food and cuisine, and Chinese and western medicines. Based on ethnography, fieldwork and participant observation, Hybrid Hong Kong intends to display and explain hybridity as it is performed in the public as well as private spheres of city life. This book was originally published as a special issue of Visual Anthropology.