Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Abstract Hong Kong has been located in the future tense throughout various genres of writing and popular culture, serving as a model for free-market neoliberal thinkers, as a proof-of-concept for future national reunification and as the backdrop for techno-orientalist and cyberpunk narratives. Paradoxically, within recent Hong Kong cultural productions and civil society debates is often a strong sense of a foreclosed future. This paper traces three fictions that together navigate the shifting temporalization of Hong Kong, from Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2004), which adapts the pulp fiction writer frame narrative from Liu Yichang’s The Drunkard (1963). The film’s anachronistic 1960s SF unexpectedly finds its way into an emerging genre/movement as seen in the video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) by Lawrence Lek (2016). These three (science) fiction texts reveal Hong Kong as a palimpsest of temporalities – an impossible fiction of ‘50 years of no change’, which somehow still returns as a site from which to imagine the future.
Bram Overbeeke (Thu,) studied this question.