Urban Humanities through Hong Kong Literature and Film : The Materiality of Crisis

Through a lens of literary urban studies, Ann Tso offers fascinating insight into perceptions of Hong Kong as a city in crisis in contemporary film, novels, and memoir. Through close readings of six pivotal works spanning three decades, Tso reveals how cultural creators encode dissent within the mundane. Divided into two parts, the first explores cannibalism within Hong Kong’s apartment plots through film. Part 2 examines discordant urban sounds in literature through Madeline Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) and Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City (2022). Tso demonstrates that while comprehensive surveillance reshapes cultural narratives, the resulting silencing effect does not necessarily encourage apathy and asocial behaviour. Instead, Hong Kong can express itself through its silence; its stubborn possession of mundane objects evocative of pasts ostensibly erased but mutely present. Rigorously researched, this interdisciplinary book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary urban studies, spatial literary research, urban humanities, speculative realism, and Hong Kong studies.