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Passed Along The Way: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong Max Nobel
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n 1979, Jean-François Lyotard thus instituted the term ‘postmodernism,’ previously found only in the critique of art, into the context of philosophy with the following quotation: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” The metanarrative, understood by Lyotard as an essential attribute of modernity, is a larger master narrative that aims to order and explain knowledge and experience within a single account of culture and history. It offers societal legitimization by the progressive realization of a presupposed “transcendent and universal truth.” The modernist metanarrative is the story of progress through ecumencial human reason. Art in modernism serves to clarify and further this metanarrative, with individual creative expression meant to conform to the realities of technological progress. The postmodernist incredulity towards this artistic philosophy manifests itself in its advocacy for dissident subjectivity and the intertextuality of smaller, often contradictory narratives, with truth lying within the discourse between them. It posits that the spaces between a film’s scenes, and the words and images they encompass, are no less meaningful than the scenes. It aims to break down the social, political, economic and technological cultural demarcation of modernist structuralism through positioning itself as a cultural response to social, political, economic and technological changes. The transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the colonial rule of the United Kingdom to the postcolonial rule of the People’s Republic of China occurred on July 1st, 1997. Internationally, it was referred to as “the Handover”; in China, it was referred to as “the Return.” It was interpreted by many as marking the end of the British Empire. The British Empire acquired the territories encompassing Hong Kong from three separate treaties. They were the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the Treaty of Beijing in 1860 and The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory in 1898, giving them control of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories, respectively. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to the United Kingdom in perpetuity. The control of the New Territories was obtained with a 99-year lease. By 1997, the New Territories were fully integrated into and home to nearly all of the economic production and developments in Hong Kong. As the 99-year lease neared its end, the status of the New Territories following its expiNorth Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
ration was intrinsically tied to Hong Kong’s economic future. From the start of negotiations in 1984 to the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, nearly 1 million residents emigrated from Hong Kong, with a sharp uptick following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, leading to a significant loss of capital. In July, 1992, former Member of Parliament Chris Patten became the 28th and final Governor of Hong Kong. Unlike the majority of his predecessors, he had been a career politician, not a diplomat. The Legislative Council elected by the election of 1995 was originally meant to serve past the handover, providing institutional continuity to Hong Kong’s return to the People’s Republic of China. Beijing had expected this Council to be elected by functional constituencies with limited electorates. This changed upon Pannen’s enactment of election reforms in 1994, expanding the constitutional definition of functional constituencies to allow nearly every subject of Hong Kong to “indirectly elect” the members of the Legislative Council. His actions were condemned by Beijing and given unprecedented support by the citizens of Hong Kong, with his institutional push towards democracy seen as a championing of their rights. Following the handover, the Legislative Council elected under Patton was dissolved and replaced with an unconstitutional Provincial Legislative Council lacking any democratic functions. An election was held in 1998 with the rules in place prior to Patten’s reforms. Historicity was defined by Frederic Jameson in 1989 as “a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.” It achieves “the brutal transformation of a realistic representation of the present... into a memory and a reconstruction.” Jameson posits this as a consequence of postmodernism, defined as cultural narratives of experience and representation, understood in historical, economical, political and aesthetic form. This aesthetical form is self-fulfilling, being that, as Jameson puts it, “the ‘search’ automatically becomes the thing itself: to set it up is by definition to realize it.” Jameson describes postmodernism as a “cultural dominant”, a classification (un) informed by culture’s place, within this postmodern space, as a communicative dominant. In viewing postmodernism as a product of history, Jameson finds it in accord with his
