Remembering the City: Trauma and Modernity in Hong Kong Literature

Siyang Xue

doi:10.71222/p476r558

Authors

Siyang Xue School of Tourism Sciences, Beijing International Studies University, Beijing, 100024, China Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.71222/p476r558

Keywords:

Hong Kong literature, trauma, memory, modernity, Dung Kai-cheung, cultural identity, Atlas, literary city

Abstract

This paper examines how contemporary Hong Kong literature engages with the city as a site of trauma, memory, and modernity. Drawing on trauma theory (Caruth, LaCapra), urban modernity (Jameson, Harvey), and memory studies (Nora), the study analyzes how literary texts reconstruct the urban space of Hong Kong as a repository of historical rupture and cultural displacement. Focusing on Dung Kai-cheung's Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, the paper argues that fiction operates as a counter-archive, preserving what is threatened by societal changes, colonial erasure, and capitalist urban redevelopment. The city, as rendered in literature, emerges not as a stable setting but as a fragmented, haunted, and continually re-imagined space. Through symbolic reconstruction and narrative estrangement, Hong Kong writers articulate a form of literary remembrance that resists forgetting and reclaims agency in the face of spatial and temporal disorientation. The paper contributes to ongoing conversations about postcolonial identity, cultural memory, and the politics of place in Sinophone literature.

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