Special Topics in International Asian Studies

Catalog description

It is often said that Hong Kong developed from a small village into an international metropolis, and then the "Asia World City" in the post-handover time. This course investigates the various "discourses" of Hong Kong from the British colonial perspective to the post 1997 Beijing perspective. The major course objective is to understand these various discourses of the city, their ideological implications and effects on the everyday life of the people. The course also investigates alternative stories, marginalized groups and unnoticed spaces overlooked in the official stories of economic prosperity and East-meet West. The course approaches less talked about dimensions of the city from various film, spatial and food productions. We take students to field sites that look at the vibrant but precarious city lives, Africa refugees, and the less talked about dimension of the New Territories.