Cold War Hong Kong: An archipelagic reading of sinophone literature during the seventies

This dissertation critiques Cold War representations of Hong Kong as an apolitical and hyper capitalist site by turning to Sinophone literary fiction written during what I call the "long seventies" (1970-89). Within the Cold War discourse dominated by the Chinese and Western nation-states, Hong Kong tends to be understood as a neutral zone in which the UK, the US, and China furthered their own economic and political interests, unchallenged by Hong Kong people who benefitted from this neutrality. However, the literature written during this period tells a different story, one in which linguistic, ethnic, and regional differences were bridged as everyday peoples of Hong Kong forged decolonial relationships that undermined Cold War imperialisms. Through practices of close reading and archival research, I situate two modern classics, Ye Si's novella Paper Cuts and Xi Xi's short story cycle My City, in relation to a group of understudied short stories by established authors, such as Yang Mingxian, Yan Chungou, Peng Cao, and Lv Qi Shi, who write within and outside Hong Kong. I reread this literary corpus with an emphasis on themes of unexpected identification, accidental friendship, and ephemeral alliances that challenge the Cold War construction of national and legal identities. I show that Hong Kong literature provides a key space to re-evaluate Cold War neutrality as an inter-imperial mechanism that caused the city to be imagined as culturally and politically featureless in exchange for ideological and juridical impartiality. I draw on archipelago as both metaphor and materiality to re-conceptualize Hong Kong—a Cantonese coastal city, island-peninsula, and transoceanic nodal point—as part of a larger network of mainlands and islands that connects peoples, cultures, languages, and territories. Unlike an area studies approach, an archipelagic reading of Hong Kong's Sinophone stories proposes an ethics of situating Hong Kong in close proximity to the Chinese mainland without resorting to a nationalist narrative. Furthermore, the stories this dissertation studies represent the city's archipelagic linkages with Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond to challenge divisions marked by Cold War borders.