Fugitive Hong Kong

• Autores: Laura A. Meek, Bai Hua
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 6, 2023, págs. 736-748
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This photographic essay reflects on fugitive forms of protest in Hong Kong. Photographs span the peak of the prodemocracy movement in 2019 to current postactivist practices of protesting otherwise in 2023. In the face of state surveillance and repression, even the slogan 光復香港時代革命 (Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!) became illegal, and spaces that were previously animated with revolutionary dreams now stand stark, quiet, and apparently immobilized. International media accounts portray today’s Hong Kong as a monolithically hopeless place drowning in political despair. We offer these images to create a new narrative, one that insists on the ongoing fugitive experiments in what is still a dynamic and becoming-otherwise city. Coded language games proliferate around Hong Kong, from cupcakes to graffiti to license plates. Much of today’s political action capitalizes on censorship itself, deploying gaps and absences such as blank pieces of paper as a mode of protest. We show how activists draw on the capaciousness of such symbols to build emergent cartographies of open experimentation, transnational solidarity, and defiant rebellion. Our invitation is to become fugitive anthropologists who might augment these possibilities percolating, harboring, and emerging in and from the cracks.