A Wronged-Soul Society Hong Kong as a Chinese Heterotopia

LI Cho Kiu

Abstract

The wronged souls (yuanhun) of contemporary China have stimulated various self-imaginations, collective actions and civil organisations in Hong Kong. Hong Kong people have distanced themselves from Mainland China because of the perception of Communist China on these wronged souls. In accordance with analytical tools from existing studies on spectralities, this research reflects upon historical cases in question and demonstrates intricate interplays between wronged souls and civil society. The notion of “wrongedsoul society” is developed to articulate how wronged souls mobilise living people to challenge the ruling power with their agency. This research also reflects how civil society as a Western practice integrates the Chinese ideas of life and death in Hong Kong, thereby forming a wronged-soul society that, by connecting the living and the dead, can be seen as a Chinese heterotopia.

 

Keywords: Civil Society, Wronged Soul, Spectralities, Hong Kong, China


Full Text:

PDF


References


蒲慕州(2005):〈序:鬼魅神魔:一個熟悉又陌生的世界〉,《鬼魅神魔:中 國通俗文化側寫》,台北:麥田出版,頁5–18。

鄭宇碩、羅金義編(2010):《那夜無星:八九民運二十年顧後瞻前》。香港:香港城市大學出版社。

黎志添(2005):〈從打齋儀式看道教對死亡的處理—— 一個死魂遠遊旅程 的救濟:拔罪、救苦、度亡及成仙〉,梁美儀、張燦輝編:《凝視死亡 ——死與人間的多元省思》,香港:中文大學出版社,頁55–78。

Alesheh, Yehonatan (2015). “The Biopolitics of Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide” In Dreyfus, Jean-Marc, and Elisabeth Anstett, eds. Human Remains and Mass Violence: Methodological Approaches. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, ed (2013). The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury.

Butler, Judith (2006). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Davies, Douglas (2008). The Theology of Death. London: T&T Clark (Continuum). Foucault, Michel (1986). “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring): 22–27.

Johnson, Peter (2006). “Unravelling Foucault’s Different Spaces,” History of the Human Sciences, Vol 19, Issue 4, 75–90.

Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schwartz, Margaret (2015). Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Seligman, Adam (1995), The Idea of Civil Society. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Sontag, Susan (2014). On Photography. London: Penguin.

Stepputat, Finn (2016). Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Taylor, John (1998). Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War. New York: New York University Press.

Verdery, Katherine (1999). The Politics Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

Yu, Anthony (2007). Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zeitlin, Judith (2009). The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.