Hong Kong Disneyland (HKDL) was seen as the ‘Millennium Dream Comes True!’ in 1999, but as ‘Hong Kong’s shame’ after its opening in 2005. In this article, interviews and ethnographic research are used to examine the different positions of various actors (HKDL workers, consumers and media practitioners) in their relationship with HKDL. Appropriating Lefebvre’s conceptual triad of space, these stories show that Disney brought Hong Kong a physical park, non-transparent values and related management practices. These same stories also demonstrate that HKDL workers and visitors work and consume the park in a local way that Disneyland management finds difficult to control; local people produce and circulate the changed meanings of ‘Disney’ and change certain Disney management policies.
The paper argues that, under the globalized economy, state power is far from diminishing. I study how the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government officials in 1999 developed “competition-development” discourse and “disappearing-world-city” discourse to persuade the public to approve the unequal and non-transparent Hong Kong-Disney deal for setting up the Hong Kong Disneyland (HKDL). I also examine how newspaper reports have circulated and have reinforced these two pairs of political discourses in wider popular discourse. I further reveal, in the post-colonial context of HongKong, how the HKDL project functions to accomplish decolonization tasks and to reshape Hong Kong as a consumption-based tourist spot instead of a citizen-based participatory community.
Keywords: cultural studies; Hong Kong Disneyland; Hong Kong; globalization; discourse; urban development; city politics
"The art does not mirror or transcend experience but rather is a means for creating and experiencing the world," Holman Jones (2005: 776).
Jones, S. H. 2005. Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In Denzine & Lincoln (eds.) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd edition). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Recent studies of globalization provide contrasting views of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of such major corporations as Disney as they invest transnationally and circulate their offerings around the world. While some scholars emphasize the ubiquity of Disney’s products and its promotion of consumerism on a global scale, accompanied by cultural homogenization, faltering democracy, and diminishing state sovereignty, others highlight signs of contestation and resistance, questioning the various state-capitalist alliances presumed to hold in the encounter between a global company, a local state, and the people.
The settlement process and the cultural import of Hong Kong Disneyland in Hong Kong complicate these studies because of the evolving post-colonial situation that Disney encounters in Hong Kong. While Disney specializes in “imagineering” dreams, Hong Kong itself is messily imagining what “Hong Kong” is and should be, and how it should deal with others, including transnational companies and Mainlanders. In this thesis, I appropriate Doreen Massey’s ideas of space-time in order to examine Hong Kong Disneyland not as a self-enclosed park but as itself a multiplicity of spaces where dynamic social relations intersect in the wider context of post-colonial Hong Kong. I illuminate the shifting relationship between Disney, Mainlanders, and the locals as this relationship develops in its discursive, institutional, and everyday-life aspects. Through interviews and ethnographic research, I study how my respondents have established and interpreted the meanings of Hong Kong Disneyland, and how they have made use of the park to support their own constructions of place, of politics, and of identity.
Cultural Studies Review has gone open-access; all of the journal's content are freely available online. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj
Trespassing and a tale of cities: Trespassing world cities is a composite of Lai's tourist video style travelogues. The opening is a low angle shot showing a woman walking, and the camera seems to be in a bag; then it cuts to the tile of New Delhi in 2004, the pan shot of the bridge in New York City in 2001, the tracking shots of Frankfurt city space in 2001, Taipei in 2003, and New Delhi in 2004. The intercuts between tracking shots of these three cities and the following elevators shots of different cities indicate the similarities of these "modern" cities and we (the videomaker and the audiences) cannot easily recognize their differences.
Although ethnographers nowadays acknowledge the constructedness of ethnographic fields, Schneider (2008) argues that fieldwork as a method "still retains its defining position at the center of contemporary social and cultural anthropology" (173), and Clifford (1997) recommends fieldwork should be a multi-site analysis in a globalized world. The "field" in Trespassing is the city space: the floors, elevators, staircase, shores, alleys, and landmarks of different cities. These swinging or static images keep appearing in front of our eyes. The field is clearly-defined--the cityscape, and yet Lai rejects to interpret the meanings of these images in these cities. As Lai writes in Trespassing: "The totality of events in a city forms a thick collage that rejects systematic reading nor individuated signification".
As other works of Lai, with images and written words, Lai self-consciously does not offer audiences a realist and transparent tale of each place--how people live in a certain place at a certain period of time. In Trespassing, we do not see the usual image of an ethnographer describing a place and its people. The video does not allow us to immerse ourselves in the field, pretending the videomaker (and the audiences) can immerse, understand, and interpret other cultures. Rather, we are encouraged to question a walker's power in understanding city life.
A critique of flâneuse in Trespassing: Obviously, Trespassing depicts the filmmaker walks various cities in the world and encourages audiences to link the video with the practice of female flânerie, a term from the French masculine word flâneur. Baudelaire's flâneur depicts a man who walks the city to experience, observe, understand, and portray city life through both of his participation and detached observation. Therefore, flâneur is both an active participant and critical voyeur to portray and examine city life in sociological, anthropological, literary and historical aspects. However, the concept of flâneur excludes women from the spaces of modernity. As Wolff comments, "The influential writing of Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and, more recently, Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman, by equating the modern with the public, thus fail to describe women's experience of modernity. The central figure of the flâneur in the literature of modernity can only be male" (1985: abstract). It is because sexual differences were expressed through the segregation of space of public and private, and women were often defined in the private sphere. The experience of walks in the city mainly accounts for the experiences of men. The exceptions are the "non-respectable", the prostitute (D'Souza & McDonough 2006:19).
In Trespassing, Lai further comments that although women nowadays are less bounded by the private spheres than women in the mid-nineteenth century, and they can navigate around the world as what Lai does in the video, street crimes undermine such bourgeois practice. At the end of the video, Lai told us that her beloved student Joey was murdered while taking a brief walk in Moscow in transit for a flight back to Hong Kong. Women walking in the city still face various kinds of danger that flâneur may not experience. In my interview with Lai, Lai openly criticized the male-oriented ethnocentric world view under the concept of flâneur.
Lai: Joey left us. At that time, Hector (Lai's husband) and I had sharing, that in class, we often talked about drifting, and a student drifted in Moscow. Joey intended to have that drifting. If she's still alive, she's studying travel literature in Belgium. Her death affected us a lot.
Kim: Drifting somehow is an activity for men.
Lai: Drifting is dangerous to women. Drifting is a dangerous activity; most critical theories romanticize drifting.
Kim: Critical theories in one sense are gender blinded.
Lai: And these theories always present drifting as productive academically and epistemologically. In fact, drifting is a male-oriented practice.
In summary, as a visual experimentation, Trespassing pushes the boundary of tourist video. Lai as a frequent world cities' traveler brings the audiences the sensuous experiences of the fleeting and ephemeral encounters of city life. At the same time, Lai plays against and makes critiques the "culture" ethnographers inhabit. Culture in any sense is not transparent but interpretative.
References
D'Souza and T. McDonough. 2006. The invisible flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris. Manchester & NY: Manchester University Press.
Schneider, A. 2008. Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14: 171-194.
If I read Non-place. Other space as a visual ethnography, we may need to rethink several things in the making of (visual) ethnography:
the "field": ethnography contains fieldwork. The field of this video is two cities, Hong Kong and Macau. The classic ethnographic text may use thick description to describe the field and to let audiences understand and even step in the field through the writing. In the video, we do not see these cities' landmarks (except the high skyscraper shot of Hong Kong). In fact, there are few long shots for audiences to recognize the location. The motif images repeatedly appear in the first part of the video are flowing water, floating chicken corpse, female mannequin with red cheongsam and black lace stockings, two staggering words "no. 10" in Chinese, etc. If the landscape and the objects are the Other Lai represents, these images do not describe what these places really are but "take[s] us into the center of the experiences being described" (Geertz 1973: 18). The sense of instability, the horror, and the suffocation haunter audiences until the last part of the video, with men and women doing (house) work in their "work" place.
the "Other": Rather than represent the Other, Lai clearly tells us that representation of the Other is always self representation. Lai self consciously does not position herself as an outsider but she actively invites us, the audiences, to join her journey to explore the cityscapes. One of her poem in Non-place: "The domain of the enigmatic is where I play my daily routine. Here and now fogged by undifferentiated hues. Blow and blow and off I go. Come go with me yes or no? (27 October 2002)".
the "story": what means by a story? Non-place provides no mainstream ethnographic situated story (such as how the central character, the Other, lives her life in a particular context). If there is a central character, it is Lai, who selects video shots and words from her visual and written diaries respectively, making sense of and describing her experience of city space (HK & Macau) and other spaces (various art galleries which construct temporary sense of place and community). The story also provides no typical story, without an action-oriented or cause-and-effect plot development and resolution. It also provides audiences no clues how Lai, if she is the protagonist, organizes her life in different spaces and contexts. It is not a realist tale showing audiences a transparent world; the video tells from a feminist standpoint stressing reflexivity and emotion. In Denzin's words, Lai creates her "own situated, inscribed version of the realities" (Denzin 1994: 505).
References
Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Denzin, N. K. 1994. The art and politics of interpretation. Handbook of qualitative research, edited by N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, 500-515. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
As a method, ethnography entails fieldwork, participant observation author/director's position: detached to build "realist tales" (Van Maanen 1988).
Marcus (1992), however, suggested that "[e]thnography ... provides interpretation and explanation by strategies of contextualizing the problematic phenomena focused upon.... The referent of contextualization for the modernist ethnography ... are fragments that are arranged and ordered textually by the design of the ethnographer.... The whole that is more than the sum of the parts of such ethnographies is always in question, while the parts are systematically related to each other by a revealed logic of connections" (325).
Linda Lai's video work, I told them my camera was on (2005), Excitable speech: all About Cinderella (2006), Trespassing world cities (2006), Non-place ･ Other Spaces (2009), Shanghai saga: other skies, other lands (2009), demonstrate the importance of fragments in representing the world she lives in. These fragments include travelogues, daily interactions with friends, structured and unstructured interviews, written and visual diaries, found footage, critical insights on mainstream media texts, recitation of cultural studies texts, and self reflections. These fragments do not conjure up to a exposition-development-resolution story, nor do they pretend to show audiences the final and definite "truth" of the personal, social, and the material world. Rather than provide a linear, comprehensive, and explanatory account of an event, a person's life, or city life, the fragments under Lai's camera interrupt the "mainstream causal narrative logic" in Lai's words (2005: 1) and acknowledge the constructedness of the "ethnographic field"--the fleeting images, the split screen, and the silence--and "the limits of intelligibility" (Hegde 2009: 292; Butler 2004). As a film historian, cultural studies scholar, an artist, a postmodernist, a university teacher, a traveler, a wife with a Spanish husband, a woman circled with women friends, Lai composites her video fragments from these multiple positions to research and represent the world she lives and studies. Her works create new possibilities of experimentation in visual research and in appropriating others' cultures. That is, Lai's videos do not claim to tell us an objective truth of a specific location; instead, she provides audiences "with some powerful propositional, tacit, intuitive, emotional, historical, poetic, and empathic experience of the Other via the texts" she produces (Lincoln and Denzin 1994: 582).
References Butler. 2004. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Hegde, R.S. 2009. Fragments and interruptions: sensory regimes of violence and the limtis of feminist ethnography. Qualitative inquiry 15 (2): 276-295. Lai, L. C. 2005. 4748 moons and 13 elliptical years. Artist statement. Lincoln, Y.S. 1994. The fifth moment. In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by Denzin and Lincoln, 575-586. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Marcus, G. E. 1994. What comes (just) after "post"? The case of ethnography. In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by Denzin and Lincoln, 563-574. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Charles Taylor and Claudia Strauss argue that social imaginaries are a “cultural model”, that is, the common understandings through which people imagine their surroundings.
Charles Taylor argues that the social imaginary is not an idealized understanding of things but rather a matter of complex understandings in which both facts and norms play important roles. The social imaginary affects people’s perceptions of how things are (facts) and people’s perceptions of how things should be (norms):
"I want to speak of social imaginary here, rather than social theory, because there are important—and multiple—differences between the two. I speak of imaginary because I’m talking about the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms; it is carried in images, stories, and legends. But it is also the case that theory is usually the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. In addition, we should note that what start off as theories held by a few people may come to infiltrate the social imaginary, first that of elites, perhaps, and then of society as a whole. The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy." (Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, issue 1 (2002), p. 106.)
Building on this theory, Claudia Strauss argues that Taylor’s social imaginary “fits cognitive authropologists’ conception of cultural models” because cultural models are also widely shared and they are implicit schemas for people to interpret the world and their behavior. Cultural-model theorists further argue that there is more than one cultural model and that cultural models affect people’s behavior to different extents and in different ways.
Taylor’s and Strauss’ social-imaginary model implies a dialogic relationship between the elite minority and the “ordinary” majority—that social theory can integrate itself into the social imaginary and, also, that the social imaginary can derive its form and content from “below.”
Benedict Anderson couches the imaginary in political terms. Anderson interprets the meaning of the imaginary by associating it with the concept of “nation.” He argues that the development of print capitalism in the eighteenth century standardized and disseminated vernacular print languages and social concerns. The common language was “fixed” as the “national” language, through which people communicated and exchanged ideas. The common concerns raised by the print media also constructed an imagination of a community, the nation, in which people share common concerns at the same time. To Anderson, the community is “imagined” because nationalism encourages members of the community to imagine that they share not only the same language but also the same concerns, although “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them.” Anderson further explains:
It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.
Anderson argues that media play a critical role in the construction of these imagined communities because the widespread nature of communication processes help construct national identity and other forms of community.
Jacques Lacan conceives of the imaginary as a basis of a misrecognized selfhood. For Lacan, the imaginary is associated with ideal, illusion, and misrecognition. According to Lacan, the self is a split self; the imaginary is an internalized image of an ideal whole self that young people, during their preverbal stages, derive from an unfragmented image that they have of their own selves. When an infant looks at a mirror and sees his or her image wholly present, the wholeness of the image establishes itself in the infant’s mind, where the image constitutes the infant’s ego, the concept of identity. In other words, this mirror image is an image of wholeness—of completeness and coherence—and reflects, for the infant, a complete and coherent internal self. Lacan argues that this line of reasoning in the infant’s mind leads to a profound misrecognition of what it means to be human. However, the mirror stage, which ends with a sense of the self as complete, has an important social function: by creating the subject (the self), the mirror stage enables the subject to recognize and to interact with objects (the external world). Media scholars, for example, use Lacan’s theory to explain how the subject identifies with screen images to fulfill his or her desire to achieve oneness, to replace our permanent lack with completeness.
Massey’s concept of space-time challenges the dualistic concept that frames time as becoming and space as being. Massey’s concept challenges, as well, the dualism that frames place as the local and “everywhere” as the global—a distinction that pits the concrete against the abstract, the particular against the universal. In “A Global Sense of Place,” she argues that the idea of place problematizes the distinction between global and local because the specificity of a place lies neither within the place’s identifiable borders nor within the place’s proper history. In truth, a place is a site where wider cultures meet, networks take root, and social relationships evolve:
What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each “place” can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. (p. 154)
If a place is not constructed by an internally produced and essential past, the place’s identity is not singular, fixed, and unproblematic. If places are “open and porous networks of social relations” (p. 121), places not only develop mixtures through history but also bring differences together in space. It follows that places constructed out of “juxtaposition, the intersection, the articulation, of multiple social relations” are of course internally contradictory and contested, and that while places are necessarily shared, there will simultaneously be clashes between various and competing interests over what the area is, and what it ought to become (p. 137). To extract advantages from a set of social relations, the particular claimant groups lay claim to some particular position in time-space (whether through the establishment of heritage centers and the promotion of nationalism), so that the groups can establish an identity of a place, although “the past was not more static than is the present” (p. 169):
When black-robed patriarchs organize ceremonies to celebrate a true national identity they are laying claim to the freezing of that identity at a particular moment and in a particular form—a moment and a form where they had a power which they can thereby justify themselves in retaking. All of which means, of course, that the identity of any place, including that place called home, is in one sense for ever open to contestation. (p. 169)
Doreen Massey’s distinctive concept of space-time introduces a cultural perspective into the idea of space, which is traditionally seen as a passive and apolitical “setting for objects and their interaction” in a timeless context. Rather than conceptualize spatial relations as social relations taking a particular geographical form, Massey conceptualizes space and social relations as mutually constructed. And if space and the spatial configurations of social relations produce social effects, space and the spatial are implicated in the production of history (p. 254); space, therefore, cannot be seen as the realm of stasis. In Massey’s words, “Space is not static, nor time spaceless…neither [spatiality or temporality] can be conceptualized as the absence of the other” (p. 264). Because space is conceived in terms of social relations, and because social relations are dynamic and multiple, and because individuals hold not only different positions but consequently different experiences and interpretations of spatial social relations, space does not imply fixity or stasis but “a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces” in the “lived world” (p. 3). That is, space should be conceived in relation to social relations, power, symbols, and representations.
