Forget Chineseness by Allen Chun

Author:Allen Chun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

What Is (Post)Colonial “Modernity”?

The history of Hong Kong, both in its evolution as a colonial city-state and its post-1997 transformation as special administrative region of China, should have relevant and significant things to say about the nature and operation of colonial modernity. It should lead one above all to question what coloniality and modernity are as well as the collusive relationship between the two. Coloniality should be questioned not only for how it exists in fact (as a mode of political practice) but also how it portrays itself as representation (through cultural discourse, subjective narrative, and (re)writings of history, ritual, or other codifications of memory and fictive denials). These same forms of coloniality can also be used to legitimate the existence of other forms of political institutions not termed colonial, strictly speaking. If so, then the continued existence of colonialism can easily transcend its explicit change of political status, because it is in effect a matter of interpretation. Modernity deserves questioning in the same way. Far from being an autonomous and value-free entity, it is, on the contrary, something that is put into practice in the service of that same political evolution. Global capitalism is in this regard not only the abstract operation of a market society, as though a realization of utilitarian ideals, but also the end product of its own ongoing historical process. In the context of the colonial development of Hong Kong into the post-1997 era, one can witness its subtle and complex transformations. More importantly, these transformations are part and parcel of its necessarily collusive relationships to changing policies and governmentality in the abstract.

The work of Bernard Cohn (1984) on late colonial India offers a useful parallel into the collusive relationship between the cultural sociology of the state, structurations of modernity, and constructions of identity. His observations about cultural and social objectification that he argued were seminal to British colonial rule in India has proved to be broadly endemic to diverse forms of modern govern-“mentality” throughout the world. More than just castes of mind or imagined communities in the making, identities have always been cultural fictions predicated on the assumption of real roots and the need to reaffirm them. The tendency to objectify “ethnic” identity in particular has been in effect symptomatic of attempts to define the illusory nature and form of such an ethnos, but it is perhaps characteristic of society’s need to inculcate the ethos of its own modernity, whether it is encoded in the rule of law, civilizing imperatives, moral regulation, personhood or the etiquette of everyday interaction. Such changing discourses of identity supplement (rather than conflict with) the extraordinary extent to which state apparatuses have labored to compel people into “becoming their ID.” Taken as an entire cartography of power, they freeze us, as Corrigan and Sayer (1985:211) phrased it, through these programs of power, “into mythic statuses of sedimented language.” Why identify? I personally do not believe that it is necessary to identify with anything. Yet, people everywhere go to great lengths to prove that identities are real, even worth dying for.

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