A historiographical approach to Hong Kong Occupy: Focus on a critical moment (original) (raw)
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A historiographical approach to Hong Kong Occupy
Journal of Language and Politics, 2016
This article is conceptualised within the framework of a historiographical approach to critical discourse analysis (Flowerdew 2012). It focusses on a critical moment in Hong Kong’s socio-political development, the Occupy movement, and a specific language event, an interview on a local Hong Kong English-language television programme discussing the rationale for the movement. A micro-analysis of the interaction focusses on important features of the historical context, intertextual links, the backgrounds and the roles of the participants, and the argumentations strategies used by them. The article shows how a focus on a critical moment in discourse can shed light on the bigger socio-political picture and how arguments regarding particular topics may reflect larger ideological struggles, the political agendas of different groups, and the ways arguments are constructed dialogically in response not only to the words of interlocutors, but also in relation to prior (and future) discourses.
Understanding the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement: A Critical Discourse Historiographical approach
This article is conceptualised within the framework of a historiographical approach to critical discourse analysis (Flowerdew 2012). It focusses on a critical moment in Hong Kong's socio-political development, the Occupy movement, and a specific language event, an interview on a local Hong Kong Englishlanguage television programme discussing the rationale for the movement. A micro-analysis of the interaction focusses on important features of the historical context, intertextual links, the backgrounds and the roles of the participants, and the argumentations strategies used by them. The article shows how a focus on a critical moment in discourse can shed light on the bigger socio-political picture and how arguments regarding particular topics may reflect larger ideological struggles, the political agendas of different groups, and the ways arguments are constructed dialogically in response not only to the words of interlocutors, but also in relation to prior (and future) discourses.
Journal of Language and Politics, 2016
Kong, where he has worked since 1989. His main research and teaching interest is discourse analysis in its many varieties and manifestations. In political discourse he has developed a historiographical approach to critical discourse analysis, tracking Hong Kong's socio-political development from a diachronic perspective. This research is collected in his book Critical Discourse Analysis in Historiography: The case of Hong Kong's evolving political identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
This thesis uses critical discourse analysis in order to analyse how the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s oldest and largest English-speaking newspaper, is representing the pro-democratic social movement, Occupy Central with Love and Peace. This is done in order to see how political dissidents in Hong Kong are represented in the region’s English-speaking press. Drawing on the theories of van Dijk, Fairclough, Richardson, Wodak and van Leeuwen, three different cases are studied. The results clearly shows that the South China Morning Post have been misrepresenting Hong Kong’s pro-democratic opposition in favour of more moderate political ideologies and that the challengers of the dominant hegemony in Hong Kong have been systematically misrepresented in the newspaper.
Discourse and social change in contemporary Hong Kong
1996
This article documents discursive and social change currently taking place in contemporary Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the change of sovereignty from Britain to China. It does so by means of a detailed analysis of a political meeting, involving the British Hong Kong governor, Chris Patten, and members of the Hong Kong public. The meeting took place in October, 1992, a day after Patten introduced proposals to widen the democratic franchise. Patten used the meeting, the first time a Hong Kong governor had made himself openly accountable to the public at large, to demonstrate the sort of democratic discourse for which the reform proposals were designed to create a framework.The analysis focuses on two main ways Patten highlighted the democratic nature of the discourse: the use of mise en abyme, or a “play within a play” structure, and the downplaying of overt markers of hierarchy and power asymmetry. Although Patten's aim was to demonstrate openness and accountability, his ultimate control of the discourse belied the democratic agenda he ostensibly promoted. The analysis consequently also focuses on the manipulative dimension of Patten's discourse. The conclusion considers to what extent the meeting might mark a real shift to a more democratic order of public discourse in Hong Kong. (Discourse analysis, power and language, social change, indexicals, involvement, manipulative discourse, mise en abyme, order of discourse, political discourse, turn-taking).
Competing public discourses in transitional Hong Kong
Journal of Pragmatics, 1997
This paper describes two competing discourses currently at work in the public domain in Hong Kong during the period leading up to the change of sovereignty in 1997. The two discourses are labelled Utilitarian and Confucianist. The Utilitarian discourse is characteristic of those who support greater democracy and autonomy for Hong Kong, while the Confucianist discourse is employed by representatives of China and the pro-China camp in Hong Kong. The Utilitarian discourse promotes egalitarian values and may be confrontational. The Confucianist discourse is more hierarchical and consensus-oriented in nature. The two discourses are illustrated by means of brief descriptions of a set of discursive events reported in the press and by four texts: a television news item, a television interview, and two newspaper articles.
Reflexive language and ethnic minority activism in Hong Kong: A trajectory-based analysis
AILA Review, 2016
This article engages with Archer's call to further research on reflexivity and social change under conditions of late modernity (2007, 2010, 2012) from the perspective of existing work on reflexive discourse in the language disciplines (Silverstein 1976, Lucy 1993). Drawing from a linguistic ethnography of the networked trajectories of a group of working-class South Asian youth in Hong Kong (Pérez-Milans & Soto 2014), we analyze the trajectory of Sita, a Hong Kong-born young female with Nepali background. In her trajectory, performative acts of ethnic minority-based activism emerge as key in the enactment of a given set of values, stances, types of persona and situated forms of alignment/disalignment. That is to say, Sita's enactment of activism is seen in this article as tied to a discourse register (Agha 2007: 147). As such, 'talking/doing activism' is inter-textually linked to a speech chain network of a group of secondary school students, teachers, researchers and community-based minority activists engaged with Sita in various interrelated projects for social empowerment. Analysis of interview transcripts, online chats and multimodal artifacts shows the extent to which the coordinated formation of this discourse register proved useful in providing Sita with relevant cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) with which she shaped her own academic trajectory, from a low-prestige government-subsidized secondary school to an elite international college.
Reterritorializing Linguistic Landscapes: Questioning Boundaries and Opening Spaces, 2020
[AUTHOR PREVIEW] In a densely populated district of Hong Kong, a protester screams while blindfolded by the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Her voice is lost in the white-noise crossfire of prime-time shopping and distorted national anthems blaring from nearby megaphones. It is the first of July in Hong Kong. Marking the anniversary of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China, it is a holiday commemorating the end to over 150 years of colonial rule. Officially named Establishment Day, it is a solemn celebration of a ‘new’ Special Administrative Region contentiously tethered to an estranged ‘motherland’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also a day of protest. Throughout this chapter, I examine how reterritorialisation constituted heterotopias in the occupied sites of Hong Kong’s 2014 pro-democracy movement. I demonstrate how the mass movement of bodies, the appropriation of urban space and the emplaced signage of the Umbrella Movement encompassed reflexive performances of place that temporarily subverted the technologies and discipline of social order. In an analysis drawn from over ten thousand images taken across over eighty days of civil disobedience, I illustrate how the semiotic landscape of Hong Kong’s occupied sites encompassed each of Foucault’s six principles of heterotopology. I conclude by considering how heterotopia can expand the scenery by informing a reflexive, multimodal approach to analysing the power dynamics and fleeting materiality of reterritorialised landscapes of dissent.
Since the financial crash of 2008, the strategy of occupation has been widely deployed as a means of expressing and mobilising political dissent. Within legal studies, responses to this mode of protest have remained wedded to a statist perspective that fails to assess the normative commitments immanent to occupations themselves. Rather than examine the strategy of occupation through a legalistic lens, this article approaches a recent occupation through the theoretical apparatus of the ‘nomosphere’. This term – originally coined by David Delaney but substantially expanded here – allows for an assessment of the spatial, narrative and atmospheric orderings of the Umbrella Movement, a pro-democracy campaign that sustained a 79 day occupation in Hong Kong’s city centre in late 2014. This ‘nomospheric inquiry’ assesses the forms of ordering that animated the movement from within and seeks to foreground the lived and felt reality of the occupation rather than focus on its legalistic or constitutional significance alone. Published text available in Social and Legal Studies (2017).