In postcolonial Hong Kong, the Rule of Law inherited from the colonizers has acquired the status ... more In postcolonial Hong Kong, the Rule of Law inherited from the colonizers has acquired the status of a grand narrative capable of masking its own injustices. This is made possible by the Occidentalization strategies employed by those in power, namely the government and the legal profession. The major injustice of the Rule of Law is in its construction of the standard of reasonableness. It is argued that for lin guistic, ethnic and structural reasons, reasonableness as construed in the legal dis course is culture-biased and marginalizes qing, which is a very important element of the cultural roots of the Hong Kong Chinese. The influence of this marginalization of qing is not limited to the legal discourse itself, but is further extended to the public sphere. In turn, in relation to the Rule of Law, the public sphere is rendered unable to perform the task of a 'warning system with sensors' as desired by Habermas.
In the 1980s, the academy witnessed the advent of postcolonial discourse. Numerous academic confe... more In the 1980s, the academy witnessed the advent of postcolonial discourse. Numerous academic conferences, books and journals on postcolonialism appeared one after another. In the academic periphery, many viewed postcolonial discourse as a site of resistance against Western cultural hegemony. With the rise of the discourse of globalization in the 1990s, postcolonial discourse, no longer riding on the whitecaps of the latest critical wave, seemed to have lost much of its currency and critical energy. On the face of it, many central issues of postcolonial discourse, such as colonizer/colonized, East/West and center/margin turned out to be no longer applicable to the global era, when national borders blurred. Yet in the new global/local paradigm, the above binaries continued to cast a shadowy specter. Many academic journals focusing on postcolonialism, such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies (online) were born in the late 1990s. In a sense, there appears to be an intricate relationship between the discourses of postcolonialism and globalism. Simon During pointed to their "dialectical" relationship (During 1998) and Arif Dirlik tried to relate the two by asking the question "When exactly … does the 'postcolonial' begin?" (Dirlik 1997: 52). One might then ask, is postcolonial discourse becoming less relevant in an age of globalization? The influence of postcolonial discourse on other forms of discourses is too profound to be easily dismissed. "As the domain of the postcolonial has expanded," Dirlik (2000: 1) notes, "postcolonial criticism has infiltrated discourse that have origins quite independently of postcolonialism, and in turn has been infiltrated by those discourses, so that it is quite impossible
In postcolonial Hong Kong, the Rule of Law inherited from the colonizers has acquired the status ... more In postcolonial Hong Kong, the Rule of Law inherited from the colonizers has acquired the status of a grand narrative capable of masking its own injustices. This is made possible by the Occidentalization strategies employed by those in power, namely the government and the legal profession. The major injustice of the Rule of Law is in its construction of the standard of reasonableness. It is argued that for lin guistic, ethnic and structural reasons, reasonableness as construed in the legal dis course is culture-biased and marginalizes qing, which is a very important element of the cultural roots of the Hong Kong Chinese. The influence of this marginalization of qing is not limited to the legal discourse itself, but is further extended to the public sphere. In turn, in relation to the Rule of Law, the public sphere is rendered unable to perform the task of a 'warning system with sensors' as desired by Habermas.
In the 1980s, the academy witnessed the advent of postcolonial discourse. Numerous academic confe... more In the 1980s, the academy witnessed the advent of postcolonial discourse. Numerous academic conferences, books and journals on postcolonialism appeared one after another. In the academic periphery, many viewed postcolonial discourse as a site of resistance against Western cultural hegemony. With the rise of the discourse of globalization in the 1990s, postcolonial discourse, no longer riding on the whitecaps of the latest critical wave, seemed to have lost much of its currency and critical energy. On the face of it, many central issues of postcolonial discourse, such as colonizer/colonized, East/West and center/margin turned out to be no longer applicable to the global era, when national borders blurred. Yet in the new global/local paradigm, the above binaries continued to cast a shadowy specter. Many academic journals focusing on postcolonialism, such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies (online) were born in the late 1990s. In a sense, there appears to be an intricate relationship between the discourses of postcolonialism and globalism. Simon During pointed to their "dialectical" relationship (During 1998) and Arif Dirlik tried to relate the two by asking the question "When exactly … does the 'postcolonial' begin?" (Dirlik 1997: 52). One might then ask, is postcolonial discourse becoming less relevant in an age of globalization? The influence of postcolonial discourse on other forms of discourses is too profound to be easily dismissed. "As the domain of the postcolonial has expanded," Dirlik (2000: 1) notes, "postcolonial criticism has infiltrated discourse that have origins quite independently of postcolonialism, and in turn has been infiltrated by those discourses, so that it is quite impossible
Uploads
Papers by chu Hiu Wai