This is an ethnography of waste in the streets of urban Hong Kong and a curatorial inquiry into the significance of its visuality. Presented in the form of a triptych, the dissertation probes and portrays fragments of urban life in Hong Kong, consequently opening up a new vista for intellectual and social engagement at the juncture of aesthetics, lived experiences, and power. While urban density provides for its equivalent in trash, much of Hong Kong’s refuse first lands in the streets. It is thereupon regulated to be rendered invisible through government organisation which corresponds with what Gay Hawkins (2007) calls “the modern imaginary of the tidy city” where order and hygiene are brought together towards a ‘smooth running of things’ (Žižek 2006 in Moore 2012). Hawkins (2007) also states, however, that no city 'can hide the excesses of consumption'. Indeed, no matter the attempts at the ridding of rubbish in the modern city, trash keeps reappearing. Also Hong Kong has a waste problem that goes beyond its exhausting landfills. ‘It’s everywhere!’, as its collectors indicate. Both formal and informal collectors continuously pick up trash. This conflicting location between desired tidiness, persistent trash, and constant collection, it is argued here, is a political sphere that is largely negotiated visually. Taking on the collectors’ views of “trash in place” (in the streets; the city), I therefore rethink what is commonly understood as “matter out of place” (Douglas 2002) in the modern city. Emphasising the significance of the visuality of trash – understanding visuality as “an embodied process of situation, positioning, re-memory, encounter, cognition and interpretation” (Rose and Tolia Kelly 2012) – I advance the ethnographic project with curatorial practices, putting the collectors’ perspectives on trash and those of local artists in dialogue. From this dialogue, this thesis presents three “panels” on waste in urban Hong Kong. The “panels” engage in matters of order and duty, social networks and places, and the visuality and instantaneous of the everyday, to then reconsider the aesthetics of trash and the politics of urban life more generally. The thesis presents a range of different stories, therefore, about the instant undoing of disorder in the modern city, the (re)valuing of discards via social networks of excess, and the “unordering of the sensible” by means of a repositioning of trash. The triptych in its entirety, finally, manifests possibilities for methodological innovations on everyday matters of aesthetics and power.

As stated in the Urban Renewal Strategy (2011), “the problem of urban decay” has been identified as the major task of urban renewal in Hong Kong. Rows of densely packed, “dilapidated” tenement buildings constitute the imaginary of a declining urban landscape that, much like the squatter areas of the 1950s, are seen to pose threats to public health and to the “prestige” of Hong Kong. I propose the concept of the discourse of ruination as a way to interrogate and at the same time, de-naturalise the pervasive assumption of the problem of decay, which serves to rationalise and perpetuate the cycle of destruction and renewal. I argue that crucial to this process is how certain sites are identified and framed as “pockets of decay”, which simultaneously “brings ruin upon” these spaces by rendering them as useless. This research investigates (educational) exhibitions, operated by the key actors of urban renewal to observe how exhibitions, as discursive practice, construct and consolidate knowledges about urban decay, and how it configures and normalises the logic of urban renewal. In the second case study, I present a critical reflection of the ongoing preservation project of the Blue House Cluster in order to highlight how heritage preservation is incorporated into the larger framework of urban renewal, and the erasures entailed in ‘preservation’ in the process of transforming ‘ruins’ to ‘heritage’. By converging insights derived from ‘ruin studies’, and studies on urban space and its power relations, this thesis aims to illuminate how the ‘discourse of ruination’ operates in the logic of urban renewal in Hong Kong.

This study looks at representations of the bakla in Philippine cinema from 1954 to 2015. I argue that the bakla, a local gender category that incorporates ideas of male homosexuality, effeminacy, cross-dressing, and transgenderism, has become a central figure in Philippine cinema. I examine the films of Dolphy, the actor who was the first to popularize bakla roles in mainstream cinema, and I outline several tropes that create the bakla image in movies: “classical” kabaklaan (being bakla), which involves crossdressing, effeminacy, and being woman-hearted; the conversion trope, where the bakla stubbornly resists being forcibly masculinized by the men that surround him; and women’s enabling of the bakla to perform femininity despite his male body. The bakla also becomes trapped in the dialectic between the genres of comedy and melodrama – the bakla then becomes either a comic relief character or a tragic character, someone who should be both pitied and admired for enduring tragic circumstances. Since the word bakla colloquially means both the gay man and the transgender woman, I also look at the intersections between the bakla and global transgender rights discourse in Philippine cinema. I argue that the bakla’s male body and his female heart mirror contemporary thinking about transgenderism, where a person’s birth-assigned sex does not match their gender identity. I look at films in the science fiction/fantasy adventure genre and examine how the male body is transformed into a female body – whether through medical or magical means – but the bakla gender category remains pervasive. I next look at independent films and how the camera constructs bakla sexuality in cinema by framing the male body as an object of desire. I also examine how the bakla have shifted their sexuality from the desiring the otherness of the macho lalake (masculine man) to desiring sameness in the form of other bakla (masculine gay men). Incidentally, this shift in the object of sexuality coincides with the shift in gender performance from “traditional” kabaklaan, with its elements of effeminacy and crossdressing, to a more homonormative image, mirroring the “modern” discourse of gay globality. Finally, I examine the contemporary Philippine celebrity star system and the popularity of bakla films within the last decade. I argue that Vice Ganda becomes representative of the ideal bakla, one who is affluent but still ‘reachable’; opinionated and politically engaged with LGBT rights; and finally, funny and comic in a way that is empowering for himself, but also in manners that are abrasive and offensive.

Ever since the commencement of the new millennium, intangible cultural heritage, the cultural concept and campaign promoted by the UNESCO has rapidly spread the world. In China, thousands of traditional cultures and everyday practices have been absorbed into the intangible heritage system over the past decade, which is reshaping people's perception and engagement with everyday life and traditions. Intangible cultural heritage as an 'imported' concept has been highly localised and resituated in contemporary China. I seek to examine how intangible heritage as a prevalent cultural phenomenon incorporates everyday practices into regional and national narratives in China in light of the marketization of traditional culture and the political and cultural agenda of 'the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation'. Furthermore, I attempt to historicise the concept of heritage in China's history of modernisation especially since around the establishment of the PRC in 1949. Through the historicised approach, I aim to demystify the imaginary of heritage and interrogate how cultural heritage turns from something to be reformed in the revolutionary era to something to be 'protected' and 'preserved' in the consumer society. Under such scope, l examine in detail the changes of mwywge (木鱼歌),a former popular everyday practice in the Pearl River Delta area, as it successively becomes an intangible heritage ofthe provincial and national levels. Despite its prevalence, muyuge was peripheral, marginalised in the both the cultural and geographical senses. I contextualise muyuge in the economic restructuring of the Pearl River Delta area and analyse the process of an everyday practice being reconstructed as an intangible heritage. Based on fieldwork interviews, policy analysis and media analysis, I particularly examine the reconstruction of muyuge's performing practices, the reshaping of muyuge practitioners and its connection with the restructuring of an industrial town. I argue that intangible heritage is gradually replacing previous values and understanding of folk culture with ideas of capital, market and nationalistic identities, and that the autonomy of everyday life has been dissolved and re-incorporated into the dominant discourse.

本論文希望把中國鄉村建設運動放置在更為複雜與動態的脈絡下，嘗試以一種有別于“成王敗寇”邏輯的敍述與視野，通過參與者獨特的視角，結合起微觀與宏觀層面，將具體實踐扣聯（articulate）到近代中國轉型的“百年激進”、“百年鄉村破壞”、“百年鄉建”這一主線中。以理解鄉村建設的生命力、深層意義與內在困境，並在此基礎上對已有各種“類型化”評價認識、“刻板化”參照座標及背後的“意義系統”進行梳理與反思。 為更好實現以上目的，筆者借助卡爾•波蘭尼“雙向運動”視野，但努力避免因生搬硬套而“削足適履”式的尋找或對應本土及“三農”領域的“雙向運動”，而是更多借鑒其“視野”上的啟示。希望通過該“視野”的幫助，讓筆者可以更好的探討那些被遮蔽與忽略的面向，進而解決困擾筆者的理論思考與現實實踐問題。同時，本論文結合了歷史與當代鄉村建設的各組案例，實踐所蘊含的複雜性與豐富性也希望可以推進筆者對“雙向運動”發生及運作機制所展開的討論。 正如標題所示，本論文希望從“自我保護”和“另類實踐”結合起來的角度重新理解鄉村建設的定位與特點及其與“主流”社會的複雜關係及互動。它們既是鄉村建設的主要意義，同時也決定其將一直面對著各種困境與矛盾張力。 本論文借鑒文化研究的思想資源及其對脈絡與扣聯的強調，希望以此打破“研究者-行動者”、“理論-實踐”的習慣性分割。同時希望能跳出一般分析所隱含“樂觀-悲觀”、“積極-消極”的二元框架，也挑戰將鄉村建設納入“效果論”、“好人好事說”和“效果論”這三種常見的類型化處理。故本文儘量避免事實羅列、簡單代言與一般辯護，而是呼應以個人參與鄉村建設的生命史，反觀其中的興奮、困惑、不甘、無奈等複雜情感與認識，除以此帶出對所存在社會基礎與宏觀環境的討論外，希望再次說明鄉村建設的動力與張力。

本研究試圖描繪香港細胞小組教會網絡短宣參加者的歷程及屬靈體驗，指出他們在旅途內的所見所聞受到了特定的宗教論述及旅遊操作所形塑和建構，而在此脈絡下產生的屬靈經驗可能不再純粹是神秘的、超自然和非物質的力量，相反它是可預期的文化產物，甚至不是本真(authentic)的屬靈經驗。然而，這種被建構的宗教及屬靈視野選擇性地把某些社會文化或問題 (如貧窮、種族主義、色情和異教文化)簡約歸類為邪惡他者的陰謀和控制，巧妙地隱藏或迴避了問題背後複雜而糾結的社會、經濟、政治及文化張力；同時鞏固了基督徒的身份認同及基督教的優越感，並相信基督教的價值觀獲得超越而且凌駕一切文化的合法性，然後將短宣內的屬靈經驗視為經歷神的重要證據。 此研究亦有助我們反思全球靈恩運動(Global Pentecostalism)的擴張，全球靈恩運動是近年基督教內增長最迅速的宗教運動，以屬靈恩賜、屬靈戰爭及繁榮神學(Prosperity Gospel)為主要特徵。除了依賴龐大的宗教媒體和超級教會等意識形態機器宣傳外，透過細緻的旅遊操作、宗教論述及靈性實踐，使短宣成為全球靈恩運動擴張的途徑之一，甚至讓這場源自美國的宗教運動轉化成本土的宗教內容。

This dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of Eurocentrism, Modernity,and their impacts on traditional Chinese cultural formations. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in Shenzhen, South China and Qinghai, West China, and explores the impacts of Chinese modernization on everyday forms of sociality. I conceive of Eurocentrism foremost as an Ontology, a mode-of-being grounded in a cosmology about the nature of reality and human being-and-becoming in the world. I argue that because Eurocentrism is an ontology predicated on materialism and individualism - “matter” being the basis of reality and the “individual”, the fundamental unit of society, respectively - it was able to manifest materially and to spread by way of coloniality. Its perpetuation was justified by two interrelated premises: that the West in being Modern was the avant-garde of progress and, concomitantly, that the history of the West should be the fate of all humanity. It is on the pretension of being Modernity’s progenitor, along with its corollary of the Modern being Universal, that Eurocentrism was materialized as an ontology throughout the globe. Because of Modernity’s historical imbrication with the West, one cannot speak of Modernity without implicating Eurocentrism and vice versa. The ideologies of Euro-Modernity have permeated the Chinese social fabric since the colonial encounters of the 19th C. The depth of their penetration renders the desire for Modernity in China today ubiquitous: being modern is verily the mark of progress. But since the Modern is of Eurocentric provenance, involving a certain cultural ontology that was itself the result of a momentous religio-cultural revolution in the West, my research is animated by the following query: How and to what extent has the Eurocentrism implied in Chinese modernity transformed traditional forms of Chinese sociality? My research thus consists of an ethnographic study of contemporary Chinese cultural change, examining Modernity’s impact on the most fundamental aspects of Chinese culture today: its forms of sociality. My studies in Shenzhen and Qinghai reveal that while much of Chinese life has adopted the standard ideologies and practices of Modernity, rich socio-cultural practices of communality and kinship remain. These practices of sociality are a crucial cultural resource making possible the felicities of everyday Chinese living. They stabilize and sustain Chinese socio-cultural life as it is confronted by the de-culturing effects of Modernity. This insight is noteworthy since it challenges the ubiquitous faith that becoming Modern will yield a better life in some hoped-for future, mostly by material progress. Against this, my findings suggest that the “better” life in China is already attainable in the here-and-now, inhering not in greater material progress but in the nourishment of the relations that have traditionally bound kith and kin. Hence, life’s meaning does not reside in the domain of matter, as per the illusion of Modernity; it is found in the ineffable realm of moral economy and sociality: in the mutuality-of-ourbeing. This insight harbours potential, for if acted upon, offers up all peoples the possibility of a human future beyond the monoculture of Modernism.

Over the last three decades, the shifts brought about by the ‘rise of China’ as a key player in global capitalism have had implications in a myriad of places, practices and imaginations. One such implication can be seen in the decade long presence of an African population in the southern city of Guangzhou. In this dissertation, I look into the dynamics informing this presence by focusing on transnational connections, relations and practices. I take up the call (coming from different fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences) for an analysis of transnationality grounded in the everyday experiences of individuals ‘on the move’ (physically and metaphorically). Accordingly, in this dissertation I provide an extensive ethnographic analysis, accompanied by theoretical formulations, to explain how is African presence in Guangzhou (re)produced and what are the possibilities for the future. Throughout these pages, I contend that transnationality entails much more than mere ‘movement’ across borders, and, as such, can be analysed from multiple perspectives. So, while I pay attention to issues of border crossing, connections beyond the reach of the state, and the reproduction of livelihoods from multiple locations, I also explore how is the transnational embodied in people and things (in emotions and aspirations, as well as in materialities), and embedded in placemaking processes. Hence, drawing from my fieldwork, I identify several ‘discursive sites of the transnational’ (i.e. neighbourhoods, things and practices, organisations, and aspirations, amongst others) from where, without necessarily undertaking international travel, one could critically observe and analyse how the complex material, political, affective and emotional geographies of transnationality unfold and expand. In this dissertation I present, thus, a ‘local’ multi-scalar approach to transnationality in the case study of Africans in Guangzhou. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, I present a historical overview of Guangzhou, focusing on the spatial conditions that facilitated the arrival (and continued presence) of foreigners in the city. I place an emphasis on highlighting how Africans articulate with China’s transprovincial migrants (and other populations) at the local level, and I problematise extant conceptualisations about the sociospatial formations emerging in the city. In Chapter 2, I explore how certain material formations have emerged after the arrival of foreigners to the city. I provide an ethnographic account of how multiple multiethnic interactions are mediated through certain objects and practices (that I construe as repositories, or sites, of the transnational). In Chapter 3, through the analysis of grassroots forms of organisation amongst Africans in the city, I discuss issues of placemaking and mobility and offer an insight into the complex relations between transnational movement, emplacement, identity, ‘homing’ and citizenship. In Chapter 4, I focus on the hopes, desires, and possibilities, what I call the ‘landscapes of aspiration’, amongst African musicians in the city. I argue that aspirations are crucial drives that not only move and motivate people but that help individuals to navigate through, and make sense of, their transnational journeys. Finally, Chapter 5 presents a theoretical discussion that advocates for a re-conceptualisation of the ‘transnational’ (and transnational mobilities) away from methodological nationalism. I argue that methodological nationalism is a burden that thwarts understandings of the multiple dimensions of contemporary forms of human movement.

Censorship is an important cultural regulatory instrument for the government of a society, or even a state. In certain socio-political settings, it can become a powerful administrative appartus (dispositif) and technique (techne) designed to render society governable. Censorship decisions often embody hegemonic views on social and political issues. No matter how virtuous the original intent maybe, the practice of censorship is inevitably geared to the social tensions surrounding issues of human rights and political dissent. The theory behind film censorship may once have been benign but banning or cutting a movie always involves an unnatural set of procedures and actions. This study examines this problem in the context of socio-political changes in Hong Kong. It is an enquiry into the evolution of political film censoship in its more conventional form to its full-fledged integration into other institutions and policies under today's 'on country, two systems' policy. It also analyses the discourse surrounding the changes in film censorship practices from the days of early cinema to Hong Kong in the 21st century. By contextualizing Hong Kong cinema from a historical and political perspective, the study of the Hong Kong experience aims to shed light on censorship's socio-political meanings for, and effects on, filmmakers and film production.

本論文疏理台灣民主化過程中，訴諸「超越藍綠統獨」的「台灣」民主共同體形構及其「中國」想像。「超越藍綠」是分析對象，包括1980年代末以來國民黨與民進黨的「藍綠」政治論述，以及「超越藍綠」的社會運動論述，想像「中國」是分析當中台灣主體形構的「中國」想像，參照「香港」是以香港的「中國」想像為對照，並試圖回應「今日香港明日台灣」的說法。 本論文分為四章節：「中國統一」與「台灣獨立」、國民黨與民進黨的「藍綠統獨」、知識批判界與社會運動的「超越藍綠」，香港的「中國」想像。本論文指出，台灣國民黨的反共「中國統一」與反國民黨的「台灣獨立」意義，是訴諸他者「中國」的威脅，建構政治現代化的自我。在此論述下，國民黨與民進黨在國家認同與兩岸主張上，形成「藍綠統獨對立」的立場，但各自政治論述又共同召喚面對「中國」（中共）的政治與經濟危機想像，共構政治上捍衛台灣「主權－民主」完整與經濟上追求兩岸「經濟發展共榮」的共同體想像。社運與批判知識界的「超越藍綠」，雖然企圖超越藍綠民粹化的對立，並修補政黨輪替後民進黨執政的「民主創傷」，但隨著國民黨重新執政與強調兩岸共榮的中國政策/超越藍綠」接合「藍綠」的「中國」迫切焦慮，從解決內部「民主創傷」轉為「捍衛台灣民主」、對抗外部「中國因素」的政治修辭，藍綠政黨也挪用此修辭標榜自身優於對方政黨的正當性。「超越藍綠」成為消費性的符碼，陷入「藍綠統獨」的迴圈。香港的「中國」想像，則凸顯「中國」內在於香港人民基層歷史與日常生活中，有難以切割的距離，進而問題化「香港」與「中國」的對立指稱，是台灣重新想像「中國」的可能參照。 知識批判上，本論文疏理台灣「藍綠統獨對立」問題的「中國」論述，作為未來「中國」轉向的討論基礎。政治意義上，本論文反思政治「藍綠」到社會運動「超越藍綠」的民粹化困境。最後，本論文嘗試提出「人民」與「階級」的「第三方」，作為超克前述困境與「中國」想像侷限的未來方向。