Author: Agnes Shuk-mei Ku
Source: American Journal of Cultural Sociology
Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41290-025-00259-7
Abstract
This article engages with recent debates in the cultural sociology of literature. Building on theories of iconicity, I propose the concept of iconic engagement to highlight variegated modes of literary engagement with reality, as well as the interplay between authorship, text and (intermediary) reception, in the production of iconic consciousness. Taking Hong Kong as a case study, this article unravels the city’s changing cultural imaginaries by studying two prominent literary novels by Hong Kong writers from two generations, the 1970s and the 2020s. Xi Xi’s My City is an exemplary work that captures a youthful sensibility within a cultural imaginary of the urban/local in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, in the context of political unification, Hong Kong has confronted the question of identity. In particular, the 2020s have represented an era of momentous political change for the city, accompanied by a massive wave of emigration. The meanings of “Hongkong-ness” are being renegotiated and rearticulated through old and new cultural imaginaries. As in Lee Chi Leung’s The Melancholy of Trees, the cultural imaginary of the local is being expanded to a broader conception of translocality that iconizes an identity in a state of liminality.