Pandemic Resilience: Deextinction and the Hong Kong Cantophone
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Published:January 2024
Chapter 3 examines three filmic projects on SARS produced and released in Hong Kong in 2003: Project 1:99, a compilation of eleven shorts by fifteen local directors; City of SARS, a low-budget movie featuring an ensemble cast of local stars; and Golden Chicken 2, a social comedy about a female sex worker who allegorizes the Hong Kong spirit of survival and resilience. The chapter explores how the local entertainment industry, long experienced in narrating Hong Kong as a subimperial post/colony faced with cultural annihilation, marshalled a unique set of extinction/deextinction tropes to tell Hong Kongers' SARS stories. The chapter focuses on these films' Cantophone aesthetics, their inside references to local history and culture, with emphasis on Cantonese sounds and vernaculars, as one nonwestern provincializing of global pandemic discourse. The chapter coda discusses some shifts in Hong Kong popular culture in the post-SARS era and Sam Hui's COVID-19 virtual concert.
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