“Resurfacing Hong Kong’s Star Ferry: Inter-Island Asian Imaginaries”
2025

“From Hong Kong Island’s 1842 Treaty of Nanjing ceding to Great Britain to its contemporary relationship with Mainland China, this “Special Administrative Region” of fragmented islands under the present-day “One Country Two System” policy has always been a transspatial and transtemporal site to think through the many representations of Asianness. Specifically, this contribution resurfaces the history of Hong Kong’s Star Ferry to address the question of the Asian Century. Today, deceptively contained as a picturesque symbol of Hong Kong, forefronting the ferry’s origins through the urban humanities methodology of thick mapping reveals one reading of pan-Asian alliances and inter-Asian competitions that shape rhetorics of “East” and “West” within the city’s complex cultural narrative...”


Verge 11.2, Peer Reivew Journal