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Projecting from Possession Point: Hong Kong, Hybridity, and the Shifting Grounds of Imperialism in James Dalziel's Turn-of-the-Century Fiction
- Criticism
- Wayne State University Press
- Volume 46, Number 4, Fall 2004
- pp. 533-574
- 10.1353/crt.2005.0014
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Criticism 46.4 (2004) 533-574
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Projecting from Possession Point:
Hong Kong, Hybridity, and the Shifting Grounds of Imperialism in James Dalziel's Turn-of-the-Century Fiction
Ross G. Forman
University of London
"The population of Hongkong as far as I am concerned," wrote the satirical columnist "Betty" in the China Mail on the cusp of the twentieth century, "consists of [my husband] William and about three hundred more, none of whom are Chinese."1 Echoing common beliefs of Asia as static and atemporal, and asserting not only that history begins with the moment of colonization but also that it is contained within it, Betty's image of blankness and her alienation from the civilization that surrounded her on all sides reiterated in social terms what the 1898 edition of The Chronicle and Directory for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Siam, Netherlands India, Borneo, The Philippines, &C asserted in geographical terms: "Before the British ensign was hoisted on Possession Point the island can hardly be said to have had any history, and what little attaches to it is very obscure."2 (See figures 1 and 2.) In different ways, both Betty and the authors of the Chronicle and Directory imagine Hong Kong through British presence and Chinese absence. Their vision of Hong Kong as a palpable and unimagined community of a few hundred British residents typifies the attitude of many, if not most, of the expatriates who made the "fragrant harbour" their home at this time. It also closely follows the contours of the unilateral racial divide that postcolonial critics of the British context have often identified in studies of India and Africa.
Like Betty, narratives about the region by many British authors, including William Rivers (aka Paul King) and Julian Croskey, often constructed China as "the China Coast," a vaguely defined network of treaty ports and Hong Kong that comprised "foreign China" of the period. They implicitly (though not straightforwardly) Orientalized the country by ideologically reconfiguring the borders [End Page 533]
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Hong Kong in 1898, when Dalziel lived there. Between District No. 4 and District No. 5 is Possession Point. From The Chronicle and Directory, Directory, opposite page 243. By permission of the British Library, PP 2573ba, 1898. |
Click for larger view | Figure 2 Kowloon Peninsula in 1898, before the acquisition of the New Territories, north of Boundary Line. From The Chronicle and Directory, Directory, opposite page 309. By permission of the British Library, PP 23573ba, 1898. |
of the "Middle Kingdom" to coincide with the areas "opened up" to Western trade and commerce from the Treaty of Nanking forward.3 In so doing, they established a fixed boundary between sites of trade and an impenetrable, unknown market interior that remains "inscrutable," unreadable, and static.4 And they contributed to the type of worldview that allowed Charles Dilke to extol "the thoroughly English treaty ports of China" in his work Greater Britain. 5
The erasure of the Portuguese, Chinese, Eurasians, Indians, and other Asian peoples from the Hong Kong of imperial accounts—alongside the erasure of the dramatic flux, mobility, and transience of the port city's population that is implied in the fixity of Betty's figure of "about three hundred"—paints a familiar tableau of a colonial subjectivity grounded in isolation. So too does the institutionalization of colonial boundaries as instantiations of an East-West divide.6 It is a picture copied in cantonments across the British Empire, but it is patently not one drawn from reality. It is, in fact, a willful attempt to envisage colonial society according to a utopian model of integrity and, as such, part of a forceful strategy to impose sameness on a landscape of difference, as well as to figure diverse colonial canvases across a broad geographical spectrum as equally empty surfaces.
Erasure is necessarily an ideological act, aimed at making something problematic disappear. Yet...
