Wednesday 11 April 2012 at 09:30 - 11:30


CITIES, MOBILITY, PLACE AND SPACE McGhee, D.P.


ROGER STEVENS 07 University of Southampton


Dignity, Happiness and Being Able to Live a 'Normal Life' in the UK: An Examination of Post-accession Polish Migrants' Transnational Autobiographical Fields


This paper examines data from a qualitative study of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. We examine the articulation and implications of our interviewees' comparisons between their lives in the UK and their recollections of what their lives were like in Poland. These comparisons are animated by autobiographical comparisons between 'material deprivations' in Poland relative to their experiences of 'material gratification' in the UK. In the paper we examine themes from our interviews such as 'dignity', 'normality', 'happiness' and the 'affordability' and 'ease' of life in the UK (compared to Poland). By so doing we examine what Robin Cohen (following Soysal) calls the new typography of practices that we suggest have emerged as a result of post- accession Polish migration to the UK. We focus on the discursive practices that define what Habib calls migrants' continuing relationship with their 'homeland'. We conceptualize this, following Levitt and Schiller, as a transnational autobiographical field. We suggest that the discursive practices in this field and the contradictory emotions evoked in and by them are performative devices that sustain our participants' 'home-making' practices in the UK but also make problematic their permanent return to Poland.


Chan, S-H. The Politics of History and Memory in The Post-colonial Hong Kong


The claim for 'collective memory' becomes increasingly important cultural basis for the struggles against the demolition of 'historical monuments' like the Star Ferry and Queen's Piers in the urban redevelopment projects in post-colonial Hong Kong. These case studies suggest that the proliferation of these and many other urban cultural politics on history and memory in the post-colonial context is symptomatic of the renewed feeling of Hong Kong as 'home', in Bhabah's sense. This is a cultural awakening from the anachronistic historical consciousness in the late- colonial period which took the form of a heightened attention placed on the future, induced mainly by political anxiety, upon a hedonist and thus escapist presentism contingent on the economic prosperity. The fast- disappearing historical-spatial spectacles in the development of the urban landscape becomes important registers of Hong Kong 'past' and 'heritage', in the cultural imagination Hong Kong society as a decolonised, authentic 'home', to be preserved. Cultural nostalgia and the politics of history and memory in Hong Kong—a society with political decolonisation without nation-building—reflects not only the revival of suppressed memory of Hong Kong society after a sustained period of 'unhomeliness' in the colonial era. The cultural attempt in crafting a 'localness' in continuity with Hong Kong (colonial) past that is felt to be threatened in the socio-political integration with China symbolises also the ambivalence of Hong Kong society in the ongoing cultural negotiation between 'the local' and 'the nation' in the cultural formation of Hong Kong society.


Shin, E. University of Oxford


After The Japanese Came and Went: The Colonial City in Korean Cinema in Relation to Post-colonial Korean-Japanese Exchanges


Today's South-Korean city is considered a megametropolis overflowing with skyscrapers, lighted billboards, corporate spaces, and cutting-edge technologies. Yet it also harbors vestiges of the past, evidenced in its Buddhist temples and palaces. Between such extremes exists an uneasy sense of national identity in relation to the city itself, one associating urbanization with the colonial experience: before the Japanese came, there were no industrialized cities; afterwards, could cities be imagined any differently? Urban images from Korean films made during the occupation reveal a panorama dominated by Japanese presence. At the opening of Angels on the Streets, for instance, a Seoul street is obscured by superimposed Japanese credits; the scene, like the city, has been colonized by Japanese characters. overwhelmed by Japanese paraphernalia.


In Straits of Chosun and Dear Soldier, the city streets are similarly


Through film, this paper addresses the idea of the post-colonial Korean city as a site of multiple allegorical tensions: (1) fascination with and repulsion towards modernity in Korean colonial films, which identify Korean culture with traditionalism and the opposite (electricity, cars, western dress) with Japan; (2) nostalgia for early 20th century Korea evinced by current South-Korean filmmakers (not for Japanese rule, of course, but for the 'innocence' romantically attributed to Koreans then) set against the fact that South Korea's modernity is now regarded as a source of pride by the Korean community; (3) post-colonial antagonism between Korea and Japan, the latest twist being Japanese protest over Korea's 'cultural colonization' of Japan through pop music and media.


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