Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities

The following is an introduction to the latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, edited by Full Stop Fellow Michelle Chan Schmidt. You can purchase the issue here or subscribe at our Patreon page.

There is something very definite about dis‐appearance, a kind of pathology of presence . . . The threat [is] that Hong Kong as a subject will be presented and represented in terms of some of the old binarisms whose function it is to restabilize differences and domesticate change, for example, binarisms like East and West, or tradition and modernity … This is dis‐appearance in a very specific sense (imagine the term as hyphenated), in that it gives us a reality that is not so much hidden as purloined, a reality that is overlooked because it is looked at in the old familiar ways.

—Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997)

(-): a hyphen between parentheses, a cipher of hybridity that enables absence and misapprehension in the breath of the same word. From “disappearance” to “dis‐appearance,” semantics shift across the hyphen’s border. In the parenthesized frontier that bounds it, postcolonial polarities—East/West, tradition/modernity, metropole/margin, reality/representation, presence/absence—dissolve and swirl together, undoing the slash of the “old familiar ways” of looking.

The hyphen is a bridge, an overpass, an elevated walkway, a floating arcade: it joins disappearance and disappearance across the breadth of the distance between them, which is the difference between the physical and the psychological, the real and the perceived. Walk across the bridge of this “(-),” and if you stand by the railing and look over the cityscape, you’ll see both landscapes of dis(-)appearance simultaneously, overlaid.

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Photos by Michelle Chan Schmidt.
Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. Photos by Michelle Chan Schmidt.

One is the actual, angular scalpel of the city’s buildings, edged with brutalism and decay and demolition and gentrification, and the corrupt gleam of speculative capitalism (a plot of land in Hong Kong’s Central district sold for 3 billion USD in 2017, a global record of 97 thousand USD per square foot). New or reperpetuated forms of imperialism also actively devastate cities and murder their citizens, as we continue to witness in Aleppo, Gaza, Kabul, Khartoum, and Kyiv. This is disappearance: that which tangibly destroys and damages, which numbs the potentials of urban space as a safe space of human cohabitation, creativity, and spontaneity, and suffocates the future imaginaries of community and justice in the city.

The other form of dis‐appearance is not “hidden so much as purloined,” but, though invisible, is no less insidious to the human experience of imagination and life. Rising water and temperature levels, land reclamation, silenced dissent, enforced amnesia, exiled populations: these are subtler intersections of politics and power that misrecognize a city’s culture and collective memory, and subject it to subversion by attempting to suppress the changes of its psychic landscapes. Continued or former colonialisms are particularly menacing, compounding past disappearances with the present, confounding attempts to reclaim a city’s development for its inhabitants. There, on the (-) of the raised walkway in the vanishing city, you inhabit all dis(-)appearances at once, spidering out through history and space.

Causeway Bay and Hung Hom, Hong Kong. Photos by Nicole Le.
Causeway Bay and Hung Hom, Hong Kong. Photos by Nicole Le.

Dis(-)appearance is more often a natural and neutral force than a nefarious one, intrinsic to the bonds of living and belonging, a condition of biological entropy. It is only when coopted with the objective to control, “to restabilize differences and domesticate change,” that dis(-)appearance becomes something to challenge and resist. (Post)colonial cities—multidimensional, multiply dispossessed—embody the vitality of these historical changes most vibrantly. Caught within the extant tensions and intentions of global imperialism, their spaces and populaces are also most vulnerable to restabilization and domestication. “Above all,” writes Abbas, “hyphenation refers not to the conjunctures of ‘East’ and ‘West,’ but to the disjunctures of colonialism and globalism.”

This special issue of the Full Stop quarterly focuses on literary representations of dis(-)appearing (post)colonial cities across the Eurasian continent, from Lublin to Manila through Istanbul and Cairo. While its gaze is mostly limited to a single landmass on Earth, one to which much critical attention has been directed, its essays aim to expand the “old familiar ways” of looking at empire, so as not to misdiagnose the pathologies of imperial power imposing dis(-)appearance today. And though some of the cities in it have been loci of imperialism in their own right, this issue centers on more recent displays of historical injustice, including in the cities colonized by Soviet Russia, the current Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. Other essays explore the borderlands or nepantla around these cities, as well as the colonial systems, languages, and infrastructures of degradation that continue to misrecognize and appropriate their citizens. These (post)colonial cities—Cairo, Hà Nội, Istanbul, Lublin, Hong Kong, Kyiv, Manila, Dubai, Tirana, and a fictional city in West Timor, amongst others—are texts of abuse and injustice, archives of exploitation and erasure.

Something sets us looking for a place, but it sets us looking for a time, too, of memory and nostalgia, or of utopia, detached from the real and terrible conditions of the (post)colonial city. What is this something? These essays argue that it is dis(-)appearance, or rather the instinct or intention to transgress it, subvert it. As they look at the literatures of the (post)colonial urban space, they engage with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (despite its Orientalizing perspective) and Michel de Certeau’s psychogeographic concept of walking the city in a refusal to “overlook reality.” These essays walkthrough the works that they analyze as though they were cities themselves. Together, they form a literary atlas of their own, mapping the cities—their streets, their structures of domination, their empty spaces—inscribed within these novels, these expansive memoirs, these poetics of dis(-)appearance. The path of relation that joins these essays is in how they each grasp the material and immaterial remnants of imperial power, ingrained in the (post)colonial cityscape at the intersection of space and time.

So we walk through Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, these urban sites of memory, to unravel dis(-)appearance. What these textual perambulations reveal isn’t the totalizing, mythic history of the (post)imperial state, but the fragmented memories and sensual experiences of the individual citizen, translated into the collective and geographic mind of a living, dis(-)appearing city. These literary texts are not purely “a mirror held up to reality,” nor “a hammer with which to shape it,” as Bertolt Brecht would have had it. Like water, they enact a slower, murkier counter-process of reflection and synthesis, submerging yet preserving, recognizing the city in the flux of its change.

By their will to remember, these works transform the cities they represent into sites of dis(-)appearance, lieux de dis(-)par(u)tion, as symbolically weighted as Nora’s sites of memory. The essays collected here concur on this: as (post)colonial cities dis(-)appear, the texts that remember them compound dis(-)appearance as they counter them. They enable these dis(-)appearances by recognizing them textually, while their substances preserve the traces of the lived or imagined city. These essays aim to remedy and rectify dis(-)appearance, starting with the translational framework of “relatability” that informs how Western-centric readers relate to the (post)colonial city, re-orienting and sublating distance and language. In them, the dis(-)appearing city becomes a space of fruitive possibility.

“But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared,” wrote Calvino. As you cross the hyphen into the realm of dis(-)appearance, set to look for an ideal place, the bridge to binary reality dissolves in your wake; and all distances would be erased.

***Italicized quotations are from “Crossing from Guangdong” by Sarah Howe, from Loops of Jade (2015).


Michelle Chan Schmidt was Full Stop’s 2023 Editorial Fellow, and edits fiction for Asymptote Journal. She has contributed creative and critical writing to Full Stop, La Piccioletta Barca, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, Asymptote, and others.

Instagram: @mcshkdk__ | X: @mcshkdk | More: linktr.ee/mcshkdk


 
 
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