Mythicizations of the nationless: Hong Kong spectral temporality

Focusing on Hong Kong's unique postcoloniality oscillating in between nationalization and nationlessness, this paper conceptualizes this particular tension as the perfect medium for materializing and valorizing specters to redeem temporality and to invent originality for a community. Delineating the temporalizations orchestrated via exorcism and clairvoyance, this exploration scrutinizes the correlations between communal imagination, spectrality and time to achieve a historical conglomeration mixed by facts and imagination of the city's colonial past and the ongoing nationalization. Hong Kong spectrality, as temporalized by the clairvoyant, serves as a critique against the universality of nationalism with its unique temporal configuration and interrogates the legitimacy of colonial and postcolonial histories. To scrutinize Hong Kong mythicizations is also to trace the paths where ghosts are summoned and materialized in order to reclaim a sense of originality and to redeem a temporal experience peculiarly Hong Kong, which also foregrounds the city's cultural alterity in the processes of decolonization and nationalization among its Asian neighbors.