Dubbese fu recuperates the dismissal of the ‘poorly dubbed’ English-language voice tracks in the
Hong Kong kung fu films that became globally popular and profitable starting in 1973 as a position
that improperly valorizes only the perfect lip synchronization version of the audiovisual contract.
Instead of one, there is a total of three possibilities with Italy representing a looser version and the
films of Hong Kong’s kung fu wave representing the imperfect version. The internationalization
strategy adopted by Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest identified the necessity of voice dubbings
into the target market’s language, which in the case of the United States, required English dubbings
since the goal was to become appealing to mainstream rather than art cinema audiences. The
history of English dubbing studios in Hong Kong, the key individuals who made it happen, and
the working conditions of the dubbing process are recreated to uncover how imperfect lip
synchronization became a new aesthetic norm.

opening paragraph:Time-lapse video amplifies the speed of traffic, people, and their movement around the cityscape of Hong Kong. In a video, "The Best Is Yet to Come," dedicated to promoting Hong Kong as "Asia's World City," for example, writers used the magnification of speed to emulate the dynamics of capital's never-ending flow.1 Time-lapse brands Hong Kong and creates a visual metaphor for the elusiveness of "connectivity" that depicts Hong Kong culture as one of rapidity and instant gratification. Recently, speed has been foremost on the mind of Hong Kongers caught in the political quagmire surrounding what has been lambasted as "white elephant" projects devoted to more speedy connections to mainland China. Time-lapse forms the idealized mirror image of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, which, without station stops cuts traveling time to Guangzhou from two hours down to forty-eight minutes. The fantasy of uninhibited speed occludes the controversy of the co-location agreement that ceded Hong Kong territory to the mainland allowing for the practice of Chinese law on Hong Kong soil in direct counter-indication of Hong Kong's mini-constitution. "One train, two systems" directly challenges "One country, two [End Page 619] systems." Plagued by financial woes and construction setbacks, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau mega bridge connects Hong Kong to the Pearl River Delta and puts each city within an hour's commute of each other. Faster and more efficient connections between locations in southern China cemented a new geographical and economic proposition envisioned by officials as the Greater Bay Area. In the context of Hong Kong, faster connections also compress space by supposedly bringing "two systems" closer in a more harmonious temporal and political network.

From the works of Auguste Perret to Tadao Ando, current literature in the history of Modern Architecture often describe the choice of exposing concrete finishes as the architect’s intention to maintain ‘honesty’ in material expression and in doing so, responded to the dogmas of Modern Architecture. These literature largely focused on exposed in-situ concrete texture and painted the architect as the mastermind behind this aesthetic choice. This paper argues that cement-based building finishes, such as cement plaster and terrazzo, played an equally important role in defining the aesthetics of Modern Architecture. The diffusion of these cement finishes was a combined effort of industrialists, researchers, contractors, clients, and architects, and involved an uneven process of experimentations, local adaptations and transferal of techniques among different nations.

This paper attempts to establish this conceptual network and name some of the key actors. In 1936, the UK Building Research Board in London were tasked to research the appearance of exposed cement and concrete. A gigantic ‘Accelerated Weathering Machine’ was built to study the effect of weather on the cement and concrete finishes. An expedition team was sent to mainland Europe to study cement plastering techniques in other countries. The study concluded that the technique of cement plastering in Britain was far from satisfactory due to lack of skilled labour and specialised knowledge. Meanwhile, in the British colonial Hong Kong and Penang, cement plaster and terrazzo were used extensively in building projects throughout the 1930s. A specialised cement plaster called ‘Shanghai Plaster’ was popular in colonial Southeast Asia regions and was used in both private and public projects. Such ‘unevenness’ within the Empire demonstrated that the diffusion of modern construction techniques and knowledge were far more complex than an unilateral transfer from the coloniser’s ‘metropolis’ to the colonised ‘outposts’. Western architects and communities in the these regions often had to sought local or regional adaptations of Western building technologies, creating hybridised techniques that are specific to the colonial context.

Using lesser-known private building projects in British colonial Hong Kong and Penang between 1930s and 1950s, this paper seek to re-assemble the network of anonymous actors through which the modern techniques in exposed cement finishes were transferred. It argues that Modern Architecture in the region were not solely a result of Western cultural domination during the colonial era, but rather a process of intercultural and transnational exchanges and hybridisation through a network of less well-known, or even anonymous actors. Such a model is crucial in shaping a postcolonial understanding of the cultural processes in building design and construction.

This paper examines the dynamics between cultural ideals and political powers enacted in women’s cross-dressing performance in Cantonese opera, a regional operatic form that has been shared by Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Guangdong in mainland China since the early twentieth century. Despite their popularity in Hong Kong, cross-dressing actresses are sometimes viewed as “fake men” or only substitutes for male actors. Contextualizing this stigma within Hong Kong’s colonial history and the cultural inferiority complex deeply rooted among Hongkongers, I investigate how the discourse of gender authenticity intersects with that of the cultural authenticity of Chineseness. This paper shows that the female cross-dressing body in Cantonese opera is not an appropriation of privileged masculinity or Chineseness. Rather, it is a performative means for problematizing orthodox and peripheral Chineseness.

In protests, music and sound often play a cardinal role in unifying individuals via social performances in which they voice out mutual political demands. During the 79-day Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in the autumn of 2014, many forms of music and sound that are expected in local protests were heard, including slogan-chanting, booing, and the collective singing of Cantopop songs. However, performances of “Happy Birthday to You” and other “inappropriate” songs—that is, “nonsensical” events—were heard as well. These sonic events first occurred unexpectedly and ironically in the demonstration sites, but were nonetheless grasped and performed as a political act, functioning as nonviolent weapons used to “attack” political opponents. These nonsensical musical acts soon began to make sense or sound meaningful as protesters recontextualized the lighthearted nature of these songs to particular situations in the protest and adapted this paradoxical experience into the idea of 無 厘 頭 mouleitau, a cultural phenomenon that appears in Hong Kong films and other media platforms to represent a sense of localism. Drawing from insights in musicology, sound studies and critical theory, this article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to study the role of these unexpected sounds in the Umbrella Movement. In particular, this article explores how and why nonsensical musical acts were appropriated and put to political use in the protest space.

Early screen culture in Hong Kong remains underexplored, despite the rigorous work of film historians. According to new evidence on film exhibitions in Hong Kong from 1897 to late 1907, early screen practice was multi-faceted. It ranged from technological marvels and the co-programming of motion pictures with musicals and magic shows to the enjoyment of theatre spaces, in addition to the on-screen excitement projected to the audience. Given the heterogeneity of early film screening in the Crown Colony, I present three accounts of early screen culture in colonial Hong Kong: the primacy of technical marvels and the management of cinema machines; the symbiosis between motion pictures and established forms of entertainment; and the emergence of film exhibition as a commercial institution. To understand the implications of cinema in connection to colonial governance, I use the concept of dispositif, a machine of display and a device of power relations, to analyse the role of cinema in the deployment of colonial power.

This paper elaborates upon a cultural logic of overseas Chinese nationalism. Around the early twentieth century, some bourgeois members of overseas Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Seas mobilised Confucianism as an ethno‐symbol. The latter helped the overseas Chinese bourgeoisie to counter the quest for greater secularisation and to confront the surge of anti‐imperialist movements. The implication of this research is threefold. First, this research seeks to recentre the role of overseas Chinese in China's modern transformation. Second, this study calls for decentring the May Fourth agendas in the understanding of overseas Chinese nationalism. Third, the project tries to situate overseas Chinese nationalism in an extraterritorial space, including the Confucian zone created in the dialogical connections between Confucian intellectual elites (such as Zheng Xiaoxu and Chen Huanzhang) and overseas Chinese bourgeois networks that converged in Hong Kong and spread transnationally.

Creative class workers are highly mobile, yet the struggles, disruptions and
inequalities that emerge in their new, trans-local, experiential geographies are
usually erased in the upbeat, Florida-inflected narrative on creative work and
creative class mobility. This article aims to break open discussions of creative
class mobility with the insertion of affect. It argues for the inclusion of
personal, affective experiences to complicate the fluidity, the ease, the resolve
that are usually assumed in the imaginary of being mobile. Furthermore, the
article builds on the increasing volume of scholarship on affective labour –
conceptualized as the affective dimensions of labour – but via a different
route. I argue that any examination of affective labour may expand from the
affect in labour, to how labour affects; from affective labour to labour affects.
This inquiry brings to mobility studies the resonances between moving
(geographically) and being moved (affectively), supplementing cultural
studies’ critique of creative work with precarity of a different category, that of
the affective. The empirical section presents the affective accounts of three
re-located creative workers. They show us that mobility is never as frictionless
as it sounds, and doing what people love may well come at the cost of losing
those whom they love. I tease out three themes for further connections with
affect: ethos and values, gender, and technology.