Hong Kong in Transition: Photography and Liberation at the End of the Pacific War

Abstract

This article thinks with and against photographs taken by British military photographers in Hong Kong at the end of World War II, during the transition from Japanese back to British colonial rule. Building on Lisa Yoneyama's account of the “postwar settlements” through which “the war's meaning” was defined and contained, I situate the photographs as part of a broader British effort to reassert the legitimacy of colonial rule at a crisis point for empire by refiguring Asian liberation as an affordance, or synonym, of British (re)occupation. At the same time, I read the photographs for what they can tell us about the liberatory knowledges that Asian colonial subjects had cultivated, or might have, throughout years of war and occupation. In this way, the article meditates on the predicaments of liberation in an Asian place where the horizon of decolonization continues to be difficult to discern, focusing on the care work necessary for survival as a crucial site and practice of liberatory political imagining.