The Aesthetics of Sand: Reclaiming Hong Kong’s Unsettled Grounds

Abstract

Thi s v e r sio n is b ei n g m a d e a v ail a bl e in a c c o r d a n c e wit h p u blis h e r p olici e s.S e e h t t p://o r c a . cf. a c. u k/ p olici e s. h t ml fo r u s a g e p olici e s. Co py ri g h t a n d m o r al ri g h t s fo r p u blic a tio n s m a d e a v ail a bl e in ORCA a r e r e t ai n e d by t h e c o py ri g h t h ol d e r s .

Cultural geographies II: In the critical zone? – Environments, landscapes and life

“…Cultural geographic explorations of landforms as diverse as swamps, rivers, bogs, shoals and caves, marshal-associated matter and forces such as mud, sand, ice, currents and tides to challenge what Willie Wright (2020: 1134) observes as the ‘centrality of landscapes to global projects of power’ (e.g. slavery, capitalism and colonialism (see for example Brigstocke, 2021; Dillon, 2022; Jamieson, 2017)). Wright 's (2020: 1136) studies of the ‘Morphology of Marronage’, for example, considers swampy topographies as ‘unruly environments which are often space [s] less fully subjugated to capital than others’.…”

Materiality, Race, and Speculative Aesthetics

“…experience that troubles or crosses the threshold of sense, intelligibility, and legibilityas with Glissant's 'opacity', Rancière's 'dissensus', or Benjamin's 'experience without a subject'. This is central to Brigstocke's (2021) historical account of colonial power in Hong Kong, which asks what a speculative form of thinking with, and even as, sanda key infrastructural material of modernitymight reveal about the aesthetics of colonial urbanism. Brigstocke's paper owes a debt to Benjaminian ruination, but departs from Benjamin's approach by decomposing the city into a 'sandy heap' rather than a pile of rubble.…”

“…The essay's reflexive form, stressing gaps, fragments and misplaced documents in the archive, articulates a form of postcolonial narrative that story-tells the city 'without scripting it into predetermined forms that fit into established racialised imaginaries of the Third World city, Orientalized city, or a city of the Arab Spring'. Brigstocke (2021) connects the contemporary crisis of the global sand commons to a history of sand conflict that goes back to the earliest years of the colony and thinks with sand as a colonial archive that is mixed, uncatalogued, undervalued, and yet a window onto the foundations of colonial urbanism. This enables Brigstocke to reach for a form of post-colonial critique that resurfaces and reclaims an urban landscape that has long relied on land reclamation (pouring concrete into the sea) as its most reliable spatial fix.…”

Interstitial and Abyssal geographies

“…In this paper, we draw out two tendencies, or heuristics, in contemporary work which employ islands to challenge modern reasoning in different ways: what we call 'interstitial' and 'abyssal' analytics. 1 Interstitial approaches employ islands as exemplars of understandings of boundary permeability and of relations of entangled becoming (Brigstocke, 2021;Hessler, 2018;Spahr, 2005). This work contributes to and draws from broader conceptual developments in actor network theory, new materialism and more-than-human geographies.…”