Burst Into Action: The Changing Spectacle of Glamour Heroines in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema

Abstract

My question for now is: in what ways have the new currents of transnationality affected existing forms of cultural sensibility in the ‘post-colony’? Realised as a system of representation of the global popular, recent articulations of popular experience tend to be absorbed into generic cross-cultural media representations shared on the glocal level of operation by cultural producers, consumers and practitioners across geographical borders. In this paper, I shall focus on the changing spectacle of ‘the local’ through its cinematic action (along with its alternative heroine mediation), in light of such a transnational articulation as the emerging dominant. My purpose is to examine how local action has been re-imagined and can be re-aligned in relation to the specifically historical, national and postcolonial mode of imagination under the contemporary glocal context of the Hong Kong ‘Special Administrative Region’ (HKSAR), as this particular post-colony is officially renamed.