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

Abstract

Sand is a key material foundation of modern cities. In Hong Kong, a city founded in British mercantile imperialism, the extraction of sand needed for construction and reclamation projects has always been tied up with violent dispossession. Experimenting with the forms and poetics of postcolonial and new materialist critical theory, and thinking with sand’s distinctive materialities and forms of drift, this paper develops a speculative critique of Hong Kong’s sandy infrastructure. Hong Kong’s colonial and post-colonial authority is legitimized by a continual process of surfacing and resurfacing, claiming and reclaiming. By evoking the process of saltation, one of sand’s distinctive mechanisms of movement, the paper uncovers utopian potential in sand’s unsettled qualities, searching for a new ethics of ground-down grounds.

沙子是现代城市重要的物质基础。香港建于英国的商业帝国主义，其建筑和填海工程需要提炼沙子，这个过程始终和暴力掠夺有关。通过对后殖民主义和新唯物主义批判理论的形式和诗学的实验，考虑沙子的独特物质性和迁移方式，本文对香港沙质基础设施进行了推测性批判。通过不断的出现和再出现、开发和再开发，香港殖民和后殖民政府得到了合法化。通过探讨沙子独特运动机制之一的跳跃过程，本文揭示了沙子不稳定特性的乌托邦式潜能，旨在寻找一种新的“底层”伦理。

La arena es uno de los materiales fundamentales de importancia clave en las ciudades modernas. En Hong Kong, una ciudad que data de los tiempos del imperialismo mercantil británico, la extracción de la arena requerida para los proyectos de construcción y reclamación ha estado siempre ligada a la desposesión violenta. Experimentando con las formas y expresiones poéticas de la nueva teoría crítica materialista y poscolonial, y pensando en las varias materialidades y formas de divagar asociadas con la arena, este artículo elabora una crítica especulativa de la infraestructura arenosa de Hong Kong. La autoridad colonial y poscolonial de Hong Kong se legitima por un proceso continuo de revestimiento repetido, de demanda y reclamación. Al evocar el proceso de saltación, uno de los mecanismos distintivos del movimiento, el artículo pone al descubierto un potencial utópico de las inquietas cualidades de la arena, en la búsqueda de una ética nueva en los terrenos de lo deprimido.

Key Words:

• atomism
• drift
• geo-poetics
• ground
• reclamation
• 原子论，迁移，地缘政治，土地，再开发。
• atomismo
• desplazamiento
• geopoétia
• reclamación
• terreno

Acknowledgments

Readers of early drafts of this article, including Claire Blencowe, Günter Gassner, and Suha Babikir Hasan, offered enormously helpful encouragement and insight. Thanks also to participants in the Symposium on Spaces and Politics of Aesthetics at Cardiff University; in the Truth, Fiction, Illusion: Worlds and Experience conference in Klagenfurt; and in the inspiring lecture series organised by Anna Grear and Dot Kwek, Imagining the Eco-Social: New Materialist Reflections for the Anthropocene. I am grateful also to the anonymous peer-reviewers for their constructive and helpful suggestions, to the GeoHumanities editors for their support and encouragement, and to the Taylor & Francis production editors for their care with the text.

Notes

1. Material in this fragment derives from a research interview with a prominent environmental campaigning group in Hong Kong.

2. Mr Chan Kin Por, Hong Kong Legislative Council Debate, “Motion of Thanks,” responding to the Chief Executive’s annual Policy Address, 9 November 2018. https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr18-19/english/counmtg/hansard/cm20181107-translate-e.pdf#nameddest=mbm01

3. This fragment is a fictional retelling of a letter sent on 23 May, 1906, to colonial administrators complaining of sand digging. Hong Kong Government Records Service, “Sand Removal of From Foreshore at Kau Wa King Village,” HKRS58-1-36-13.

4. On the six-day war, see Hase (2008).

5. He (2018).

6. Etymologically, the word “interview” derives from the French “entrevoir” (to have a glimpse of) and “s’entrevoir” (to see each other).

7. This fragment follows in the tradition of irreverent adaptations of the great Chinese novel Journey to the West, a spiritual journey in which the Tang Monk gathers together tutelary shape-shifting deities (Monkey, Pigsy, Dragon-Horse, and Friar Sand) to guide and protect him in his quest. Throughout the book, it explores structures of order and authority through the use of “demonic others.” It is a deeply elemental book, not in the Empedoclean sense that dominates Anglophone geographical writing (identifying the unchangeable roots of substance as fire, earth, air, water), but in the Chinese Wu Xing tradition of elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) as dynamic forms of transition.

8. “Report on the New Territories for the Year 1933,” Appendix J, Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of the Colony of Hong Kong during the Year 1933, p.20.

9. Colonial Secretary E.R. Hallifax, 27 March 1931. “Stone and Rubble on Foreshores,” Hong Kong Government Records Service, HKRS58-1-135-75.

10. Mr Abraham Shek, Hong Kong Legislative Council Debate, “Motion of Thanks,” 9 November 2018.

11. “Unauthorized Removal of Sand From Foreshore Near Mui Wo, Lan Tao Island Proposed Resumption of Lots 511 & 547,” Hong Kong Government Records Service, HKRS58-1-95-10.

12. An Ordinance to Protect the Sand Supplies of the Colony and to Regulate the Sale of Sand, passed into law in 1935. Available https://www.elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap147

13. Newspaper clipping, unidentified source, 1965. Hong Kong Government Records Service, “Stores Department—Sand,” HKRS931-6-392.

14. See the account by the Financial Secretary, in Legislative Council, 26^th March 1965, as well as various letters in HKRS931-6-392.

15. 19 February, 1956. “Price of sand—1. Petition from Ho Lu Kwong, chairman of the building contractors association ltd. Against the increase of …. 2. Claim for refund in respect of increase in price of sand,” Hong Kong Government Records Service, HKRS229-1-194.

16. Clipping from the Hong Kong Standard, March 13 1965. In Hong Kong Government Records Service, “Stores Department—Sand,” HKRS931-6-392.

17. “Reply by the Honorable The Acting Financial Secretary in Legislative Council on Wednesday, 2^nd July 1969.” In HKRS931-6-392.

18. Update on the Development of the Three-Runway System at the Hong Kong International Airport, 30 November 2018, Legislative Council Paper No. CB(4)274/18-19(01).

19. Mr Leung Che-Cheung, Hong Kong Legislative Council Debate, “Motion of Thanks,” 9 November 2018.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/L013282/1].

Notes on contributors

Julian Brigstocke

JULIAN BRIGSTOCKE is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF10 3WT, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research focuses on space and the aesthetics of authority in Paris, Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro, developing a theoretical framework that works at the intersection between new materialist theory and critical theory.