Colonial Nostalgia and Postcolonial Longings

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter continues our theoretical discussion on popular music and politics with a specific remit: its intersection with postcolonial studies and its deliberations on home, identity, and power contestations. The insertion of an inquiry over Tat Ming Pair and Hong Kong here serves two purposes. The first is, quite generally, the lack of research on music and postcoloniality in the Asian experience in English language scholarship—save for some notable exceptions music. Second, and more fundamentally, we see Tat Ming Pair and its politics as an “anomaly”—as much as the decolonisation of Hong Kong itself. Put simply, Hong Kong’s decolonisation proceeds in tandem with its renationalisation. While the former colonies in postcolonial studies became nations in their own right, Hong Kong became part of China after its sovereignty was handed from London to Beijing in 1997. Drawing primarily from the interviews with Anthony Wong and Tats Lau, Chapter 2 tracks and analyses the emergence and development of the duo in the larger geopolitical and geocultural context. Their musical engagements with a host of issues including sexual autonomy, gender equality, freedom of thoughts and speech, and Sino-Hong Kong relationships will be highlighted to prelude the more detailed analyses in the following two chapters. At the same time, Chapter 2 aims at mapping out a history of Hong Kong in its colonial entanglements with the British administration, and its postcolonial struggles with the Chinese regime. It will also seek to retell a concomitant history of Hong Kong popular music that is not dictated by the “Golden Era” logic, that is from its popularity zenith as the “global cool” to its alleged post-Handover decline or even death; rather the history we write will be informed and inspired by the vitality and complexity of Tat Ming Pair’s music and politics. Chapter 2 will converse with existing scholarship on Cantopop, as well as on Tat Ming Pair.