Towards Obliterature | A Female Text of Hong Kong
Feminist Thinking Seminar Series
Towards Obliterature: A Female Text of Hong Kong
Friday 19 May 2023, 1pm - 3pm
LSK Room, Access Centre, Wadham College
Please register via Eventbrite.
The writer and critic Kate Zambreno proposes a term for informal writing that has fallen through the cracks of not only the ‘canon’ in literature but also the archive of published works—writing by women and circulated amongst women. She calls it obliterature: texts that are “experiments in the epistolary, the fragmented, this casual, cultural criticism, some of it in the comments. It is all ephemeral, not wanting to be formalized. I am beginning to think of this note-taking as the project itself.”
During the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, the best writing I read about the movement were not the pieces published in The New York Times or the commentaries in local newspapers or the rousing calls to action by activists. They were the ephemeral Instagram stories and Facebook statuses by my friends, posted day after day as we accumulated bruises from falling over on the streets trying to avoid the riot police and the tear gas clogged our lungs. These were not structured pieces of writing with a beginning, middle, and end; our emotions are unprocessed, immediate, too raw, an editor would say, to be considered for official publication. I propose that these fragments of personal writing, rarely archived or published, contribute towards a body of obliterature that stands alongside the formal archive in the form of factual news articles, academic papers, summaries of historical events, and other books on Hong Kong.
Over the past decade working as a writer, I had often struggled to separate the mode of historical, factual, and “objective” journalism writing I did for media outlets, with that of the tinyletters I sent out to a small circle of subscribers—writing I sometimes think of as 少女心事, roughly translated as ‘the yearnings and struggles of teenage girls’. In the talk, which draws on my experience as a news reporter and the process of writing The Impossible City, I think through questions such as: what does it mean to write a ‘female text’, one that is unapologetic about juxtaposing events of historical importance with 少女心事? What happens when the political conditions of a place dictates that all literature becomes obliterature? And how do we continue to write from within the margins?
Content warning: self-harm, suicide.
Event rundown:
A talk on obliterature, 少女心事, and The Impossible City (40-45 minutes)
Brief Q&A session (30 minutes)
Informal writing workshop (30-40 minutes)*
* Participants will be asked to write on the spot based on a series of prompts. They are encouraged to share their work with the group, but this is not compulsory.
Karen Cheung is a writer from Hong Kong. She is the author of The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir (Random House), which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and The Economist. Her essays, reported features, and cultural criticism have been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, This American Life, New Statesman, The Rumpus, Evergreen Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. She was formerly a senior reporter at Hong Kong Free Press, and Associate Editor at Asia Art Archive.
For more information email intersectionalhumanities@torch.ox.ac.uk.
