Glocalizing Hong Kong anglophone literature: Locating Xu Xi’s writing across the decades

Abstract

This chapter traces the development of Xu Xi’s novelistic oeuvre over two decades, from Chinese Walls (1994) to That Man in Our Lives (2016). Lee depicts how Xu Xi’s “outsider-insider” perspective allows her to indigenize her own creative works within Hong Kong by yoking together local and cosmopolitan sensibilities, even as she emphasizes the contradictions of writing about a territory that is constantly being reconfigured by the forces of cultural nationalism and neoliberalism. Lee argues that Xu Xi’s formulation of a Hong Kong literature resists convergence with an increasingly modish yet recognizable global “Chinese” literature and, that by positing her writings on Hong Kong rather as a subset of global fiction, she is reframing Hong Kong Anglophone writing as a form of glocal literature.