Paper short abstract:

Hong Kong's ongoing 50-year transition between its colonial past and its socialist future is complicated. This paper focuses on South Asian communities who are connected to the territory's colonial past, but are building a future through heritage projects combining food and festivals.

Paper long abstract:

Hong Kong presents a challenge to the literature on post-colonial identities. The territory is postcolonial, but is also pre-socialist – halfway through a 50-year transition period that separates the handover of the territory by the British in 1997 and the full integration of Hong Kong into mainland China’s political, legal and social systems in 2047. The 50-year transition is complicated by its very liminality. Many would argue that the transition itself is all but over, causing seismic tensions over what Hong Kong identity is and who this identity includes. Working from Chari and Verdery’s (2009) argument that people living in post-socialist or post-colonial contexts are tied into similar, and in fact mutual experiences of self-making - this paper examines Hong Kong residents’ everyday perceptions of their post-colonial and ‘pre’-socialist present.

Focusing on well-established communities of South Asians in Hong Kong, this paper examines the everyday perceptions of the liminality of this transition among groups that have long struggled with projects of belonging to the territory. The paper explores how South Asians have come to secure their local food heritage practices through festival making. These heritage-making practices not only combine their anxieties about the present with efforts to protect their past– a dynamic that emerges from much food heritage ethnography (West 2014), but also reflect their visions for the future.

The questions this paper poses two questions. What colonial pasts are revealed in food heritage making practices of South Asian festivals in Hong Kong? What socialist futures are brought into view?