Course Outline
[pic] Course Description
This course aims to provide students with a critical introduction to popular culture in Hong Kong. Students will learn to assess for themselves the form, meaning and significance of popular culture, as well as to analyse the formation of cultural and social identity of Hong Kong people through concrete case studies. Students will study popular culture as something more than leisurely entertainment: it is a cultural process already inscribed in relations of power. Students will be asked to analyse the politics of Hong Kong popular culture in its particular historical and geopolitical conditions: marginal, postcolonial, postmodern, cosmopolitan, transnational and perpetually transiting. The course will draw on, but not limited to these critical perspectives: postcolonial criticism, postmodernist reading, gender theory, media and cinema studies. Specific topics will be selected from such areas as: the changing cultural status of Hong Kong through the post-war decades, Western and Asian influences and the transformation of indigenous culture, cinema as mass entertainment, the consumption and politics of popular music, electronic media, and the printed media, etc.
[pic] Intended Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to reason about for themselves the significance of Hong Kong popular culture in everyday life in the local, as well as broadly in the East-Asian and Euro-American contexts. Specifically students will be able to:
1. discuss various aspects of popular culture in conceptual terms; 2. use a set of critical tools to delineate and discuss the forms, themes and meanings of Hong Kong popular culture; and to describe and debate in a theoretically and historically informed manner the formation of cultural and social identity in contemporary Hong Kong society, with an awareness and understanding of the cosmopolitan characteristics of the city; 3. demonstrate a reflective, critical attitude toward their everyday
This course aims to provide students with a critical introduction to popular culture in Hong Kong. Students will learn to assess for themselves the form, meaning and significance of popular culture, as well as to analyse the formation of cultural and social identity of Hong Kong people through concrete case studies. Students will study popular culture as something more than leisurely entertainment: it is a cultural process already inscribed in relations of power. Students will be asked to analyse the politics of Hong Kong popular culture in its particular historical and geopolitical conditions: marginal, postcolonial, postmodern, cosmopolitan, transnational and perpetually transiting. The course will draw on, but not limited to these critical perspectives: postcolonial criticism, postmodernist reading, gender theory, media and cinema studies. Specific topics will be selected from such areas as: the changing cultural status of Hong Kong through the post-war decades, Western and Asian influences and the transformation of indigenous culture, cinema as mass entertainment, the consumption and politics of popular music, electronic media, and the printed media, etc.
[pic] Intended Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to reason about for themselves the significance of Hong Kong popular culture in everyday life in the local, as well as broadly in the East-Asian and Euro-American contexts. Specifically students will be able to:
1. discuss various aspects of popular culture in conceptual terms; 2. use a set of critical tools to delineate and discuss the forms, themes and meanings of Hong Kong popular culture; and to describe and debate in a theoretically and historically informed manner the formation of cultural and social identity in contemporary Hong Kong society, with an awareness and understanding of the cosmopolitan characteristics of the city; 3. demonstrate a reflective, critical attitude toward their everyday