Kowloon Walled City as de jure retrospective: digitising and mythologising statelessness

This article aims to investigate accounts of the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City (1898–1994) through a Marxist retrospective, approaching the phenomenon of statelessness as represented in its posthumous digitised life through films, video games and other forms of immersive or interactive media, tracing a lineage of postcoloniality through a critique of hauntology and affect. Tracing the question of Walled City’s history within debates of statelessness, the article intends to prescribe a dialectical and spatial reading of capitalist neglect, juridic-political abandonment within the aesthetics of gaming, genre film and contemporary exhibitions on site and in greater Hong Kong. It provides a critical retrospective on Derrida’s anti-Marxist approach to hauntology and the condition of postmodern capitalist malaise as per Spectres of Marx. Furthermore, it asserts that digitised reconstructions of the historic Walled City remain in the popular ‘dystopian’ oeuvre through its repeated intimate re-exploration, re-screenings of popular periodic genre films, and the persisting nature of interrogating, macabre curiosity on the part of the consumer class. Derrida’s hauntology, while an evocative means for literary, textual or visual analysis, ultimately risks crucial detachment from material and historical contradictions, spiritualising class antagonisms as something of a stand-in for more concrete, structurally-informed Marxist critique, which asserts that the driving force of history is not the ghostly or spectral but, rather, a fetish.