Ann Tso – författare

Through a lens of literary urban studies, Ann Tso offers fascinating insight into perceptions of Hong Kong as a city in crisis in contemporary film, novels, and memoir.Through close readings of six pivotal works spanning three decades, Tso reveals how cultural creators encode dissent within the mundane. Divided into two parts, the first explores cannibalism within Hong Kong’s apartment plots through film. Part 2 examines discordant urban sounds in literature through Madeline Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) and Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City (2022). Tso demonstrates that while comprehensive surveillance reshapes cultural narratives, the resulting silencing effect does not necessarily encourage apathy and asocial behaviour. Instead, Hong Kong can express itself through its silence; its stubborn possession of mundane objects evocative of pasts ostensibly erased but mutely present.Rigorously researched, this interdisciplinary book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary urban studies, spatial literary research, urban humanities, speculative realism, and Hong Kong studies.

Through a lens of literary urban studies, Ann Tso offers fascinating insight into perceptions of Hong Kong as a city in crisis in contemporary film, novels, and memoir.Through close readings of six pivotal works spanning three decades, Tso reveals how cultural creators encode dissent within the mundane. Divided into two parts, the first explores cannibalism within Hong Kong’s apartment plots through film. Part 2 examines discordant urban sounds in literature through Madeline Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) and Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City (2022). Tso demonstrates that while comprehensive surveillance reshapes cultural narratives, the resulting silencing effect does not necessarily encourage apathy and asocial behaviour. Instead, Hong Kong can express itself through its silence; its stubborn possession of mundane objects evocative of pasts ostensibly erased but mutely present.Rigorously researched, this interdisciplinary book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of literary urban studies, spatial literary research, urban humanities, speculative realism, and Hong Kong studies.

This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair’s respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London “psychogeographically” to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore’s psychogeography consists of bird’s-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd’s aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair’s conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London’s disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize “London-ness” as estranging.