Venues of Counter-Hegemonic Visuality; Days of Contention

This chapter introduces and describes how, as the arguable center of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s protest culture and tradition, Hong Kong, and especially Hong Kong Island, contains a number of venues where demonstrations, rallies, and protests are prepared, deployed from, or held. The chapter, and the associated repertoire of images, begins the visual exploration of how the city has been visually re-imagined, transformed, and utilized by its subalterns to reproduce their aspirations and demands for greater democracy and social justice while subversively contesting and resisting hegemonic pressures to accept mainland Chinese cultural, economic, and political domination. The co-optation by anti-hegemonic Hongkongers of key cultural, economic, social, and political venues within the city during its many demonstrations, processions, rallies, and protests can be seen as visual resistance and as an effort to create a rich countervisuality by giving “voice to the visual.” Similarly, the conflation of special days (January 1st, May 4th, June 4th, July 1st, October 1st) with identifiable protests in Hong Kong—“Days of Contention”—suggest a similar impetus.