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Against the Current: Rewriting Hong Kong Film History

This collection of interdisciplinary studies of Hong Kong film history is the first book of its kind published in China that brings together scholars and critics based in China, Hong Kong, and the United States. Published by the prestigious Peking University Press, this co-edited book, especially several chapters in it, has gone through many revisions because of the delicate subjects it explores. It features a wide range of new perspectives and approaches to recontextualize the transformation and globalization of Hong Kong cinema from the 1920s to 1970s. In these fifty years, the former British colony’s film industry was transformed from a hub of dialect entertainment production attacked for derailing China’s nation-building struggles to involving in the frontline of Asia’s cultural Cold War with its global pan-Chinese reach. In the 1970s, it became the platform for negotiating local identity as Hong Kong became the leading “Little Dragon” economy and its relations with post-Mao China was beginning to change.