The Age of Precarity

This chapter is about the precarity of life and the image in the twenty-first century. Since 1 July 1997, Hong Kongers have found themselves increasingly caught in a posthistorical performance of the city’s juridical and economic extraterritoriality. This chapter first discusses what it means by precarity and how it has generated a sense of anguish among young people around the world. It also explicates how it is intertwined with local politics in Hong Kong, including the Umbrella Movement. Finally, it conducts analyses of documentaries made during and after the Movement. These documentaries are not made with the presupposition that what the spectators see on the screen must be an access to the truth. Rather, at an age when film, video, and media images are assumed to be mediated, manipulated, and fabricated, these documentarians offer their spectators texts that are constructed out of realities captured, re-narrated, and remediated from multiple perspectives. Their truth claims must then be contested and defended in the larger public discourse. Such a public discourse in turn makes visible that a set of problematics are embedded in the interstices in the debate between the political establishments and the hard-line supporters of political reforms.