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Research article

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

Author
  • Majorca Bateman-Coe orcid logo (Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, The University of Minnesota, MN, USA)

Abstract

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.

Keywords: urbanism, digitisation, posthuman, gaming, spatial reconstruction

How to Cite: Bateman-Coe, M. ‘Kowloon Walled City as de jure retrospective: digitising and mythologising statelessness’. Architecture_MPS 33, 1 (2026): 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2026v33i1.002.

Rights: 2026, Majorca Bateman-Coe.

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Published on
11 Feb 2026
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Introduction

How should the stateless be represented – or, more critically, instrumentalised – in the design of video games, virtual simulations or other spectral commodities of digital culture? This enquiry proceeds from the position of the mediated observer, one structurally distanced from Hong Kong and acquainted with the Kowloon Walled City (1898–1994) only through its cinematic, journalistic and hypermediated afterlives. These accounts, though often detached from material histories, reveal the ideological operations through which capital reclaims and reconfigures urban dispossession as spectacle. This analysis understands the Walled City not as a romantic anomaly but as a spatialised symptom of uneven development, capitalist neglect and juridico-political abandonment, embodying a physical site where surplus populations made a living despite their formal exclusion from the state. While Jacques Derrida’s hauntology is often invoked to understand such absent-yet-present sites, it ultimately obscures the material conditions of dispossession under a veil of spectrality. Nevertheless, in the case of Kowloon, hauntology inadvertently registers the contradictions of its erasure: the Walled City’s destruction in 1994, under the cooperative auspices of British, Chinese and Hong Kong authorities, did not terminate its function as a productive site. The central claim here is that the Walled City’s mediated afterlife reveals a dialectical tension between the truth of statelessness and the profit-driven desire to simulate a particular post-mortem affect without engaging structural or economic causality. In this way, the Walled City then becomes a case study in the hauntological spectralisation of an anti-state life, not as subversive or revolutionary nostalgia but as commodified atmospherics.

Histories, occupation, colonial impositions

The Kowloon enclave was initially established as a residence following the First Opium War (1839–42) and functioned as an abandoned and unaccounted-for Chinese military outpost. Given its modest dimensions of 0.03 km2, it would scarcely appear suitable for housing thousands. However, its intricate network of tunnels, corridors and concealed passageways rendered the former fortress a potent yet sombre symbol of Chinese resistance against British colonialism and imperialism and an unlikely refuge for some of Hong Kong’s most disenfranchised residents (Figure 1). Historical accounts suggest that the Walled City was formally completed and recognised as a military fort by 1847. Over time, commercial activity proliferated within its confined walls, with numerous storefronts and shops emerging organically and in response to civilian demand and necessity. During the Taiping Rebellion of 1854, rebels briefly seized control of the enclave before British forces reclaimed it weeks later. In 1898, James Stewart Lockhart, a British colonial official in Hong Kong and later, Commissioner of British Weihaiwei, described the Walled City as ‘a rough parallelogram measuring 700 feet by 400 feet, enclosing an area of 6.5 acres … built of granite ashlar facing, 15 feet in width at the top, and averaging 13 feet in height’, further noting its six watchtowers and four iron-lined wooden gateways.1 That same year, the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory was introduced and subsequently enacted, granting Britain control over the New Territories for a period of 99 years. However, Kowloon was explicitly excluded from this arrangement. At the time, the garrison numbered 544 soldiers, with a civilian population of only 200.2 With the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912, control over Kowloon fell entirely under the sovereignty of the British Empire.3

Figure 1
Figure 1

Miyamoto Ryuji, Kowloon Walled City, 1987 (Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Miyamoto Ryuji) 

In 1987, the Hong Kong government formally announced plans to demolish the Kowloon Walled City, initiating a rigorous and methodical process to evict every resident from the densely packed enclave. This marked the beginning of an extensive effort to dismantle what had long been regarded as a chaotic and lawless settlement, all while managing the complex transfer of the city’s political sovereignty from China to Britain. The principle of ‘one country, two systems’, advocated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, laid the groundwork for the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which initiated the process of returning Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997. Deng and the provisions outlined in the declaration establishing the special administrative region (SAR) explicitly stated that ‘socialist policies’ would not be implemented following the handover. The demolition was carried out gradually and reached completion in 1994. The government allocated approximately HK $2.7 billion to relocate more than 30,000 residents from what officials called a ‘historical blackspot’.4 A Housing Authority special committee was established to oversee compensation efforts, with property owners receiving payments ranging from HK $5,000 to $8,000 per square metre. Unregistered businesses, including medical practitioners such as dentists and doctors, many of whom were licensed in mainland China but not in Hong Kong, were also compensated. However, proprietors of illicit enterprises, including illegal sex work and gambling operations, were excluded from these financial distributions from the local government.5 Today, the site where Kowloon once stood has been replaced by a somewhat conventional, yet pleasant, Chinese garden known as ‘Kowloon Park’.6 Critics argue that ‘the demolition of Kowloon Walled City is as much a violent destruction of buildings as it is a drastic erasure of an important part of the city’s memory’.7 Whether this large-scale clearance was executed in direct anticipation of the 1997 handover remains a matter of political speculation.

Urban spectacle and the imaginarium

It is essential to acknowledge that science fiction has not firmly established itself or gained widespread popularity in Hong Kong, both in production and consumption, despite any assertions that ‘colonial cities have the best chance at establishing a cityscape of the future that embraces racial and cultural differences’.8 This trend is particularly evident following the significant decline of Hong Kong’s film industry after the ‘Golden Age’ and the innovative period of the Hong Kong New Wave, especially in the post-2000s. Given the genre’s limited domestic fanbase, its strong association with representations of the Kowloon Walled City is noteworthy, especially when contrasted with the dominant themes of urban displacement explored in popular crime thrillers and wuxia (martial arts) films.9 Often described as an aestheticised representation of ‘anarcho-capitalism – a slapdash city more closely resembling a Borg cube than the hidden valleys, alpine vistas, or artificial islands envisioned in libertarian and anarchistic imagery’,10 the Walled City has been the subject of extensive mythologising, reflective of a legitimisation of both power and non-power. Most importantly, from a Marxist standpoint, especially when informed by critical theory, anarchy must be understood not as the negation of power but as the redistribution of power under ideological concealment, in which class domination persists.11

These films often portrayed the Walled City as a space marked by poverty and sensationalised crime, but they simultaneously imbued it with a resonant sentimentality, presenting it as a symbolic microcosm of the city itself. Prominent (and salacious) wuxia (martial arts) crime thrillers from this era that reference or feature the Walled City include Po-Chih Leong and Josephine Siao’s Jumping Ash (1976), Stanley Wing Siu’s The Rascal Billionaire (1978), Lam Ngai Kai’s Brothers from the Walled City (1982), Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law (1984) and Jackie Chan and Kirk Wong’s comedy film Crime Story (1993) (Figure 2).

Figure 2
Figure 2

A compilation of movie posters for Hong Kong films made between the 1970s and 1990s that feature or were filmed within the Walled City (Source, clockwise from top left: Jumping Ash, dir. Po-Chih Leong and Josephine Siao, 1976; The Rascal Billionaire, dir. Stanley Wing Siu, 1978; Brothers from the Walled City, dir. Lam Ngai Kai, 1982; Long Arm of the Law, dir. Johnny Mak, 1984; Crime Story, dir. Jackie Chan and Kirk Wong, 1993) 

Examples of video games that feature or digitally replicate the Walled City include the text-based detective game Fei Duanmu VS Kobayashi (2018), Kowloon Walled City Adventure (2014), Stray (2022) and Kowloon’s Gate (1997), among many others, contributing to an ever-evolving cultural and visual archive of the site in all its grimy, disjointed, neon-lit physicality, perpetuating its traceable, unconventional memory across diverse media forms. Kowloon’s Gate, in particular, plays entirely into the idea of Kowloon as a place of storytelling, crime, violence and imminent danger for the protagonist-player. In the earliest iteration of this franchise, which takes place in the then-present day and was initially released for the PlayStation in Japan in 1997 and re-released for the PlayStation Network in 2010, the Walled City quite literally reincarnates itself in a ghostly, spectre-like form from the realm of Yin (陰界) back to the streets of Hong Kong in the living realm of Yang (陽界). Recognising an imbalance in a kind of unspecified higher spiritual power, the order of ‘Feng Shui’ will need to be reinstated. The protagonist, referred to as a ‘Super Feng Shui Practitioner’ (超級風水師), is sent to Kowloon to reawaken the ‘Four Symbols’ and restore the city’s equilibrium. Die-hard PlayStation fans consider Kowloon’s Gate to be a ‘cult classic’, and its fandom has remained relatively strong despite the game being significantly outdated compared to contemporary graphic standards for the video game industry. However, its 2017 virtual reality (VR) remake, Kowloon’s Gate VR: Suzaku, is of note – the figures residing inside this interactive virtual simulation of a cult franchise are not interactive and have undergone what can only be described as a transformative process of visual objectification, rendering them speechless, occasionally mobile entities that reside in the city’s cavernous halls.

In a more modern rediscovery of the enclave, Welcome to Kowloon (N4bA et al., Germany, 2023), a first-person exploratory indie-horror game developed by a1esska, Notex, N4bA and Admia, allows players to explore the city, noting in their game’s logline on Steam that ‘the inhabitants of this place only at first glance seem to be ordinary people, but if we dig deeper, we will see their real faces’.12 Beneath this cryptic phrasing lies a meditation on alienation and dehumanisation: the ‘real faces’ are less monstrous than symptomatic of a society fractured by economic precarity, informal labour networks and spatial neglect. In the game, the player enters the compound, following a series of notes and cards that take them deeper and deeper inside the city. The player can interact with stray dogs, be bombarded by a hall of flapping moths and enter private, vacant and abandoned residences, including cramped personal apartments in disarray.

An exemplary mechanic in one particular sequence evokes this revelation, piecing together discarded letters to spell ‘decay’ and unlock a barred door, becomes an embodied metaphor for Althusserian misrecognition, as subjects and tasks may appear superficially autonomous and ordinary but are interpellated, hailed into being by the very structures that confine them for all of eternity, as ‘the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’.13 The player is not only solving various puzzles embedded within gamic infrastructure but performing a ritual of demystification: recognising that what appears as personal or haunted is, in fact, systemic and structurally imposed, acts as a departure from the contradictions of the superstructure collapsing under the weight of the base through visual spectacle in which, per Debord, ‘to accomplish [reproduction], the spectacle must be fragmented, reimagined, and regurgitated in slightly new form for consumption by individuals who are completely alienated from its production’.14

The experience of Welcome to Kowloon stages a dialectical tension between negation and becoming, posing the player with a phenomenological dilemma: should one remain near the periphery, clinging to the illusion of exteriority and the familiar, or descend into the city’s interior, a decaying superstructure that unfolds like Spirit coming into consciousness through estrangement? This spatial choice becomes allegorical, echoing Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812): the player, as subject, must move through contradiction to reach truth, not by evasion but by immanent negation through which a concept (or entity) negates itself from within as negating ‘the simple, thereby posits the determinate difference of the understanding; but it equally dissolves this difference, and so it is dialectical’.15 What was once a shelter now stands as a ruinous expression of alienated labour and collapsed universality – a human-made material superstructure whose ideological contradictions have metastasised. In the game’s final sequence, the first ‘resident’ is revealed: they are a skinless figure of exposed muscle and trembling flesh, posed in Christian supplication, emphasising the tragic (or even cinematically heavy handed) impasse of Spirit arrested in self-negation, stripped of authentic meditation as it remains suspended in a corner, unhearing and unseeing.

Anotherin-game figure bashes its head repeatedly against a wall soaked in blood, enacting a dreadful repetition of labour lacking sublation, while a third figure stands inert, silhouetted, and pressed against the prison-like bars of a concealed threshold, reflecting the residue of a historical dialectic foreclosed before its Aufhebung (sublation). The game ends with a textual rupture on a box television set’s dimly lit screen, showing the text: ‘the city was demolished five years ago’ and ‘was one of the worst cities in China’.16 Here, historical materialism punctures the illusion of the present tense. What the player has explored is not a living world but a spectral one, or, more precisely, a negated past re-presented as a commodified spectacle. The city becomes both a ruin and a simulacrum, a negative image of the real, with its inhabitants reduced to homogeneity. Through the alchemy of poverty, spatial isolation and forgotten time, these former subjects are transformed into monstrous forms, robbed of speech, agency and recognition. They are no longer beings-for-themselves but rather beings-in-themselves who have failed to enter reciprocity – a catastrophic dialectic embodied in decaying, spectacular (virtual) flesh.

Hauntology as methodology

To grasp the socio-spatial logic of Hong Kong’s infamous Walled City and, by extension, of other dense, hyper-urban, semi-autonomous or structurally occluded urban spaces, it is not sufficient to proceed with a Derridean hauntological approach without accounting for its flaws. Namely, the approach often risks aestheticising absence and deferring political critique in favour of spectral metaphor or interpretative claims. Instead, such spaces aptly demand a materialist analysis that adequately confronts the dialectic of presence and erasure under capitalism or even statelessness. State abandonment, global capital flows and informal labour economies also co-generate urban forms that both resist and are shaped by political sovereignty or illusions of freedom. Herein lies the core contradiction: hauntology, though deeply flawed, is undeniably useful as a dominant representational framework for ‘post-socialist’ or even politically contested architectural spaces in media through its embodiment of concretised contradictions. Derrida’s never-fully-present conception of the spectral has become popular in urban, cultural and architectural theory for describing the residual presence of past social orders, particularly the Soviet Union.

Yet hauntology often abstracts suffering and obscures materiality and reflects what Jameson aptly refers to as persistence of the dialectic at the level of the cultural consciousness, arguably buying into ‘the local hypothesis of a mysterious autonomy of the cultural under certain circumstances’.17 For those who once inhabited the Kowloon Walled City, a space infamous for its perceived ‘lawlessness’, their lived experiences were shaped by an imposed transformation into politicised beings, as life beyond the polis can be reframed through the mechanics of their digital reconstructability.18 Furthermore, this ideal suggests that territorial sovereignty and political alliances strive to replicate and uphold an idealised human image rooted in the Greek conception of the modern, advanced state as this ‘teleological principle determines the political nature of those parts of the parts, the human beings who join into partnerships unequivocally called households … being human beings, as we have seen, being by nature … a political living being, a being possessing life under the attribute “political”’.19

Much like Derrida’s conceptualisation of hauntology, first presented at the ‘Whither Marxism?’ conference at UC Riverside in 1993, the Walled City, as a site, is rendered visible in its claustrophobic architecture, informal economies and legal ambiguity. For its residents, these were not abstract ‘ghosts’ but lived consequences of spatial abandonment and precarity. Derrida frames this spectrality as foundational to modern experience, particularly under late capitalism, writing: ‘Given the difficulties some democratic, free market economies are experiencing – including the plight of the homeless, the lack of adequate health care, environmental degradation, and enormous national debt burdens – what sort of model for the future do we have?’20 The question may be rhetorical, gesturing towards the haunting neoliberal governance and repressed memory of Marxist critique. However, most importantly, the spectral inaugurates new ontologies and, for Derrida, the spectral (the ghost) is not simply an absence or a trace but a productive force. Haunting, he argues, does not require physical presence but operates through what he calls conjuration – a ritual or invocation that summons the past into the present. He describes this spectral conjuration as ‘worried, fragile, anxious’, and writes that hauntology becomes ‘an irreducible’ category, one that undergirds all systems of thought, which makes ‘ontology, theology, positive or negative onto-theology’ all possible.21

Hauntology, while evocative, can risk detaching historical contradictions from their material base. It is here argued that this theory spiritualises antagonism. Derrida’s ghost has a theoretical tendency to behave as a poetic stand-in for structural critique. When Derrida writes of the ‘conjuration’ against purported Marxist orthodoxy, he rightly identifies the ideological suppression of revolutionary alternatives, but he renders this suppression as problematically metaphysical rather than materially systemic. For Marx, by contrast, the driving force of history is not the ghostly or spectral but the material: the commodity is not a ghost but a fetish, that is, a ‘thing’ that appears to possess social power precisely because it mystifies the relations of labour embedded within it. As Marx writes in the very beginning of Volume I of Capital, the commodity is ‘an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind’.22 But under capitalism or its ‘anarchical’ presumed absence, this ‘thing’ becomes enchanted: its exchange-value obscures the exploitation of disenfranchised labour that produces and precludes it.

This tension between the spectral abstraction of capitalism and its concrete, material manifestations is made strikingly visible in representations of the Walled City, which foregrounds the lived realities and labouring bodies that hauntology too often renders invisible. In 1988, Austrian journalist and filmmaker Hugo Portisch23 released a documentary24 titled Kowloon – The Walled City, which examines the interior daily life of its inhabitants (Figure 3). His camera navigates the enclosed, dimly lit corridors of the city to reveal scenes of unregulated labour – illegal trade, small-scale noodle production, unlicensed dentistry, and solitary ageing in precarious conditions. For Western audiences, this portrayal clashed sharply with dominant Cold War-era fantasies of Hong Kong as a bastion of capitalist order resisting the looming spectre of Mao’s influence, where those fleeing the swell of violence and social upheaval during the Civil War (1929–47) and the subsequent Cultural Revolution (1966–76) would find refuge.25 However, Portisch’s work also exemplifies the dangers of a hauntological gaze when untethered from critical or dialectical praxis. His camera lingers on dripping pipes, cockroaches and unsanitary conditions, deploying a particular visual language that veers towards an almost masturbatory visual expression of filth and degeneracy. Most notably, Portisch privileges the perspective of Jackie Pullinger, a white British missionary whose eccentric presence in the sacral service of residents allegedly suffering from drug addiction displaces the political stakes of the Walled City’s local realities. The filmmaker’s refusal to include substantial interviews with residents, coupled with the implicit criminalisation of unnamed figures just offscreen, risks reproducing the very conjuration Derrida warns of: a mystified, anxious construction of the other, haunted by unspoken fears of disorder and illegibility. Residents and labourers are relegated through the camera apparatus as then-premature spectres, navigating an architecture soon to be abandoned and demolished, which contrasts with what would be the ideal formulation of the ghost in Derrida’s methodology, shifting attention from infrastructural truth to atmospheric ambience.

Figure 3
Figure 3

Stills from Hugo Portisch’s Kowloon – The Walled City (1988), featuring the enclave’s dark tunnels and a lone man cutting what appears to be eels (Source: Kowloon – The Walled City, dir. Hugo Portisch, 1988) 

The polis is all-political

In this conceptualisation of the polis as a site of social, behavioural and philosophical transformation, the city becomes more than a physical enclosure, acting as a mirror of human interiority, a projection of governance, control, improvisation and refusal. Within the Kowloon Walled City, where sovereignty was suspended and legality was contested, media representations, particularly those from Hong Kong cinema, have frequently depicted the inhabitants not merely as lawless or marginalised but as individuals navigating a condition of statelessness. The question thus arises: do fictional and semi-fictional portrayals of Kowloon’s inhabitants serve as narrative testaments to stateless survival under conditions of prolonged displacement and infrastructural neglect?

This particular reading finds support in genre films like the aforementioned crime thriller Long Arm of the Law (1984) – heavily featuring illegal border-crossing, as was committed by many undocumented residents of the Walled City, and the Triads, who purportedly ran the site – as well as other Hong Kong films that reflect global milieus, such as Rumble in the Bronx (dir. Stanley Tong, 1995) – a gangster thriller-comedy set in New York and starring Jackie Chan – and Happy Together (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 1997) – a romantic drama about a dysfunctional gay couple from Hong Kong who find themselves stranded in Argentina – to name only a few of many. Featured characters are often fugitives, exiles or working-class figures who operate within and against fragmented authority and were made popular by the ‘uncanny ways’ these works disorient the ‘paradigms of colonialism’ by globalism. In particular, ‘the city exists not just as a physical, political, and economic entity that can be documented, but also as a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of space and place, and a set of practices that need to be interpreted’.26 Kowloon’s ‘organic form of architecture’, as Fraser and Cheuk-Yin Li note, has been linked to a form of makeshift, spontaneous community life: ‘making do with what was available, with a range of “off-the-books” economic activities flourishing—from fishballs and cakes to plastics and matches’.27 However, this inevitable turn to immersive or interactive experiences, particularly in virtual reality and video games, introduces both aesthetic and theoretical tensions in embodying and rearticulating both the polis and its absence through its spatial reconstruction.

VR and game-based reconstructions featured in Kowloon’s Gate VR: Suzaku (2017) and Welcome to Kowloon (2023) (Figure 4) do more than merely represent space; they simulate the conditions of disorientation, claustrophobia and spectral entrapment, disavowing the political in order to prioritise the innate sensuousness of virtual embodiment.28 Games like Stray (2022) (Figure 5) and Mr. Pumpkin 2: Kowloon Walled City (2019) further illustrate this double bind: they romanticise urban decay and vertical density as playful mystery or stylised ruin, often eluding the classed realities. Stray, for instance, casts the player as an agile orange cat navigating a hyper-urban, underground ruin explicitly modelled after the Walled City. Stray’s exploration mechanics foreground bodily intimacy with the built environment (as an animal, no less), allowing players to crawl through debris, leap between perches and interact with robot denizens. The game’s ‘Walled City 99’ is eventually revealed to be a posthuman bunker built to protect a vanished humanity from ecological collapse, now inhabited solely by artificial life. Even the drone companion B-12, once a mortal scientist who uploaded his consciousness to escape a plague, becomes a vehicle for liberal redemption: he sacrifices himself to unlock the city’s gates and liberate the surface, as sunlight (a poetic return to the surface world) immediately kills and disables the Zurks and Sentinels. But what is being liberated, and for whom?

In replacing human labour with robotic memory and lived history with playable ruin, the game transforms structural collapse into a post-apocalyptic fable of the neoliberal fantasy of agency. The player navigates a world where catastrophe is inevitable yet curiously depoliticised, where class struggle is displaced by Deleuzian affect – l’effect – expounded from Spinoza’s affectus, and a certain oddly wistful technological melancholy. The world is felt, not understood. This affective atmosphere is tinged with a strange longing: to free the Outsiders, a group of companions yearning to return to the surface, and to reunite the stray-cat protagonist, which itself does not possess higher intelligence or autonomy as the player controls its movements, with its kin. Deleuze and Guattari describe genetic code, ontologically akin to digital code and virtual embodiment, observing that ‘nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as sedentarisation is a stoppage that settles the nomads’.29 In the context of VR, this exploratory nomadism becomes literalised: players move their own bodies to ensure constant navigation through simulated thresholds and affective intensities, where movement and memory are re-encountered as programmed space, reimposing contradictions of our time, beyond apparent control, as intended by its design and simulatory ontology.

In an interview with Goldthread in 2022, former Walled City resident Albert Ng reacted to Stray’s depiction of a decaying hyper-urban landscape, modelled after where he himself grew up. As he watched the game, he immediately took note of its spatial inaccuracies, noting that ‘There weren’t that many areas with this much space’ and recalled the presence of an almshouse, similar to a retirement home, and a Yamen (衙門), a kind of imperial Chinese office. He then explained that, without public sanitation, residents disposed of garbage wherever precedent dictated. More revealingly, he stated: ‘Living in the walled city, you needed a very important skill. Know how to keep your head down.’30 This evocative comment invokes the material realities of scarcity and a cramped domestic upbringing, noting how he shared a 200-square-foot apartment with his mother and sisters. Arguably, Stray reconstructs the textures of former residents, such as Ng’s own history, into a posthuman allegory. The game’s interiors, strewn with debris, traversed by rusted plumbing, mimic material traces while simultaneously displacing their origins. There are no living humans in this game, only robots and one orange cat; no members of the labouring class but merely encoded archetypes. If waste piles remain in this virtual space, the question must be asked: do sentient machines have any use for sewage systems or leaking pipes? Do they dispose of waste, or does this gesture towards bodily realism merely serve as formal affect (sentiment) or spectral abstraction?

Figure 4
Figure 4

Still from the immersive horror VR game Welcome to Kowloon (Source: Welcome to Kowloon, 2023) 

Figure 5
Figure 5

Still from Stray, a post-apocalyptic adventure game in an underground, crowded, neon-lit city of robots and other forms of artificial intelligence (Source: Stray, 2022) 

The transformation of the Kowloon Walled City from a physical enclave to a realm of collective cultural memory and consumer-driven representation underscores its hauntological qualities. Derrida posits that the ghost is not merely ‘the carnal apparition of the spirit’ or ‘its fallen and guilty body’ but also ‘the inpatient and nostalgic waiting for redemption … the deferred spirit, the promise or calculation of an expiation’.31 The representations of Kowloon’s past – whether as a frightening dystopia or an enrapturing curiosity – echo this spectre-like quality, created and reinterpreted by artists, filmmakers and game developers. As a former site of rapid urbanisation and non-Western speculative futures, its portrayal perpetuates the imperialist tradition of capital accumulation at the expense of the disembodied, spiritless, mutilated masses. This digitisation, then, risks stripping the city’s former residents of self-realisation and memory as a component of its gameplay mechanics. In Statelessness: On Almost Not Existing, Tony C. Brown remarks that ‘beings whose material and physical poverty marks them as radically imperfect … are therefore metaphysically imperfect, participating in nonbeing’.32 Such encoded or filmic depictions, therefore, often reduce beings to symbols of precarity, divorced from the complexities of interiority and compounded significations.33

Ackbar Abbas, in his essay ‘Faking Globalization’ (1997), describes the unprecedented transformation of the ‘Asian city’ – specifically in a Chinese context – through capital, media and information technologies, which ‘threaten to outpace our understanding of it’.34 Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s offers a lens through which to analyse this transformation, providing new insights into a particular postcolonial urban phenomenology. Abbas embraces the Deleuzian turn of any-space-whatever, referring to the affect image – one of three movement-images, alongside perception and action. These affective urban landscapes provide insight into the tension between space and place, with ‘place’ referring to undefined or unexplored sites.35 Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Weinstein argue that the virtual realm, as a product of the merger between technology and biology, challenges traditional spatial and temporal frameworks. They describe the technological class as ‘a bionic product of that vast … experiment in economic eugenics unleashed by the merger of technology and biology in the post-historical form of the will to virtuality’.36 The virtual Walled City becomes a ‘judicial space’,37 wherein sovereignty and power are (de jure) exercised outside traditional territorial frameworks. This space redefines the boundaries of experience, reflecting both the oppressive histories of physical sites under capitalistic governments and the possibilities of their reimagination in digital landscapes and virtual spatial constructions.

Virtual economy and virtual representation of real-world urban conditions prove to be inherently complex in their depiction and representation of space in time, as, ‘having no social origins, the technological class is a bionic product of that vast, and demonstrably successful, experiment in economic eugenics unleashed by the merger of technology and biology in the post-historical form of the will to virtuality’.38 When examining virtual reality simulations, it is essential to consider the virtual economies and to acknowledge that the virtual realm challenges traditional notions of space and time, as it lacks inherent social origins and exists as a product of the merger between technology and biology. The former nostalgia of Kowloon, therefore, risks growing steadily distorted with each potentially disingenuous reiteration. Kowloon’s Gate VR: Suzaku and Welcome to Kowloon both offer a truly immersive experience of the Walled City, albeit a fictional representation of it.

However, the question of audience and consumer arises – for whom are such games meticulously designed? Who are the consumers of these digital spectres? The social contract tradition, having become ingrained in a political or civil state, compensates for the lack or depletion of nature in the self, resulting in unpredictable bouts of violence, whether real, as in the case of horror, or anticipated. These digital images and stories can ‘manifest themselves as presences, that is, even though many of them are regarded as disembodied, they exist in the form of “as if” presences with different ontologies made real in the material world’.39 As David Harvey emphasises in Spaces of Capital, there is no innate ‘neutrality of geological knowledges’40 and, applying an architecturally informed reading of the Manifesto, there is always a ‘non-neutrality of spatial structures and powers in the intricate spatial dynamics of class struggle’.41

Orientalism and the outskirts

It cannot be overlooked that Hong Kong occupies a somewhat contradictory geographical and ideological position – not merely as ‘both Chinese and non-Chinese’ in some symbolic register but as a fractured terrain structured by legacies of imperialism, uneven development and active class antagonism. Its historical separation from mainland China was not the product of abstract ideological divergence but the result of a brutal colonial project engineered by British imperialism and later sustained by globalism and global capitalism.42 As elucidated in Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989), the treatment of aesthetic effect ‘as the operator of a new connotation of “pastness” and pseudo-historical depth’ propagates exchanges ‘in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history’.43 This flattening of history is rendered as a simulacrum, an aesthetic surplus in the capitalist imagination wherein the ‘stateless’ or unmoored subject then becomes the ideal of exoticised fascination and woeful pity, dangerously tethering ‘an unrestrained existence threatening the being of human being’ in which a condition beyond a consolidated state or polis becomes ‘not a different way of living but an unaccountably inhuman-human perversion of political and so enstated being’.44

This aforementioned conception of ‘outskirts’ is further at play in the shaping and coordinating of identities as well – Carolyn Cartier, in ‘Culture and the City: Hong Kong, 1997–2007’, identifies the metropolis as a site of intrinsic difference and of frequent othering by both mainland China and nations abroad, writing that, ‘from inception, a colonial territory and foreign-governed society, and so it must be othered as not quite “Chinese”’.45 In opposition to the capitalist and hyper-individualist logics that underpin such constructions, it is crucial to integrate Dirlik’s reinterpretation of Orientalism into the Chinese and Hong Kong context. Where Edward Said focused largely on Orientalism in Islamic and West Asian settings, Dirlik exposes Orientalism as a dynamic articulation of culture, politics and history under late imperialism. His contrary position is that Orientalism and the culturalist epistemology are a ‘reconfigured relationship between politics, culture, and history’.46

Orientalism, in this light, is not merely a cultural misrepresentation but a mechanism of global capital – a byproduct of Euro-American bourgeois domination that reinforces uneven development and ideological hegemony.47 This form of nationalism, one could argue, is the pursuit of the homogenisation of all the differences in territories occupied across the nation, ‘projecting itself back in time to some mythical origin to erase the different temporalities of the past, so that all history becomes a history of national emergence’,48 as Hong Kongers may imagine a problematised cultural Chinese identity ‘unblemished’ by the spectral or aesthetic presence of Maoism, communism, socialism or revolutionary histories as a fundamental component of their own national (or regional) identities and, in recent memory, there has emerged an ironic nostalgia for the squalor, disrepair and poverty of Kowloon’s Walled City, motivated by its cinematic and aesthetic legacy within the SAR (Figure 6).49

Figure 6
Figure 6

Hong Kong International Airport (Source: May Tse/South China Morning Post, China Daily, 2024)50 

Fearful of a dystopic, overpopulated, decadent and anarchical future, films and franchises such as Ghost in the Shell (dir. Mamoru Oshii, Japan, 1995) and its somewhat infamous Western remake of the same name (dir. Rupert Sanders, USA, 2017) have modelled their landscapes on both the Walled City and broader Hong Kong, and, by proxy, one can argue that the extreme hyper-urbanism of Kowloon’s Walled City is also a result of this influence. As Kin Yuen Wong writes in his essay ‘On the Edge of Spaces: “Blade Runner,” “Ghost in the Shell,” and Hong Kong’s Cityscape’, published in 2000, before the release of Rupert Sanders’s heavily criticised remake of Ghost in the Shell, Chinese culture, especially montages of crowded, chaotic restaurants, have established themself as sites of violence and conflict as riots may be taking place just outside, citing Strange Days (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, USA, 1995) as one such distinctly North American example of this cinematic phenomenon, somewhat nihilistically inspired by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)’s brutal beating of Rodney King in March 1991, nine months before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union and only a few years before the commencement of the Walled City’s demolition in 1993 in anticipation of the handover of 1997.51

Beginning in December 2024 (and lasting until April 2025), Hong Kong International Airport had an exhibition to promote the film Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, an action-thriller film directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Soi Cheang, in which the Walled City was replicated for tourists and locals to visit and interact with.

Here, as Said reminds us, in the case of Asia’s aesthetic reception by and replication in popular Western franchises and blockbusters, the ‘East’ is not represented but instead produced by the West: it becomes a surface for the projection of anxieties about modernity, disorder and ‘the Other’.52 This dynamic, in particular, reflects the anti-Marxist approach to history, which denounces collectivism and revolutionary praxis as wholly ‘totalitarian’, while embracing soft authoritarianism under capitalism under a banner of ‘freedom’. Exotic expressions of decay enamour the same Western liberalism that renounces Marxism for its inhumanity, flattening struggle into mere metaphor. Derrida’s return to ghosts, or ‘a body that is more abstract than ever’,53 arguably sidesteps pressing class antagonisms in favour of drifting through its (reconstructed) ruins, as:

With the corresponding expropriation or alienation, and only then, the ghostly moment comes upon it, adds to it a supplementary dimension, one more simulacrum, alienation, or expropriation … For there is no ghost, there is never any becoming-spectre of the spirit without at least an appearance of flesh, in a space of invisible visibility.54

In this context, hauntology can be rightly identified as part of the postmodern canon, divorced from class antagonisms and imperial dispossession (Orientalism) but an apt description of the phenomenon’s temporal and ontological disjunction.

Concluding remarks

Finally, it is to be emphasised that Derrida’s preoccupation with a romantic and tragic past is, more than anything, symptomatic of the material conditions and intellectual turn during the times in which he lived, and thus, this treatment of sites situated in a precarious geography of non-existence – quite literally torn between (post)colonial capitalism to the south and revolutionary communism to the north – emphasises a cerebral preoccupation with the shallow aesthetics of ‘anarchy’ at the potential expense or neglect of outskirts as phenomenologically tied to capitalism’s inevitable inward structural collapse. A comparative analysis of the Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong and other ‘slum-like’ housing complexes and historic neighbourhoods subsequently reflects the phenomenon of immortalisation and hauntological representations of urban environments. A critical retrospective on Derrida’s anti-Marxist approach to hauntology and the dialectical condition of capitalist malaise further asserts that these digitised retellings and reconstructions of everyday life in Hong Kong’s enigmatic Walled City will remain in the popular dystopian oeuvre through its intimate re-exploration, rescreenings of then-contemporary crime thriller flicks and the nature of probing somewhat morbid human curiosity.

Notes

  1. Sinn, ‘Kowloon Walled City’, 31. ⮭
  2. Sinn, ‘Kowloon Walled City’, 32. ⮭
  3. Although the British had gained control of the Walled City during their occupation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they did very little to develop it, allowing many residents to exist and develop various small businesses and community sites of their own volition and based on public need. The republican government continued to request ownership of the site until the war with Japan began, which resulted in the destruction of many homes and the brutalisation of Kowloon’s residents by Imperial Japanese occupying forces. ⮭
  4. Lau, ‘$2.7 billion package’. ⮭
  5. Lau, ‘$2.7 billion package’. ⮭
  6. Taking up 3.1 hectares, the Kowloon Walled City Park incorporates and preserves several notable architectural and historical features, emulating a Jiangnan (江南) garden of the early Qing dynasty (1636–1912), marked by eight primary architectural and landscape features: the Yamen (衙府), Old South Gate (南門), Eight Floral Walks (八徑異趣), Garden of Four Seasons (四季同馨 – 廣蔭庭), Garden of Chinese Zodiac (生肖倩影 – 童樂苑), Chess Garden (棋壇比弈遊弈園) and Mountain View Pavilion (邀山樓) as well as the Fei Sing Pavilion (魁星半亭) and Guibi Rock (歸璧石) (Kowloon Walled City Park Exhibition Guide, 2015). Exhibitions remain on display for the park’s visitors. ⮭
  7. Lorenz and Shiqiao Li, Kowloon Cultural District. ⮭
  8. Wong, ‘On the edge of spaces’, 1. ⮭
  9. Central to this study is the recurring figuration of hypermasculinity and stylised violence in martial arts and crime thrillers produced both during and after the demolition of the Walled City – genres that transform socio-economic abandonment into commodified fantasy. The sentimentalised representations in Hong Kong New Wave cinema, across both the first- (late 1970s–mid-1980s) and second-wave (post-1984) periods, frame Kowloon not simply as a site of disorder but as a residual utopia: a space of refusal, friction and ungovernability within the shadow of colonial sovereignty and capitalist modernisation. Approached through a critical hauntological lens (albeit one sceptical of hauntology’s tendency to depoliticise loss by rendering it aesthetic), this analysis contends that the afterlife of the Walled City in media reveals the dialectical tension between erasure and surplus. Its post-demolition presence in games and films is not simply mnemonic but productive, reproducing the site as a commodified spectre of postcolonial and neoliberal anxiety. The Walled City thus persists as an ideological structure: a spectralised zone of alterity through which late capitalist media narrativises and neutralises the trauma of displacement, industrial neglect, urban expulsion and deterritorialisation. ⮭
  10. Earle, ‘Stateless’. ⮭
  11. Marx’s relevant critique of both Bakunin and Proudhon exemplifies the conflation of domination (the state) with its content (class exploitation). For Marx’s critique of Proudhon, see ‘Letter to J B Schweizer “On Proudhon”’ (1865). For his critique of Bakunin, see ‘Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’, written between April 1874 and January 1875 in response to Statism and Anarchy (1873). Anarchy, then, is more reflective of a particular petty-bourgeois fantasy of freedom and horizontalism, which rejects the realities of vertical wage labour. Furthermore, relevant critique has been similarly levied by members of the Frankfurt School, such as the critique of market dependency and the illusion of spontaneity as reflected in Adorno and Horkheimer’s verwaltete Welt (the ‘administered world’) (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 232), Marcuse’s identified ‘repressive tolerance’ (see Marcuse, ‘Repressive tolerance’), reflected by the neoliberal neutralisation of radical potential, is utterly harmless against the behemoth of capitalism, and Benjamin’s distinction in ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) between foundation law-making violence and administrative law-preserving violence thus elucidates a kind of mythos of violence that can never securely guarantee social or economic justice. He expounds upon Spinoza’s exposition in Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that ‘the individual, before the conclusion of this rational contract, has de jure the right to use at will the violence that is de facto at his disposal’ (Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume I, 237). ⮭
  12. N4bA, Welcome to Kowloon. ⮭
  13. Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, 84. ⮭
  14. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 38. ⮭
  15. Hegel, The Science of Logic, 10. ⮭
  16. N4bA, Welcome to Kowloon. ⮭
  17. Jameson, Late Marxism, 47. ⮭
  18. While Aristotelian theories of the polis present the city as a teleological space wherein the human becomes political through their participation in sovereign life, the Walled City defied such classical notions. It was a space where sovereignty was both overdetermined and absent, shaped not by the legal structures of the modern state but by the practical negotiations of those surviving under overlapping systems of neglect. Rather than entering the polis as political beings, its inhabitants were interpellated by capital itself through illicit economies, makeshift governance and informal networks of care. Their political subjectivity was forged not in abstract ideals but through the concrete contradictions of everyday life. ⮭
  19. Brown, Statelessness, 30. ⮭
  20. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, viii. ⮭
  21. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 62–3. ⮭
  22. Marx, Capital, 125. ⮭
  23. Portisch is most known in Austria for making contemporary documentaries about the emergence of Austria’s Second Republic, including his book Österreich II, as well as speaking and advising Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky in occupied Palestine about Austria’s extensive complicity during the Holocaust. He was also significantly involved in the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) documentary The Birth of Europe (dir. Mark Currington, UK, 2012). Although an accomplished journalist and filmmaker in his own right, one must wonder whether he was the right person, from both an ethical and moral standpoint, to make a film about a place like the Kowloon Walled City. One could argue that a filmmaker, particularly a documentary filmmaker, has an inherent responsibility to uplift, to some degree, the community they feature as a subject in their works. Those who are critical of the documentary medium may call into question the participatory role of the documentarian as the problem therein remains: filmmakers may put on a show of credibility with their public but ‘when they criticize “things-as-they-are” they mobilise the opposition of political and economic elites who wish to maintain the status quo and the public’s “proper” perception’ (Linton, ‘Moral dimension’, 17). ⮭
  24. Furthermore, in the modern age of the internet, short-form internet documentaries have also explored the Walled City and its history, such as The Wall Street Journal in its short-form doc, currently available on YouTube, entitled The City of Imagination: Kowloon Walled City (dir. Diana Jou, USA, 2014), as well as Geographics in its 2019 video published on YouTube entitled Kowloon Walled City: Hong Kong’s City of Darkness, hosted by Simon Whistler. There appears to be no shortage of videos available online that cover the site, treating it as a place of spectacle and intrigue and that are perhaps outraged at the poor living conditions of its inhabitants. Other documentaries have sought to establish the site through comparative analysis with other more popularly recognised urban slums, such as Ron Fricke’s 1993 documentary project Baraka, which compiles memories of cities, rural landscapes, forests and isolated communities without the implementation of voice-over, compiling and chronicling natural events and connecting them through visual motifs – one, in particular, includes a notable transition between a Brazilian favela and the Kowloon Walled City. However, to understand how this near-mythological and sensationalised enclave came to be, one must understand its origins, which date back to the Song dynasty (ce 960–1279) and were later shaped by the Opium Wars (ce 1836–60), with both periods tremendously influencing the site’s historical origins. ⮭
  25. In multiple crime thrillers, the Walled City will sometimes serve as a stand-in for a sanctuary within a church or religious institution, where criminals would be exempt from the law and under the institutional protection of the residents inside, who themselves were often involved in gang activity. In reality, the Walled City did house many refugees from mainland China, Southeast Asia and even those within Hong Kong itself. ⮭
  26. Abbas and Huyssen, ‘Faking globalization’, 244. ⮭
  27. Fraser and Cheuk-Yin Li, ‘Second life of Kowloon Walled City’, 219. ⮭
  28. Unlike passive spectatorship, these experiences construct a feedback loop between the user and the space, enacting what Derrida might call a (messianic) conjuration, as the player summons not just memory but loss itself. ⮭
  29. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 430. ⮭
  30. Albert Ng as quoted in Goldthread, ‘Former Kowloon Walled City Resident Reacts to Stray!’ YouTube, 29 November 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCxpaCtQkH0. ⮭
  31. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 170–1. ⮭
  32. Brown, Statelessness, 175. ⮭
  33. In their book Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, Daniel S. Roh, Betty Huang and Greta A. Niu identify a signified model of representation to be ‘dehumanizing’ and further elaborate that it has ‘engendered counter-dialogue in those same cultural and political spaces’ (7). More specifically, the image projected by this phenomenon, typically encountered in science fiction or works set in a dystopian, hyper-technologically advanced perspective future, can add ‘a wrinkle to the critical commonplace that Orientalism actively produces and reproduces an oppositional East to cement Western hegemony’ (8) as described in Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism (1978). The authors of this book describe how techno-orientalism, more specifically, may encompass Asian perspectives or derive from Asian creatives and artistic sources, though their symbolism, themes, reception and distribution are worth considerable analysis and discussion. In other more brazenly Orientalist depictions, the authors frequently acknowledge that it is women who are the bearers and recipients of violence and forced technological advancement (as evidenced in the discussed works, including the original and remade Ghost in the Shell, and the episode ‘Good Hunting’ from the adult animated anthology series LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (2019–present)). ⮭
  34. Abbas and Huyssen, ‘Faking globalization’, 243. ⮭
  35. For instance, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s seminal Chungking Express (1994) captures the affective rhythms of urban life through what Abbas describes as ‘the rhythmic alternation between frenetic speed and long moments of waiting and lethargy’ (Abbas and Huyssen, ‘Faking Globalization’, 245). ⮭
  36. Kroker and Weinstein, ‘Political economy of virtual reality’. ⮭
  37. Brett, Changes of State, 169. ⮭
  38. Kroker and Weinstein, ‘Political economy of virtual reality’. ⮭
  39. Rosler et al., ‘Notes from the field’, 16. ⮭
  40. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 231. ⮭
  41. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 389. ⮭
  42. The so-called ‘international’ character of Hong Kong is less organic cosmopolitanism than the residue of settler-colonial fantasies of the free market. The subsequent post-demolition transformation of the Walled City into the popular mythos – its slum conditions aestheticised – is a quintessential flattening of history. ⮭
  43. Jameson, Postmodernism, 67. ⮭
  44. Brown, Statelessness, 45. ⮭
  45. Cartier, ‘Culture and the City’, 63. ⮭
  46. Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 108. ⮭
  47. Western narratives about China (or particular administrative states by association) often overlook class contradictions and the revolutionary legacy, reducing the nation to either a repressive monolith or a cultural relic, thereby ignoring the complex dynamics of national development under socialism, particularly in light of the contemporary restrictions on information and communication imposed by both domestic and international forces. ⮭
  48. Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 113. ⮭
  49. In retrospect, many films based on the aesthetics and ideals of what is arguably considered the ‘cyberpunk’ genre draw imagery from hyper-urban spaces, particularly Asian cities such as Tokyo and Hong Kong. Most importantly, it is crucial to note that science fiction as a genre has not necessarily established itself or ‘fared well’ in Hong Kong in terms of production and consumption. If this aesthetic and genre have not garnered a significant fan base – why does it remain so strongly affiliated with the site’s ideas, as opposed to Hong Kong’s own native film industry’s representation of urban displacement, as demonstrated in their popular crime thrillers and wuxia films? This question, in particular, forms a necessary interrogation. ⮭
  50. Accessed via https://www.scmp.com/opinion/letters/article/3296929/why-celebrate-kowloon-walled-city-hong-kong-airport. ⮭
  51. In a more seemingly ‘contemporarily inspired’ representation of a conflicted, violent, crime-riddled city, Batman Begins (dir. Christopher Nolan, USA, 2005) treats Gotham City as the embodiment of an urban epicentre thrust into a state of utter darkness, both ideologically and literally, featuring crowded, condensed shots of a foggy, polluted atmosphere marred by glaring yellow-dotted lights that seek to elucidate the grandness and disorder of this fictional world plagued by crime and corruption – a city embodying moral decline that must be cleansed through both violence and subsequent efforts at messianic (missionary) salvation, albeit by a masked and tragically orphaned billionaire. Other notable films not produced in China or Hong Kong that potentially perpetuate techno-orientalist objectives in their visualisation and representation of the Walled City and other ‘cyberpunk’ aesthetics inspired by the ‘Asian city’ include, most notably, Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, USA, 1982) and its sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, USA, 2017), both of which present a dystopian future where synthetic humans known as ‘replicants’ become more or less indistinguishable from human beings on, at the very least, a superficial level. ⮭
  52. Said, Orientalism, 1. ⮭
  53. This passage, in particular, evokes Benjamin’s critique of bourgeois cultural product in reflecting on Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (an apt socialist reading of a capitalist world and adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera); as he writes, ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, 256). ⮭
  54. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 157. ⮭

Declarations and conflicts of interest

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Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interests with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.

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