Pedagogy and the Unlearning of Self : The Performance of Crisis Situation Through Popular Culture

Pedagogy in popular culture is embedded as a process of self-learning among subjects implicated in the reproduction of collective anxieties and desires. In face of uncertainty about future, cinema performs anxiety and fear on layers of disorienting common experience. Over a span of three decades since the city’s late colonial period under British rule, the world-renowned filmmaker Johnnie To has created memorable scenarios which put to play Hong Kong’s crisis situation – either at the 1997 political transition or in light of the widespread social protests invoked by the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and its aftermath. With this focus, I examine social antagonism via local moments of postcoloniality. As people live through everyday fear, anger, and anxiety while learning, i.e., struggling, to cope with the despair, distrust, and disengagement that ruptures the cityscape, the embedded sociopolitical experience – especially among the youth – contributes to the critical (un)learning of self in a cultural situation edging away from hope beyond the screened space of affect. Thus, the pedagogy of culture underpins the politics of affect casting doubt on hopelessness in the performance of ordinary culture under the status quo.