Mundi: articulating a post-umbrella common(s)
CHAN Kam Fai
ABSTRACT This paper shares the experiences of an emergent collective of young intellectuals in Hong Kong and its recent project, Mundi, which consists of publication, activist research and communal transmission of knowledge. The project negotiates the notion and practice of “common” at the limit, from within the historical experience of Hong Kong, between academia and public intellectuals, global universalism and local particularism, and colonial knowledge and everyday urban practice. Affected by an intense desire to analyse and theorise the reality of Hong Kong, Mundi engages in a long process of decolonising knowledge production. The paper also explores how Mundi responds to the demand of the present post-Umbrella Hong Kong situation by problematising and re-articulating the common.
KEYWORDS: Mundi, decolonising knowledge, common, post-Umbrella Hong Kong
Notes on contributor
Chan Kam-fai is editor of Mundi, a local publishing project which aims at producing non-institutional knowledge in the East-Asian context. Recently, he has edited and written a book series in Chinese on the concepts of biopolitics (Omnia Omnibus: Paul, Our Comrade of Time [2016]; Life Disposed: Biopolitics and Dispositif [2018]). He teaches at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Design. His current research interest is in biopolitics and political theology, urbanism and urban materialism, visuality and visual epistemology.