Feeling Numb:

The Cultural Politics of Unemotionality in Hong Kong

Speaker: Ting-Fai Yu (Associate Professor)

Organizer: Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, NYCU

Venue: 106A, HA Building II, NYCU

Date: 2 PM. Nov. 11, 2026

What does it mean when unemotionality becomes a public feeling? This lecture examines emotional absence in post-2019 Hong Kong as a condition in which certain feelings fail to arise or remain accessible. Drawing on a range of literary and audiovisual texts from Hong Kong and its diaspora, it attends to how the city is articulated through indifference, detachment, apathy, and numbness, and asks how cultural forms make emotional absence perceptible. By approaching unemotionality as both a public feeling and a problem of cultural representation, I argue that it is neither an incapacity to feel nor simple political apathy. Rather, it is an active orientation that enables people to continue living, be creative, and manage risk when grief, anger, or hope can no longer be publicly expressed or meaningfully sustained. This lecture concludes by showing how current social and political conditions reorganize what people can feel, thereby extending the study of political emotion beyond the more intense feelings commonly associated with change and crisis.