Research: Aesthetics of Nostalgia in the Urban Narrative and Cinema of Postcolonial Hong Kong
Marco Sbreglia is a PhD Student in English Literatures, Language and Translation at Sapienza, University of Rome, in cotutelle with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. In 2023 he received his Master's degree in English Studies from Ca' Foscari, University of Venice with 110 cum laude, with a thesis titled "Translating Neapolitan Neorealist Narrative: Anna Maria Ortese's Il mare non bagna Napoli". In 2021 he earned his Bachelor's degree in European and American Languages, Literatures and Cultures from L'Orientale, University of Naples, with 110 cum laude. His doctoral project aims to explore how cinema and anglophone narrative address the sense of nostalgia that results from Hong Kong’s drastic urban transformations between the 1960s and the 1980s. More precisely, this research will widen the focus on how the urban environment is continuously moulded by high-tech, futuristic skyscrapers, while being simultaneously haunted by the ghosts of pre-handover memories. This research will try to understand how and to what extent this pattern of nostalgia impacts and defines emblematic urban spaces and human connections in the narrative and cinema of postcolonial Hong Kong. This research will build upon Xu Xi's anglophone narrative and the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, Stanley Kwan and Fruit Chan.