Infrastructure and its discontent: Structures of feeling in the age of Hong Kong-China dis/connection

Abstract

This essay reveals that infrastructure, both transit and legal, not only facilitates exchanges across distance and borders, but also creates public structures of feeling. By structures of feeling, I refer to Raymond Williams’s discussion of those emergent trajectories of emotions that prevail without being fully articulated in a particular time and space. I found the term structures of feeling useful to articulate those emergent forms of mistrust, repulsion, anger, and even apprehension among the population with regard to the subway and other border-crossing projects.