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Ceylon has several claims to occupy a special place in British colonial history. Ceylon's place in colonial history is not confined to its status as Britain's model colony. On the contrary, in Ceylon's case the triumph of moderate nationalism coincided with a resurgence of religion as a significant force in the political process. Lord Donoughmore was appointed to examine the Ceylon constitution in 1927. With a view to the eradication of communalism, the Donoughmore Commission made its most startling and controversial recommendation. Equally controversial during the period of the Donoughmore constitution, and indeed right up to independence and beyond, was the position of the Indian Tamil community in Ceylon. Unlike their counterparts in India and Burma, the political leadership in Ceylon co-operated with Britain in the war and, ultimately, Ceylon's wartime role as a major source of raw materials and as a strategic base worked to the advantage of the island's nationalists. Ceylon was independent but the real test of nationhood lay ahead.

This book focuses on Fruit Chan's film Made in Hong Kong (1997), a typical story of disaffected youth and the morbid trips they take. In the history of world cinema, the disaffected youth is a well-recognized trope used to illustrate symptoms of the problems of contemporary cities. Like other similar films, Made in Hong Kong is an indictment of a society where youth express their urban angst and disillusionment. While the “cruel tragedies of youth” are fundamental to any big city, they always embody local specificities. The youngsters' death trips allegorize the concluding chapter of British colonial history in Hong Kong. It is this allegorical reference to the 1997 handover that places the film in the category of “New Hong Kong Cinema.”

The subject of chapter 5 is the installation Post-Partum Document (1973–79). The chapter traces how Mary Kelly’s engagement with the visual appearance of language became a tool to deconstruct idealised myths of maternal femininity. By taking material desires – so often pathologised – as her aesthetic subject, Kelly challenged white ideals of maternal femininity as an identity women naturally assume. Crucial to this challenge was the psychoanalytic argument that through pregnancy and the first months of infant care, women re-experience their psychic lives before their negative entry into the Oedipus Complex. Kelly shows that mining the feminine pre-Oedipal for its affective and aesthetic plenitude opens up the feminist possibility that women can do more than serve as the ground for patriarchal losses; they can actually compose their own forms of fetishisation, a ‘language’ capable of writing women’s desires into cultural visibility. Kelly draws upon the visual language of the hieroglyph to represent this fetishisation. And with elegant hieroglyphic forms, Post-Partum Document touches upon the legacies of British colonial history and its manifestations as metropolitan racism in the London of the 1970s. As Kelly demonstrates, this structural racism was consolidated through the naturalisation of maternal femininity that Post-Partum Document puts into question.