Archives of Intimacy

Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949

This book offers a rich and innovative study of multiracial social worlds in early-twentieth-century London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong – three port cities linked by their importance to global British shipping networks and circuits of Chinese migration. In these cities, Chinese, Black, South Asian and European people came together to foster multiracial communities which have been largely forgotten, remembered only through sensationalist fictions that reflected white anxieties about racial mixing. Nadine Attewell considers these vibrant multiracial worlds through the eyes of those who knew them best: people of mixed Chinese descent, for whom interracial intimacies were features of everyday life.

Mobilizing a wide range of archival materials, including photographs, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, Attewell reconstructs the social experiences of people like Vera Leung, a working-class woman of Irish and Chinese descent growing up in Liverpool's interwar Chinatown, and Percy Chang, a Jamaican man of Chinese and African descent with a wide social network in Hong Kong. Rather than centering identity as the focus of mixed-race people's struggles, she asks what they did and with whom. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship and integrating British, Asian, and diasporic histories, Attewell presents new ways of thinking about the everyday meanings of interracial intimacy, and practices of relation and survival under global conditions of colonial capitalist rule.

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