This Palgrave Pivot combines anthropological, biographical and autoethnographic perspectives onto imperial intimacies, the transgenerational transmission of colonial and familial trauma, and violence in two kinds of household: the Chinese family in British Hong Kong and wider imperial Asia, and the Anglo-Chinese family in England. Conjoining approaches from literary anthropology, the historiography of Anglo-Chinese relations, and perspectives on colonial trauma, it highlights the relative neglect of women’s stories in customary Chinese readings, colonial accounts, and an ancestral family record from 1800 to the present. Offering an alternative view of family history, this book links the body as a dwelling for assaults on the ability to breathe―through tuberculosis, opium smoking, asthma, and panic―with the physical home that is assaulted in turn by bombs, killing, intimate betrayals, and fatal respiratory illness. The COVID-19 “pandemic of breathlessness” serves as mnemonic both for state repression, and for the reprisal of historical fears of suffocation and dying. These phenomena converge under an analytic concept the author calls respiratory politics.
Author(s): Nichola Khan
Series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 142
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
About the Book (Optional, Conferences)
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Breathing With Historical Trauma
Respiratory Politics
Intimacies Across Continents and Generations
Breathing With Words
Becoming Breathless
References
Chapter 2: Breathing as Transgenerational Transmission
104 Johnston Road: And Other Unhomely Dwellings
Washing the Bones
Afflictions of Breath
Bodily Dwellings
From Colonial to Postcolonial Disorders
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Women’s Intimacies After Empire: Respiratory Histories for the Future
Message From a Dead Grandmother
Imperial Intimacies for the Future
Writing, Through Paralysis and Possibility (Reading Duras)
Time and Returns, Colonial Trauma
Contested Scenes: Between a Father and Daughter
Oceanic Futures, My Head Is Floating
No Ending, On Time
References
Chapter 4: Conclusion: Breathing as Life
References
References
Index
