Book Talk: Death and Emotions in Anglo-China

Engaging with both English and Chinese sources, Death and Emotions in Anglo-China explores how the mourning of the dead in places like colonial Hong Kong and semi-colonial Shanghai was not merely a personal matter but a hotly contested issue. The book pays attention to the dilemma between personal grief and public mourning, arguing that the individual’s chaotic process of grieving was often pushed aside by collective narratives, which stressed the emotional norm of solemnity and the notion of ‘authenticity’. Such collective emotions provided the British, a sentimental rhetoric of sacrifice for their imperial cause, and for the Chinese, a powerful impetus to rising Chinese nationalism by the turn of the century. Focusing on a culturally dynamic context previously overlooked in the field of emotional history, this book contributes to the global dimension of growing interests in historicizing the universal human conditions of emotions and death.

Bobby Tam specializes in the history of death and the history of emotions. His first academic monograph Death and Emotions in Anglo-China explores emotions surrounding death in British colonial and semi-colonial settings in China during the nineteenth century. His previous works include how dead bodies were managed in early colonial Hong Kong. He has also written about the meanings and vocabulary associated with the dead body in urban China during the Late Qing and Early Republican period. His current new research is about history of suicide in nineteenth-century and pre-war Hong Kong.

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