History Talk – A Matter of Life and Death: Relation Work in Wartime Hong Kong (Dr. Nadine Attewell, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University)

Talk abstract: On December 25^th 1941, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong became a temporary possession of the Japanese empire. The experiences of the thousands of white British and other Allied soldiers and civilians who were imprisoned in urban camps for the duration of the war have been extensively plumbed by memoirists and scholars alike. In this talk drawn from my forthcoming book, by contrast, I reflect on the complicated affordances of the colonial archive as a starting point from which to map the cross-class and multiracial networks of relation through which mixed-race and other Chinese women from lower-class (including sex-working) backgrounds struggled to survive the occupation, both within and across the lines dividing the camps from the city.

Given the complicated gender, sexual, racial, and labour politics of care, how might we make sense of women’s practices of relation-making in a wartime context where the uneven distribution of precarity not only intensified, but itself became an object of interimperial contestation? To British and Japanese observers, colonized people’s practices of relation-making mattered principally insofar as they hindered or furthered the reproduction of imperial life. Mobilizing the insights of queer of colour and leftist feminists, I think with Asian women’s efforts to elaborate other orders of value through acts of relation, improvising new supports for life in the face of colonial state abandonment and mass death.

Author bio: Nadine Attewell is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, where she also directs the undergraduate program in Global Asia. She is the author of Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and has published articles in Postcolonial Text, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures of the Americas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Trans Asia Photography. Her second book, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949, will appear as part of Stanford University Press’ British Histories series in 2026.

Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=103693