18/05/2026
It's this Wednesday! Register on TicketPass.
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HKHC Speaker’s Series, Dr. Nadine Attewell, Simon Fraser University
Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949
Speaker: Dr. Nadine Attewell, Simon Fraser University
Date and Time: 20 May 2026, 3:30 – 5pm (UKT)
Venue: LR8, Arts Complex, University of Bristol / Zoom
Language: English
Hybrid event. To attend, please register on Ticketpass.
https://tktp.as/ECCXPK
Zoom details:
https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/99053578662?pwd=Ohsjy7puFEkLdgyxI6LSD65ItTraBu.1
Meeting ID: 990 5357 8662
Passcode: 090444
HKHC Speaker’s Series, Dr. Nadine Attewell, Simon Fraser University
Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949
Speaker: Dr. Nadine Attewell, Simon Fraser University
Date and Time: 20 May 2026, 3:30 – 5pm (UKT)
Venue: LR8, Arts Complex, University of Bristol / Zoom
Language: English
Hybrid event. To attend, please register on Ticketpass.
https://tktp.as/ECCXPK
Zoom details:
https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/99053578662?pwd=Ohsjy7puFEkLdgyxI6LSD65ItTraBu.1
Meeting ID: 990 5357 8662
Passcode: 090444
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On 20 May 2026 at 3:30-5pm, the HKHC Speakers Series will host Dr. Nadine Attewell to give a talk on her forthcoming book, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949. (Stanford University Press, June 2026). After her talk she will be joined by two discussants, Dr. Saima Nasar and Dr. Vivian Kong of University of Bristol, who will respond to this exciting new publication.
About Archives of Intimacy
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 in*******al 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 q***r and feminist scholarship and integrating British, Asian, and diasporic histories, Attewell presents new ways of thinking about the everyday meanings of in*******al intimacy, and practices of relation and survival under global conditions of colonial capitalist rule.
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Nadine Attewell is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and Global Asia at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (2014).
Dr. Saima Nasar is Senior Lecturer in the History of Africa and its Diasporas at the University of Bristol, and the PI of Leverhulme Trust funded project on ‘Welfare Citizenship and Intersectional Feminism’. She is a social and cultural historian who works on histories of race, empire, and immigration.
Dr. Vivian Kong is Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History and Co-Director of Hong Kong History Centre at the University of Bristol. She is a historian of identities and migration in colonial Hong Kong.
