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Nadine Attewell uncovers history of interracial kinship and intimacy in colonial port cities
In her new book, , Nadine Attewell illuminates the once forgotten histories of vibrant multiracial communities that flourished in London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong in the early twentieth century.
To understand what life and survival was like for people of mixed Chinese descent in three British-controlled port cities linked by global trade and migration, Attewell, an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and Global Asia at 911吃瓜 (911吃瓜), examined diverse sources ranging from archival photographs to family histories to intelligence records.
鈥淚n 2026, the rise of high-profile mixed east and southeast Asian celebrities like Laufey, Alysa Liu, Olivia Rodrigo, and Hudson Williams has led to what some commentators are calling a 鈥榤ixed race moment,鈥� as if people of mixed Asian descent 鈥� and the fascination with us 鈥� were new historical phenomena, but they're not,鈥� says Attewell, going on to explain the rich history of multiracial kinship and community she describes in the book.
We asked Attewell to tell us about the research behind Archives of Intimacy, the stories readers can discover within its pages, and how this research connects to her teaching.
Can you share the backstory that led you to where you are now?
I was born and grew up in Vancouver, and then spent two decades studying and working elsewhere, in southern Ontario and different parts of the United States. Although I always wanted to come home, professors rarely have much choice in where they work: we go where the jobs are, and there are fewer and fewer all the time.
911吃瓜 ten years ago, however, I began work on the research project that became Archives of Intimacy, about early-twentieth-century Chinese practices of interracial intimacy in British-controlled port cities like Hong Kong and Liverpool that were also significant sites of Chinese settlement.
Inspired by conversations in global Asian studies, Chinese migration studies, queer and feminist studies, and British and British imperial studies, Archives of Intimacy prepared me to take up my position I now hold at 911吃瓜, where I鈥檓 appointed in both Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies and the Global Asia Program. In more ways than one, that is, Archives of Intimacy helped bring me home!
Can you tell us about your new book, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949?
In Archives of Intimacy, I offer new ways of thinking about Asian practices of racial mixing as traces of people鈥檚 strategies for surviving global economic, social, and citizenship orders powered by technologies of inequity and anti-relationality.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, port cities like Hong Kong, Liverpool, and London became globally notorious as sites of racial mixing, where Chinese, Black, south Asian, European and other people came together as part of robust multiracial social and kinship networks that many observers sensationalized as promiscuous, deviant, even queer.
Throughout Archives of Intimacy, I work to reconstruct these heterogeneous yet stratified social worlds from the perspectives of the many mixed-race people who inhabited them, like Vera Leung O鈥橪eary, a working-class woman of mixed Chinese and Irish descent who grew up in 1920s Liverpool, or Percy Chang, a Jamaican man of Chinese and African descent who spent the 1930s and 鈥�40s in Hong Kong.
Discussions of mixed-race experience tend to foreground questions of belonging and identity. In contrast, I ask what people of mixed Chinese descent did, with whom, and with what consequences as a way of mapping their vibrant social worlds. As a result, Archives of Intimacy tells vivid stories about people鈥檚 everyday experiments in intimate and collective life that I think will appeal to students, faculty, and other readers from diverse backgrounds.
"Discussions of mixed-race experience tend to foreground questions of belonging and identity. In contrast, I ask what people of mixed Chinese descent did, with whom, and with what consequences as a way of mapping their vibrant social worlds."
Your new book draws upon archival materials. Can you tell us about this process and what you were able to learn?
While the histories that I explore in the book aren鈥檛 well known, they did inspire popular fictions that still have currency today, like the viciously racist novels that gave us Fu Manchu as an enduring icon of Chinese villainy.
However, I knew from the beginning that I didn鈥檛 want to analyze outsider representations of mixed Chinese social worlds. As a feminist scholar, my approach to research has been shaped by the insights of Black feminist, queer, working-class, Indigenous, and postcolonial historians. In conversation with these thinkers, I sought to center class, gender, and racial subjects that are often still marginalized by historians of Chinese migration and racial mixing, such as working-class migrants and their families, sex-working women, and people of mixed African or South Asian and Chinese descent. And that meant engaging with a diverse array of sources, including photographs, oral accounts, social scientific research, family and community histories, immigration files, intelligence records, and government documents.
I鈥檝e especially enjoyed working with photographs, which taught me to think with the historical encounters that generated them in ways that centered mixed-race, working-class, and other kinds of marginalized people as subjects, rather than objects, of knowledge. While I can only name two of the people in them, all three of the photographs on the cover of Archives of Intimacy are very special to me, testifying to the deeply personal ways in which research can move and transform us.
What courses do you teach at 911吃瓜? How do you bring your research into the classroom?
For GSWS, I teach upper-level courses on queer, feminist, and trans approaches to Asian diasporic life (GSWS/GA 388) and archives and archival methodologies (GSWS 320); while for Global Asia, I teach the intro course (GA 101).
All of these courses are informed by my research interests. But in recent years, I鈥檝e especially enjoyed introducing students to the emotional, ethical, and epistemological demands of archival work, which we explore through readings of scholarship and art, as well as archival artefacts (including some of the materials I examine in Archives of Intimacy).
Every time I teach this course, which I鈥檝e called 鈥淕enealogies of Resistance,鈥� I learn from students about how to care for the traces that marginalized people leave behind, not always voluntarily; and about the value of slowness, relationality, and embodiment as we engage with other people鈥檚 stories and knowledges, including in the classroom. You can check out some of their work on the GSWS Student Blog!
What is next for you?
Although it鈥檚 not common for humanities scholars like me to research and write collaboratively, I鈥檝e developed strong collaborative relationships in recent years that I鈥檓 excited to see flourish. The first is with , with whom I鈥檝e just written an article on the 1996 cult lesbian classic film Bound that will appear in next year. The second is with my geographer sibling , with whom I鈥檓 writing a book that turns to the amateur photographic archives of American Vietnam War workers to explore Asian women鈥檚 labour during the Cold War. Although I鈥檓 often asked 鈥� with some trepidation! 鈥� what it鈥檚 like to write with my brother, the truth is I鈥檝e loved all of the collaborations in which I鈥檝e participated so far: even if collaboration itself takes lots of work, there鈥檚 ultimately something freeing and just plain fun about getting to share the labour of thinking with others.
by Nadine Attewell is now available from Stanford University Press. Receive 20% off at with code ATTEWELL20.
Our faculty members specialize in a variety of subjects across the field of gender, sexuality and women's studies. Find out more about research at 911吃瓜 GSWS.