Nadine Attewell, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949 (Stanford University Press, 2026).
In the early twentieth century, Chinese migrants, among others from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe, flocked to London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong. Nadine Attewell’s luminous Archives of Intimacy transports readers to these vibrant early 20th century dockside worlds and offers a feminist and queer history of relation, one that expands how we understand the global formation of “Chineseness” and write history. Through Attewell’s vast archival research, we encounter Chinese migrant men who married white immigrant women and local women of color, mixed-race Chinese children, elite Eurasian families, and Chinese Caribbean diasporic subjects. The book unfolds across the street corners, laundries, boarding houses, brothels, dance halls, and shops of London’s Limehouse and Liverpool’s Pitt Street neighborhoods. The heterogenous presence of seamen of color, sex workers, and social reformers exceeded the moniker “Chinatown.” Attewell examines the working-class cosmopolitanisms, intimate relations, and everyday acts of solidarity between port city residents to survive the anti-immigrant, racist inhospitalities of interwar Britain under the 1905 Aliens Act. In contrast to British port cities, Attewell also considers the Chinese majority British colony of Hong Kong to highlight a different set of mobilities, intimacies, and forms of Chineseness.
Since the relational turn in the study of race, colonialism, and empire—of which Lisa Lowe’s Intimacies of the Four Continents (2015) is paradigmatic— “relation,” “intimacy,” and “entanglement” have become ubiquitous to the point of losing their analytical specificity. However, in Archives of Intimacy, intimacy and relation are treated with precision. In this book, intimacy is both the stuff of the archives and a heuristic, “a genre of relation,” for bringing together histories of (semi)colonial east Asia, Chinese migration, and imperial Britain. Archives of Intimacy attends “to the fleshy, emplaced particulars of Chinese people’s social lives” (Attewell 3). What makes this book distinctive is its emphasis on the ephemeral, queer forms of relation that are not easily categorizable: same-sex intimacies and transactional sex, homosocial domestic arrangements, “deviant” family formations, and acts and aspirations “not always in accordance with imperial dictates or desires” (Attewell 3). Attewell mobilizes relational terms to write a connected history of colonial capitalist modernity that brings Chinese people across imperial geographies together, shaping and constraining their lives and “wayward itineraries” but never determining them. While it is easy to romanticize intimacies, the intimacies in this book are in the service of Chinese working-class survival and the reproduction of class privilege and imperial power. Interracial intimacy and multiracial conviviality are “material social practices with the potential to proliferate life chances for more people than might otherwise have been supported to survive, let alone thrive” (Attewell 4). Intimacies do not spontaneously spring up whenever racialized people encounter one another but must be laboriously forged through relational work.
Like the pejorative terms “half-caste” and “Chinaman,” “mixed-race” and “Chinese” are terms of identity freighted with racial and geopolitical meanings, and they have not been available for all diasporic subjects to claim. Accordingly, Attewell is careful to not rely on identitarian logics that posit a stable mixed-race Chinese subject and that reify Han-centric, racial nationalist “Chineseness.” Rather, she approaches Chineseness as a cultural text and frames it through relation; subjects become Chinese through their encounters with and ties to others. Refusing to narrow who can claim Chineseness, she emphasizes “the capacity of Chineseness to…mean and do new things.” “Chinese” is a “capaciously descriptive rather than a normative modifier to mark an inheritance or ascription that people may have taken up in any number of ways, or refused altogether” (Attewell 15). Refusing to demarcate and police who is Chinese, Attewell radically expands Chinese into an “inclusive category through which a range of subjects might access care and pleasure” (94). Crucially, Chineseness is not a fixed identity based in lineage and biology, nor a property of the self, but “materializes as a key site of attachment and meaning” (Attewell 75, 93).
In three parts — “Encounters,” “Itineraries,” and “Lifelines” — Attewell tells the singular and collective stories of Chinese men, women, and children, while interrogating the heteronormative, racial ways of knowing that structure their inclusion or absence in the archive. Chapter 1 “Looking Relations” centers a photograph of three mixed-race Chinese girls in London, their names and the provenance of the photograph unknown. Writing against the “archive of pathology,” Attewell attends to the girls’ refusal to be captured on film, attending to their practices of looking, knowing, and relating instead. Chapter 2 “The Queerest Parish in England” examines the promiscuous social relations of Chinese Liverpool and the pressures of white heteronormative respectability on shaping the community’s historical narratives. We meet the memorable Bella Gomes, a neighborhood resident of “Portuguese and Negro blood” who sold sexual services to Chinese migrant men. Gomes is absent from community oral histories despite her sustained presence and the solidarity she offered to the community. Chapter 3 “Everyday Chineseness” theorizes how “Chinese” is relationally produced and lived through the affective, nostalgic medium of food. Chinese mixed-race children felt a sense of identity and belonging through foodstuffs and goods. Practices of nourishment—the devalued yet “necessary work” of social reproduction—formed the bedrock of children’s acculturation and the community’s regeneration. Continuing Attewell’s attention to child subjects, Chapter 4 “Black and Chinese Liverpool in Relation” analyzes photographs of Asian and Black children playing at school. The children’s relations emblematize the maritime networks that brought African and Chinese men to Liverpool and the possibilities of Afro-Asian conviviality against racial division.
Largely set in Hong Kong, “Itineraries” explores patterns of mobility, settlement, and place-making. Contrasting the working-class cosmopolitanism of previous chapters, Chapter 5 “Relationship on Top of Relationship” turns to the imperial cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong’s elite Eurasian families, including the Cheng family, and the multigenerational reproduction of social influence through marital alliances and pedagogical training. This is also relational work, but in the service of accruing familial privileges within the British colonial capitalist order. In Chapter 6 “Model Students and Problem Children,” we follow doctoral student Irene Cheng as she embarks on dissertation research about working-class Chinese in Limehouse, only to suffer a mental breakdown and change her dissertation topic. Cheng exerts a ghostly presence throughout the book. For Attewell, in perhaps a poignant moment of identification with her subject, Cheng’s breakdown “point[s] to the affordances, costs, and limits of the deeply personal repertoires of knowledge that researchers bring to some projects more than others” (18). Chapter 7 “Exit Strategy” follows the case of Sarah Hing, a mixed Chinese woman born in the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, who married a Muslim medical student “of half Chinese and half East Indian blood” in Hong Kong, and was barred from re-entering the US when pregnant. Within the constraints of imperial citizenship, Hing rejected married life and shuttled back and forth the Pacific with her child. These chapters standout in Attewell’s creative reading of colonial archives, pressing at the limits of Cheng’s thesis and Hing’s immigration file to speculate about their interior lives, relations, and experiences as desiring, mixed-race subjects.
“Lifelines” clarifies the stakes of relational work during the Second World War in occupied Hong Kong and southern China. Chapter 8 “Mixed with the Caribbean” examines how Afro-Chinese Caribbean diasporic returnees mobilized knowledge of Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guianan, and Surinamese social worlds and local Chinese relations to support Britain. It tells the story of Percy Chang, an Afro-Chinese Jamaican who worked as a British intelligence agent in Guangdong where he could stealthily pass as Chinese, and Chang’s fraught ties across the Caribbean and Pearl Delta River worlds. Chapter 9 “A Matter of Life and Death” commemorates the mixed-race Chinese women who engaged in relational, social reproductive work for collective survival. To keep their families together, Chinese women often joined their white British partners in POW camps. They procured foodstuffs, sent parcels, raised children, and engaged in sex work. These everyday acts may not be as legible as rebellions, strikes, and insurgencies, but they resolutely were forms of political action. Throughout the chapters, Attewell insists on Chinese women and girls’ everyday practices of resistance—girls who refused the photographer, women who chose another way—and the social necessity of their relation-making labors. In this way, we can consider Archives of Intimacy as a companion text to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). Focusing on daughters, wives, aunties, and sex workers, Attewell recasts “ordinary people’s intimate experiments as (counter)archives of global Asian thought and action” (14).
There are many ways to read this book: a social history of early twentieth-century Chinese diasporic life, an Afro-Asian atlas, a people’s history of the port, a feminist manifesto about reproductive labor, a model for writing histories of relation, a collection of community and life histories, among other things. For me, Archives of Intimacy realizes the radical potential for engaging Asian and Asian diasporic studies with feminist and queer theories and methods to imagine usable pasts of connection. It can also be read as a timely blueprint for mutual aid and care in the face of cruel state violence, organized abandonment, imperial war, repressive border regimes, and family separation. An indispensable resource for interdisciplinary methods, Archives of Intimacy offers an exercise in attention: listening at “lower frequencies” (Campt 2017) and reading images for what appears on the edge of the frame or is absented all together. Ethnography is a form of knowledge-production specific to the subjectivity of the ethnographer and their relations with a particular group of people and place. The same is true for the historian. Attewell, herself a mixed-race Chinese diasporic subject, narrates her encounters with the archive and how its silences affected her. Research is relational work, she reminds us.
References
Attewell, Nadine. 2026. Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949. Stanford University Press.
Campt, Tina M. 2017. Listening to Images. Duke University Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2018. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton & Co.
Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press.
Mingwei Huang is Associate Professor, Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College. Huang is the author of Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024).