The Breath of Empire: Breathing with Historical Trauma in Anglo-Chinese Relations (Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology)

This Palgrave Pivot combines anthropological, biographical and autoethnographic perspectives onto imperial intimacies, the transgenerational transmission of colonial and familial trauma, and violence in two kinds of household: the Chinese family in British Hong Kong and wider imperial Asia, and the Anglo-Chinese family in England. Conjoining approaches from literary anthropology, the historiography of Anglo-Chinese relations, and perspectives on colonial trauma, it highlights the relative neglect of womens stories in customary Chinese readings, colonial accounts, and an ancestral family record from 1800 to the present. Offering an alternative view of family history, this book links the body as a dwelling for assaults on the ability to breathethrough tuberculosis, opium smoking, asthma, and panicwith the physical home that is assaulted in turn by bombs, killing, intimate betrayals, and fatal respiratory illness. The COVID-19 "pandemic of breathlessness" serves as mnemonic both for state repression, and for the reprisal of historical fears of suffocation and dying. These phenomena converge under an analytic concept the author calls respiratory politics. Nichola Khan is Reader in Anthropology and Psychology in the School of Humanities and Social Science and Co-Director of the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton, UK Acknowledgments About the Book (Optional, Conferences) Contents About the Author List of Figures Chapter 1: Breathing With Historical Trauma Respiratory Politics Intimacies Across Continents and Generations Breathing With Words Becoming Breathless References Chapter 2: Breathing as Transgenerational Transmission 104 Johnston Road: And Other Unhomely Dwellings Washing the Bones Afflictions of Breath Bodily Dwellings From Colonial to Postcolonial Disorders Conclusion References Chapter 3: Women’s Intimacies After Empire: Respiratory Histories for the Future Message From a Dead Grandmother Imperial Intimacies for the Future Writing, Through Paralysis and Possibility (Reading Duras) Time and Returns, Colonial Trauma Contested Scenes: Between a Father and Daughter Oceanic Futures, My Head Is Floating No Ending, On Time References Chapter 4: Conclusion: Breathing as Life References References Index