The Breath of Empire

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 women's 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.

Offers an innovative perspective on imperial intimacies, the transgenerational transmission trauma, and violence Combines anthropological, biographical and autoethnographic perspectives Advances scholarship in women studies, anthropology of body, literary anthropology, and post-colonial studies

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

1. Breathing With Historical Trauma.- 2 Breathing as Transgenerational Transmission.- 3 Women's Intimacies After Empire: Respiratory Histories for the Future.- 4 Conclusion: Breathing as Life.