The Breath of Empire

Breathing with Historical Trauma in Anglo-Chinese Relations
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-031-17689-0
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 129 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 318 g

Reihe: 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 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 breathe—through tuberculosis, opium smoking, asthma, and panic—with 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.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Khan, Nichola

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

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.