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Palgrave Macmillan

The Breath of Empire

Breathing with Historical Trauma in Anglo-Chinese Relations

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  • © 2022

Overview

Authors:
  1. Nichola Khan

    1. School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

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  • 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

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology (PSLA)

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Table of contents (4 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Breathing With Historical Trauma

    • Nichola Khan
    Pages 1-32

  3. Breathing as Transgenerational Transmission

    • Nichola Khan
    Pages 33-64

  4. Women’s Intimacies After Empire: Respiratory Histories for the Future

    • Nichola Khan
    Pages 65-95

  5. Conclusion: Breathing as Life

    • Nichola Khan
    Pages 97-111

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 113-129
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

“The Breath of Empire offers an innovative, multi-disciplinary perspective on imperial intimacies, the transgenerational transmission of colonial and familial trauma, and violence in two types of seemingly strikingly different—yet richly analytically comparable—households: the Chinese family in British Hong Kong and wider imperial Asia, and the Anglo-Chinese family in England. Taking “respiratory politics”, “intimacies” that are visceral and intrusive, and “violence” as theoretical tropes and ethnographic narrative and mnemonic, this book offers fresh and important contributions to scholarly understandings in women’s studies, the anthropology of the body, and post-colonial scholarship through its engaged examination of state repression, and its reprisal of historical fears of suffocation and dying across historical and geopolitical spans.”

—Junjie Chen, Professor of Anthropology, Minzu University of China

“The book is timely and interconnected torecent history, particularly the connections drawn between historical trauma and intergenerational infection and contagion set against wartime trauma, and the Covid virus as a global phenomenon as devastating as the ravages of war.  The idea of breath and breathing is tied to the Anglo-Chinese context of colonial and postcolonial history in China and South East Asia as well as Khan’s own transnational Chinese and bi-racial family history. Khan has accomplished an original and interdisciplinary academic work.”

—Xu Xi 許素細, author of Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations, This Fish is Fowl, Dear Hong Kong, That Man in Our Lives


Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Nichola Khan

About the author

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.

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