Since completing Better Britons in 2014, I have been working on a second, SSHRC-funded book project, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, about Chinese and Chinese diasporic practices of relation-making under conditions of colonial rule. Here, I focus on the classed and gendered practices of relation through which Chinese and Chinese diasporic subjects, including people of mixed racial descent, made sense of the heterogeneous yet stratified social worlds for which port cities like London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong became known during the first half of the twentieth century. Taking inspiration from global Asian studies, Asian diaspora studies, and the new imperial history, I attend to the multiple ways in which London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong were shaped by their entanglement with one another, as not just nodes of British imperial power but diaspora spaces (to use Avtar Brah’s term) “continually reconstituted via a multitude of border crossings,” migrant projects of inhabitation, and ethnic, national, and imperial formations.

Although I work closely with the materials generated when panicked legislators, censorious journalists, and ambitious social scientists came into contact with port city cultures of conviviality, I center the experiences of people of mixed Asian descent and their kin, exploring not just what they said but what they did and with whom. The project of the book is in this sense phenomenological: I pursue the traces of Chinese and Chinese diasporic practices of intimacy in order to show how, through the labour required for everyday forms of relation, or relation work, port city residents mapped the worlds in which they lived and struggled to make them livable. Histories of anticolonial struggle and decolonial imagining do not often make room for the gendered work of relation, so crucial for the labour of social reproduction. In Archives of Intimacy, I argue for the worldmaking potential of the experiments in conviviality — living with — and collaboration — working together — that the “containment-efforts” of imperial modernity at once made necessary and possible.

I continue to draw on my training as a literary critic. Still, writing Archives of Intimacy has pushed me to think with a wider range of materials and phenomena than ever before, and to more carefully consider the methodological and ethical exigencies of doing so. It is a book about what can be learned from oral histories, family memoirs, photojournalism, court cases, government commissions of enquiry, immigration files, school magazines, and wartime intelligence reports. I have been drawn to photographs, in particular, as entry points for enquiry. As a consequence, many of my recent publications concern everyday and institutional forms of photography; and between 2016 - 2019, I participated in the SSHRC-funded Family Camera Network. I currently serve on the editorial boards of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and Trans Asia Photography.