Family, Sex Work, and Asian Diasporic History
Photograph, “Chinese children on doorstep, Limehouse 1932,” The Graphic, January 9 1932, image collections, P18740, Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, UK. In the foreground, four children are seated in a doorway, three with their faces turned towards the camera, one facing back towards the left, where an older woman stands talking to an acquaintance in another doorway. In front of the children, the numbers 1 through 9 have been chalked onto the sidewalk.
Ethical and methodological questions are a structuring preoccupation of my scholarship. For the first part of Archives of Intimacy, I wanted to trace how British people of mixed Chinese descent navigated colonial capitalist geographies of power and attachment, centering them as subjects and not just objects of knowledge – in other words, thinking with, not just about. In the absence of a robust autobiographical record, this has meant working closely with photographs like the one above, taken by a street photographer in London’s East End during the early 1930s; as well as oral and community histories, in which family history often plays a central role. The challenge, then, is how to center the knowledges that people share in the form of family history — without recentering the family form. I offered some preliminary thoughts in a short talk given as part of a series of Family History workshops organized by Birkbeck historian Julia Laite, linked here. Originally presented June 16, 2021.