Event Date
Book Talk: Colonial Identities in Multiracial Hong Kong
Date and Time:
April 5, 2024 at 12:00 PM PST/ 7:00 PM UK
Co-sponsors: UC Davis East Asian Studies, UC San Diego 21st Century China Center, UC Irvine Long US-China Institute, UC Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies, Pomona Asian Studies Program, UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies
Register here
About the Event
Author Vivian Kong (University of Bristol) will be joined by discussant Shelly Chan (UC Santa Cruz) to talk about her recent book, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910-45. Vivian Kong asks how colonial hierarchies, the racial and cultural diversity of the British Empire, and global ideologies complicate the meaning of being British.
This event is organized and hosted by Global Hong Kong Studies at University of California.
About the Book
Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910-45
(Cambridge University Press, 2023)
What does it mean to be British? To answer this, Multiracial Britishness takes us to an underexplored site of Britishness – the former British colony of Hong Kong. Vivian Kong asks how colonial hierarchies, the racial and cultural diversity of the British Empire, and global ideologies complicate the meaning of being British. Using multi-lingual sources and oral history, Kong traces the experiences of multiracial residents in 1910-45 Hong Kong. Guiding us through Hong Kong's global networks, and the colony's co-existing exclusive and cosmopolitan social spaces, this book uncovers the long history of multiracial Britishness. Kong argues that Britishness existed in the colony in multiple, hyphenated forms – as a racial category, but also as privileges, a means of survival, and a form of cultural and national belonging. This book offers us an important reminder that multiracial inhabitants of the British Empire were just as active in the making of Britishness as the British state and white Britons.
‘Multiracial Britishness is the first book-length work that examines the political, cultural, and social milieu of Britishness in Hong Kong. It is innovative, important, and original in a number of ways - in its focus on Hong Kong, in its effectiveness at centering colonial subjects in the making of empire, and in its introduction of a diverse cast of historical actors, many of whom came from spaces outside of the formal empire.’
-Charles V. Reed - author of Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911
About the Speakers
Vivian Kong (Author)
Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History and Co-Director of Hong Kong History Centre at the University of Bristol.
Shelly Chan (Discussant)
Associate Professor of modern and transnational Chinese history at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Duke 2018). Her current research explores the disappearance of the Nanyang as a lived and imagined geography.
