“And Two of Them are Learning How to Dance”: Institutionality and Multiracial Lives in the Colonial Transpacific

• In Event: 370. Archival Production and Chinese Diaspora: New Approaches to Race, Belonging, and Migration in the 20th Century

Abstract

In this paper, I take up the entangled histories of Hong Kong’s minority communities by reflecting on the archival traces of interactions between differently racialized subjects as these unfold within and athwart such institutions of community-formation as the public school. Drawing on the archives of Queen’s College and the Diocesan Boys’ School, the two English-language Hong Kong schools most likely to educate middle-class non-British, -Chinese, and -Portuguese men, I read the “Mohammedan dinner” one Eurasian schoolboy is said to have hosted for a mixed-race Muslim friend in 1919, in relation to the latter’s contested 1924 marriage, in a Guangzhou mosque, to an American-born woman of mixed Chinese descent named Sara Hing. In 1925, Hing was barred entry to the United States on the grounds that her marriage to a “medical student in Hong Kong, a person of half Chinese and half East Indian blood” had expatriated her, a finding she (successfully) challenged by arguing that Muslim marriage rites carried no legal force in China. My paper then attends to the ad hoc character – one might say the queerness – of even those ritualized practices through which people improvise their being together in the shadow of transnational state racisms. How, I ask, might we think about practices of relation-making that do not either possess or aspire to the condition of institutionality (that is, reproducibility)? Conversely, how does our reliance on archives that are the material manifestation of institutional ventures in regulating belonging and memory-making proliferate institutionality, and with what consequences?

Author

• Nadine Attewell, McMaster University