A new collection, Locating Chinese Women, edited by Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martinez….
This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chinese women, their gendered migrations, and their mobile lives between China and Australia. It considers different aspects of women’s lives, both as individuals and as the wives and daughters of immigrant men. While the number of Chinese women in Australia before 1950 was relatively small, their presence was significant and often subject to public scrutiny.
Moving beyond traditional representations of women as hidden and silent, this book demonstrates that Chinese Australian women in the twentieth century expressed themselves in the public eye, whether through writings, in photographs, or in political and cultural life. Their remarkable stories are often inspiring and sometimes tragic and serve to demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of racial politics and imposed categories of gender, culture, and class.
Historians of transnational Chinese migration have come to recognize Australia as a crucial site within the ‘Cantonese Pacific’, and this collection provides a new layer of gendered comparison, connecting women’s experiences in Australia with those in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand.
Kate Bagnall is a historian at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. She has published on various aspects of Chinese Australian history, particularly on women and family life. Julia T. Martínez is an associate professor of history at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published on the history of northern Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
bbA new exhibition at the Freud Museum London explores Sigmund Freud’s relationship to China, Chinese culture and the Chinese objects and books in his collection. More details here.
I’m giving a talk (Zoom…again) to the RAS Shanghai – “Thrills, Spills & Femme Fatales – Pulp Fiction & 1950s Shanghai”, based on my RAS China 2021 Journal essay ‘An Appreciation of Don Smith’s 1952 China Coaster and the Period of “Interregnum Shanghai” it Portrays’. February 17th 2022 – 8pm Shanghai time.
Interwar American pulp fiction loved Shanghai – spies of all nations , White Russians dames, Japanese bad guys, all-American good guys. Then, after 1949, it looked like the pulps would have to find somewhere new to write about as the Bamboo Curtain descended. But, in the fascinating integrum period between 1949 and the mid-1950s there was still a space to tell stories of Shanghai as the old pre-war city just about clung on until the Communist consolidation. Paul French argues that Don Smith’s now forgotten 1953 pulp novel China Coaster was the best of these at describing the last vestiges of old Shanghai.
The good people at Penguin South East Asia have issued a new edition of my Penguin China Special Bloody Saturday about the horrific events of August 14, 1937 in Shanghai. I recently did an interview with the Asian Review of Books podcast. On all the usual apps as well as here….
Hired in August 1941 George Orwell was organising talks for the BBC’s Indian and Eastern Services. Orwell was keen to read Xiao Qian’s study of contemporary Chinese literature, Etching of a Tormented Age…
Xiao Chen’s book was published in the P.E.N. Books series (by George Allen & Unwin), the organisation founded in 1921 in London to promote and protect writers. With the repeated PEN logo design to cover. Orwell was keen to read Etching of a Tormented Age after beiung recommeneded the book by his colleague at the BBC Eastern Service William Empson (see my previous post) and Qian’s friend the novelist E M Forster. The two had met at the Tagore Memorial Meeting organised by the PEN Club in 1941.
