The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to the 2024/2025 Dorothy L. Black Lecture featuring Dr. Nadine Attewell (she/her/hers), Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and director of the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University (SFU).
Committed to education throughout her life, Dorothy L. Black earned her BA from UBC in 1952 and taught in Burnaby schools for over 40 years. A bequest from Ms. Black established the Dorothy L. Black First Year English Speakers’ Series Endowment after her passing.
This lecture can be attended either in-person or online via Zoom. Please be sure to register using the link below. The Dorothy L. Black Lecture is open to everyone, and undergraduates in EL&L programs are especially encouraged to attend.
This event is co-sponsored by UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies.
Talk Abstract
Day after day, our social media feeds vibrate with the names of the killed, the missing, and the threatened in zones of slow and quick death across the globe. In this talk, Nadine Attewell will reflect on the intimate labour such lists index and also demand, thinking with archives generated at a different deathly conjuncture, during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945. What forms of attention are required to make sense of these documents, at once spare and sprawling? Drawing on postcolonial, Black feminist, and Indigenous approaches to the archive, we will practice reading lists of the missing, dead, and imprisoned, of possible allies and likely traitors, of dependents and next of kin, as traces of people’s relation work for survival under conditions of extreme political, material, and bodily duress. To Japanese and British observers, Asian Hong Kongers’ practices of relation mattered principally insofar as they hindered or furthered the reproduction of imperial life. We will consider, rather, the significance of people’s efforts to care for one another in defiance of imperial norms of protectability, improvising supports for life in the face of state abandonment and mass death.
About the Speaker
Nadine Attewell is a scholar of empire, intimacy, and Asian and Asian diasporic life. Between 2000 and 2020, she studied and worked in English departments across the United States and Canada, including Cornell University, the University of Nevada at Reno, and McMaster University. Currently, she teaches at Simon Fraser University on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ, and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm lands in Burnaby, British Columbia, where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and director of the Global Asia Program. She is the author of Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and has published articles in Postcolonial Text, TOPIA, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Trans Asia Photography, among others. She is completing a SSHRC-funded book entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Global Port City.
