About this Event
This event is part of the SFU Global Asia Program 30th Anniversary, Fall 2026 Speaker Series. Light refreshments will be provided.
Please join Nadine Attewell, Phanuel Antwi, and Alice Te Punga Somerville for a conversation about archives, writing, and friendship in celebration of this publication.
In her new book, , Nadine Attewell illuminates the once forgotten histories of vibrant multiracial communities that flourished in London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong in the early twentieth century.
To understand what life and survival was like for people of mixed Chinese descent in three British-controlled port cities linked by global trade and migration, Attewell, an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and Global Asia at SFU, examined diverse sources ranging from archival photographs to family histories to intelligence records.
About the speakers:
Nadine Attewell is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Global Asia at Simon Fraser University, where she also directs 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 Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949 (Stanford University Press, 2026), and serves on the editorial board of Trans Asia Photography.
Phanuel Antwi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. In 2022 he was named Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He is the author of Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace (Pluto, 2023), and has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature. He is currently completing a book-length project titled “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”
Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) is Professor and Head in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. At its heart, her research and teaching engages texts in order to centre Indigenous expansiveness and de-centre colonialism. She is the author of Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) which won Best First Book 2012 from Native American & Indigenous Studies Association, and 250 Ways to Write an Essay about Captain Cook (BWB, 2020). Her collection of poetry Always Italicise: how to write while colonized (Auckland University Press, 2022/University of Hawai‘i Press 2024) won the Peter and Mary Biggs Prize for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2023. She is currently working on a book about published writing by Indigenous people from New Zealand, Australia, Hawai’i and Fiji entitled “Belonging Together: Periodicals and the Indigenous Pacific.”
SFU Harbour Centre, Segal Rooms 1400-1410
515 West Hastings St, Vancouver
Tranportation to the event:
- Bike parking is available at the Hastings entrance of SFU Harbour Centre. Visit the Vancouver campus’s Cycling Resources for details on bicycle racks and cages.
- The nearest SkyTrain station to SFU's Vancouver campus is Waterfront Station. Waterfront Station is also served daily by SeaBus and the West Coast Express commuter train, and numerous buses serve the downtown area.
- Parking is available at 450 West Cordova Street (Impark) and 443 Seymour Street (Diamond Parking). Metered street parking can also be found nearby.
Event venue & nearby stays
Simon Fraser University - Vancouver Campus, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, Canada
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