"There is a choreography of mothering between Black women and Chinese women dating back to the late nineteenth century. Lockstep movements across continents, women nurtured each other’s children born to the same Chinese fathers from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. While they never met, the women formed an unwritten transoceanic history of surrogacies and parenting between places like Cuba and China.
Does the colonial archive have the capacity to hold historical intimacies such as these? As a researcher, I write about a century-and-a-half of labour and migration histories that connect China, Hong Kong, and India to the Caribbean and Latin America. This elusive archive of the British, Dutch, and Spanish Empires has necessarily drawn me to artwork invested in futurist worlding—not least because of the gritty texture of a granular approach several contemporary artists are taking to history. Feminist and non-binary genealogies also form the substance of a meta-history I am investigating through art and research."
