INTIMACY AMONG STRANGERS

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between identity, emotion and citizenship manifested in Chinese Canadian head tax photographs. I argue that these photographs reveal a diasporic structure of feeling – an intimacy among strangers that is profoundly collective. As I will show, the almost uniform lack of emotion in these photographs illuminates a kind of collectivity which is based on anticipation. This essay theorizes anticipation as a key mode of agency. These images capture subjects who are not yet, and may never be, citizens. And yet, these are images of people who are asking for one of the most foundational rights of citizenship: the right of return. The first part of this essay interrogates the problematic reliance of citizenship upon a form of intimacy that excludes Chinese immigrants to Canada. The second part of the essay takes up the possibility of another kind of intimacy for citizenship. In their identification photographs, Chinese immigrants anticipate the demands of the state for fixity – despite the precariousness of their status as people who could claim a right to readmittance – and in so doing illuminate the possibility of intimacy out of alienation.