Professor Mary Chapman

Mary Chapman is Professor of English at University of British Columbia and the author of the award-winning books Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism (Oxford UP 2014) and Becoming Sui Sin Far (McGill-Queen’s UP 2016).

Intimate Empire: The Story of Sui Sin Far’s Family is a biography of one of the first Chinese families in North America. Because the Eatons—Edith (pen-name “Sui Sin Far”), her sister author Winnifred (pen-name “Onoto Watanna”), their Chinese-born mother, British-born father, and other siblings—were accomplished writers, performers, artists, lawyers, and activists, they left behind a scattered but invaluable archive of publications, performance records, and other documents that shed light on their extended kinship ties and active participation in powerful networks of overseas Chinese (Mar, Chang) in North America. Intimate Empireuses this remarkable family who engaged in conversations about race and citizenship as a case study of diverse forms of kinship and belonging enabled or constrained during the Exclusion Era when immigration of Chinese families to North America was restricted or outlawed.