Nothing to Write Home About

Laura Ishiguro is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, where she is a historian of settler colonialism, mobility, family, and the everyday in Canada and the British Empire. Her research has been published in a number of edited collections and journals, including a 2016 article in BC Studies – “Growing Up and Grown Up […] in Our Future City: Discourses of Childhood and Settler Futurity in Colonial British Columbia” – which won the 2017 Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism article prize. She has also coedited (with Esmé Cleall and Emily J. Manktelow) a 2013 special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History on histories of family in the British Empire, and edited a 2016 special issue of BC Studies on histories of settler colonialism in British Columbia. She is an associate of the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University (2017–20) and a recipient of the Killam Teaching Prize at UBC (2018).

Introduction

Part 1: Relative Distances

1 “Bind the Empire Together”: The Postal System, Family Letters, and British Columbia

2 “Affection Can Overstep Distance”: The Letter as Trans-Imperial Family

Part 2: The Colonial Commonplace

3 “Absolutely Nothing Going on”: Epistolary Emotion and Unremarkable Colonial Knowledge

4 “A Dreadful Little Glutton”: Settler Food Practices and the Epistolary Everyday

Part 3: Family Faultlines, Fractured Knowledge

5 “Irreparable Loss”: Family Rupture and Reconfiguration in Letters about Death

6 “Say Nothing”: Epistolary Gossip, Silence, and the Strategic Limits of Intimacy

Conclusion

Notes; Bibliography; Index