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This article examines the visual genre of the school photograph in order to reflect on the promise of transcolonial methodologies for thinking about the history of race and belonging in Canada. It focuses on four photographs of schoolchildren taken at around the same time in a range of locations across the British Empire. All feature Chinese children in close proximity to black, South Asian, or white peers. Seeking to understand how the photographs resonate with one another as representations of encounters between Asian and other racialized child subjects—divisions of class, location, and migration history notwithstanding—I develop a transcolonial methodology that is attentive to the (counter)institutional workings of rhythm and repetition as engines of community formation. Such a practice, I suggest, allows for rhythms to emerge that resist alignment with the pedagogical dictates of national time, as exemplified by national celebrations of Canada 150.

This article thinks with and against photographs taken by British military photographers in Hong Kong at the end of World War II, during the transition from Japanese back to British colonial rule. Building on Lisa Yoneyama's account of the “postwar settlements” through which “the war's meaning” was defined and contained, I situate the photographs as part of a broader British effort to reassert the legitimacy of colonial rule at a crisis point for empire by refiguring Asian liberation as an affordance, or synonym, of British (re)occupation. At the same time, I read the photographs for what they can tell us about the liberatory knowledges that Asian colonial subjects had cultivated, or might have, throughout years of war and occupation. In this way, the article meditates on the predicaments of liberation in an Asian place where the horizon of decolonization continues to be difficult to discern, focusing on the care work necessary for survival as a crucial site and practice of liberatory political imagining.