Archiving Asian America

Catalog description

Archiving Asian America – its people, places, politics, uprisings, and trends – can tell us multitudes about social movements and histories of racializations. Meanwhile, the preservation, collection, and interpretation of archival materials are not without fraught political dilemmas. In this class, we will learn about the power of the archives. Stepping into our city, we will have conversations with community-based organizations, campus libraries, and digital archiving projects, to examine a central question: What can archives tell us about knowledge production of and from Asian America? What are the political stakes of archiving Asian America? Through readings about archival practice, as well as historical dilemmas and contexts around documentation and preservation, we will discuss the methods and politics of knowledge production. Students will study and review digital archives projects like Densho and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), that document and preserve histories of Japanese American incarceration and stories of South Asian/Americans (respectively). In Archiving Asian America, we will work closely with a community-based archive to consider its specific circumstances, processes, and sustainability, more broadly. In this course, we will examine the politics of archival preservation, the silences of archives, and the creation of grassroots archival projects, in order to explore Asian American pasts, presents, and futures.