Ma Vang, Associate Professor of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced
"Teaching (from) the Archives"
This talk will highlight insights about archival encounters as practices of study, teaching, and life-making. It will show how the archive as a site of colonial knowledge-making and governance is also highly teachable. Tracing the connections between the archive and teaching will open up an understanding of how the teachability of certain tropes, narratives, and objects reflects the archive’s governance of life-making institutions like education and medicine. In addition, it will show how community teaching engages life lived in the moment.
Yi Lu, Assistant Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Socialism on Sale: Grassroots Archives Market in Contemporary China
How does one rescue history, literally, from the dustbin? Tracing the transformation of Chinese archives from state secrets to scholarly collectibles and memory objects since the end of the Mao Zedong era (1949-1976), this paper considers the future of historical knowledge production and memory in contemporary China. Combining ethnographic observation with digital analysis, I examine how manual labor of sorting, scanning, and cataloguing created new meaning out of garbage materials and transformed them into a landcape of grassroots archives. I first examine the flea market as an archive and the role scrap collectors as “archivists”: almost exclusively men of the Cultural Revolution generation, the marketplace of government papers thrive on a nexus of new middle-class wealth but also global historiographical trends. As much as these de-accessioned records illuminate the inner workings of the Chinese state and disciplinary foundation of history, their commodification also violate both Chinese laws and archival principles and challenge the integrity of not only these grassroots collections but also the historical profession at large. Scrutinizing the fetishized claim of “saving history from the dustbin”, I suggest that the practice of garbology paradoxically strengthen the positivist myth of archives while revealing history as self-evident, self-present document. As objects of witness and forgetting, resistance and repression, these garbage materials constituted the growing fragmentation of social groups and memory narratives in contemporary China.
Sunmin Kim, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College
Category Traversing: Early Korean Student-Migrants Eluding the U.S. State
This paper explores the early traces of what we call category traversing, the process through which migrants navigate state-imposed immigration categories. In the early twentieth century, Asian migrants were categorically excluded from entering the U.S. under the Asiatic Barred Zone, while exemptions were granted to merchants, diplomats, and students. Drawing on immigrant case files from the National Archives, we highlight how Korean migrants claimed student status to circumvent exclusion. At ports of
entry, they had to curate an elaborate performance to appear as a student to the eyes of immigration officials, with a proper display of scholarly knowledge and financial ability as well academic and social credentials. Even after the entry, they were constantly put under surveillance, and failure to maintain the
student status invited scrutiny from the officials. Responding to these demands, student-migrants creatively traversed the categories of student and worker to live in the country that excluded them.
Jiajing Wang, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Dartmouth College
Uncovering the truth behind "diseased pork" in 19th century California: insights from archival research and dental calculus analysis
In the late 19th century, the spread of rumors about "Chinese diseased pork" had profound consequences for Chinese immigrants seeking to enter the pork industry in California. The public was inundated with the slogan "protect yourself and your family, don't sow your seeds of disease by buying Chinese pork and lard," resulting in significant public concerns and a boycott of Chinese-raised pork. Newspaper advertisements further denigrated Chinese pork, likely fed by Chinese food waste, as inferior to American-corn-fed pork. To better understand the origins of this issue, this study applies dental calculus analysis to examine pig teeth found in historical sites in California. By analyzing food remains trapped in pig teeth from 19th century California, this presentation challenges the notion of “Chinese diseased pork” as popularized in mainstream public media. The findings suggest that the anti-Chinese pork movement was largely rooted in prejudice and discrimination rather than factual evidence.
Lynne Horiuchi, Indepedent Scholar
Searching Records for Building Japanese American Confinement Sites at the National Archives and Records Administration
Like Roger Daniels, one of the best-known scholars of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, I have spent days researching in the analog records of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), following his advice to excavate the history of the building of the confinement sites there. NARA, in fact, constitutes a kind of colonial archive, not just a neutral source of historical documentation of the American empire. The case of the Japanese American incarceration is further complicated by the creation of incarceration sites in remote areas on sovereign indigenous land. The 120,000 prisoners of ‘Japanese ancestry’, who were incarcerated at these sites, were pejoratively associated with America’s imperial enemy--more than sojourners but rather colonial settlers in a hostile nation. Two-thirds of them were American citizens of ‘Japanese ancestry’ in born in the United States, most of whom had never traveled to Japan. The sites themselves complicate colonial, post-colonial and settler colonial models.
This paper will focus on the prisoners’ agency and repression in the NARA records that relates to their colonial and imperial character. Their massive scale of the documentation is in the tradition of colonial administrators who, as Ann Stoler has observed, were also “prolific producers of social categories” (Stoler 2009, 1) and their enumeration. The War Relocation Authority records alone provide thousands of boxes to document this event; additional records are found in all of the agencies and military entities that participated in the incarceration with the NARA documentation around these groups. In the broadest sense, the NARA holdings are a form of what Lisa Lowe has examined as “an unlikely or unsettling genealogy of modern liberalism…a project that includes at once both the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor, and free trade as well as the global divisions and asymmetries on which the liberal tradition depends” (Lowe 2015, 3).
The imperial structure of the archives, created by and for a white male hierarchy, makes it difficult tease out information about the agency of the people incarcerated who participated, although marginally, in the military’s urban planning, building, and construction of the sites; even basic accounts about the construction of the sites are difficult to excavate. Decolonizing the NARA records to find the evidence of vernacular building in the NARA records is even more challenging: in title boxes, newspaper accounts, handwritten inventories of amenities built by the prisoners, etc. The aporias are ironic given that it was prison labor that provided the overwhelming support for maintenance of the camps. The benefits of a liberal democracy are unevenly distributed as evidenced in liberal democratic projects such as the Japanese Americans incarceration, which provided new opportunities and modes found in the NARA holdings to administer, govern and repress racialized ethnic groups. These conundrums and modes of exclusion, erasure, and agency are addressed in this paper.
Sean H. McPherson, Associate Professor of Art History, Bridgewater State University
Between Empires and Generations: Reconstructing Shifting Agendas in the Architecture of Transnational Buddhism
The transnational expansion of Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism (Shin Buddhism) was a characteristic feature of both the reinvention of Buddhism in modern Japan, and the migratory flows of immigrants from Japan to the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th century. The over sixty extant Buddhist temples affiliated with the Buddhist Mission of North America (renamed in 1942 the Buddhist Churches of America) remain the most visible trace of Japanese migration to the US, as well as the impact of wartime incarceration and anti-Asian discrimination. Amidst a climate of burgeoning anti-Asian legislation and rhetoric in the US, Buddhist temples became cultural centers that served as a refuge from discrimination and a visible statement of religious faith, community strength and ethnic minority pride. In search of the architectural roots of Buddhist temple structures sponsored in the US, this study examines the challenges of retrieving materials dispersed among defunct and active Buddhist temples in the US, partially archived records at BCA headquarters in San Francisco, the Japanese American National Museum and various university collections in southern California, Jōdō Shinshū headquarters and various university collections in Kyōto, Japan. The roles of wartime incarceration in the US and wartime destruction in Japan, postwar migration and generational differences within Japanese American communities in the postwar reconstruction of Buddhist temples, and the conflicting agendas of historic preservation and community revitalization in recent decades have scattered the records of communication that might shed light on shifting attitudes toward architectural expression of Buddhist faith in the over one hundred BCA temples in the US.
Sujin Eom, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies, Dartmouth College
Fugitive Archives: Architecture, Police Photography, and Decolonial Futures
This paper examines underexplored police photographs of Chinese migrants in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, with a focus on architectural spaces. In 1940, a secret anti-Japanese association known as Ildonghoe was established by a group of Chinese migrants in the Korean city of Incheon. The members of Ildonghoe manufactured homemade dynamite and strategically planted it in Japanese-owned businesses and factories throughout the city. Following the arrest of its members in 1943, Japanese colonial authorities initiated a comprehensive photographic documentation of locations and objects related to the organization’s activities. This investigation serendipitously created photographic archives of architectural spaces in and around Incheon’s Chinatown, many of which have since disappeared. The paper sheds light upon these police photographs as constitutive of what might be termed “accidental archives,” a repository of historical materials that gives rise to an unintended record of critical information about certain events, places, and moments. I pay particular attention to this peculiarity of police photographs as a form of happenstance yet significant documentation capturing historical moments that might otherwise remain elusive. Drawing insights from art history, architecture, and critical archival studies on archival absences, the paper argues that the absences of archival attention to marginalized people and places should not be considered as a flaw, but instead a productive space that allows us to scrutinize colonial epistemologies embedded in archives. Moreover, reading against the grain of colonial archives, this paper shows how the Ildonghoe photographs invite us to envision a different narrative of the racial relations forged under colonial rule and imagine decolonial futures that have yet to come.
Jesook Song, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Postcolonial to Decolonial: Transition or Blinding History?
This paper explores ways in which rhetorical premise within “colonial” is shifted from postcolonial to decolonial in Anglophone academia. It traces debates and contexts from 1990s when “postcolonial” studies and discourses were predominant to new millennium that “decolonial” discourses became ascendant. By doing so, this paper reckons infelicitousness in salient decolonial discourses in relation to postcolonial discourses that mute incommensurability between the different spatial-temporality between “postcolonial” and “decolonial.” By excavating prefigurative decolonial challenges during the heydays of postcolonial rhetoric, particularly in anthropology and Asian studies, this paper tinkers how those prefigurative challenges are doubly silenced. If they were trivialized in the postcolonial wave because they refuse commending the moment as novel vis a vis challenges to disciplinary and institutional coloniality, they are muted again ironically in the ascendance of decolonial discourse when the current decolonial writing lumps postcolonial and decolonial together as if it is by large continuum and commensurable in understanding to what extent coloniality is necessarily antagonistic. Although critique of Anthropocene is understood as paradigmatic departure of current decolonial studies from postcolonial studies, settler colonialism or racial capitalism as oppressive, extracting, and excluding structure conjures up oppositionality in the politics of refusal that poststructural and postcolonial framework would have disavowed. This interrogation would intervene in the way in which academic enterprises, such as Anglophone anthropology and Asian studies, are persistent and reproducing coloniality through generating new discursive terrain even in its appearance of critical edges.
Youjeong Oh, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
"Archival Activism: Introducing Collection of Historical Records of Jeju Democratic Movement"
This presentation introduces the Collection of Historical Records of Jeju Democratic Movement, a compilation of community archives published by the Jeju Democratic Movement Historical Records Research Institute. By "community archives," this study refers to collections of materials primarily produced and gathered by members of a specific community. The collection includes materials generated by activists, students, and residents during various movements that aimed to contest top- down, extractive development projects in Jeju. These movements encompassed protests against the Top-dong public water reclamation project, opposition to the establishment of a military airfield in the Daejung area, resistance to the construction of golf courses in Geumak, Bukchon, and Cheongsu, objections to the installation of a sewage treatment facility in Yerae, as well as land- defending movements in Daepo and Jungmun against the construction of the Jungmun Tourism Complex.
Throughout these movements, the people of Jeju produced a diverse range of materials, including informal newsletters, handwritten petitions, manifestos, demands and resolutions, protest schedules, resistance poetry and songs, banners and flags, activity logs, and future plans. By critically examining rampant, extractive, and exclusive development projects that disproportionately benefited mainland capitalists at the expense of Jeju's land and livelihoods, these community archives served as powerful counter-hegemonic tools in the struggle against dominant developmentalism. Furthermore, the Jeju community archives envisioned alternative possibilities by promoting bottom-up development practices unique to Jeju, in stark contrast to the destructive and exploitative projects enforced by the state and capitalists.
This study examines the Jeju community archives as decolonial practices in three key aspects. First, the community archives convey the experiences of dispossession and displacement in tangible and specific terms, offering localized knowledge about Jeju's status as an extractive periphery. These archives advocate for specific economic, political, land, and resource rights, challenge the extractive structures created by development projects. The grounded, place-based, embodied knowledge production about the extractive nature and Jeju people’s collective claiming for rights perform a decolonial work. Second, the work undertaken by the Jeju Democratic Movement Historical Records Research Institute to archive materials produced from the 1970s to the 1990s constitutes a decolonial project that aims to restore previously overlooked modern histories of Jeju. Through the collection, processing, preservation, and accessibility of materials related to the people's movements, the archiving helps Jeju people self-identify based on their locality and shared causes, providing people’s narratives omitted in the mainstream history. Third, engaging with these community archives and attentively listening to the "cries and demands" of Jeju people is regarded as a decolonial method. Writing with the community archives centers the voices and experiences of the Jeju community members and validates their perspectives and struggles. This decolonizing method promotes a more inclusive and just understanding of Jeju’s history.
Hosu Kim, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, City University of New York at Staten Island
Into the ground: Land as Disruptive Archive and Dissenting Politics for the Disappeared since the Korean War
Over the past few years, I have explored the epistemic violence of the archive, starting from inaccessible adoption records in transnational adoption practice to Gwangju’s the disappeared, to Vietnam’s no public acknowledgment of South Korea’s troop’s involvement in the civilian massacre during the Vietnam war. Across those sites of state and imperial violence, the grammar of repair is enunciated predominantly in forensic truth-finding activities. While efforts to establish the truth cannot be underestimated and clearly serve as a ground of collective claim for injuries and harm, they are over time consolidated into a singular and monopolizing regime of the Truth finding as the precondition for the ethics and politics of repair. I propose to engage the state of denied and disappeared bodies and information with a rubric of missing which Ma Vang (2021) incisively observes as the material and epistemological condition of imperial knowledge production in the war-making. Building on Vang’s suggestive reading of the missing as a ground for alternative epistemology, my exploration of archival violence through the missing takes a literal approach to the ground as archive for the missing bodies and missing memories.
In 2014, was formed the citizen’s league of excavation of the civilian dead during the Korean War. They were killed by South Korean police and its anticommunist paramilitary force on the presumed collaborations with the Communists or its suspects. Since then, the citizen’s league comprised of 1,000 citizens over time have identified more than eight sites of civilian massacres, and participated in unearthing the missing dead. Based on the reading of their excavation reports and a close analysis of the documentary film, Heo, Chul-Nyung’s “206: Unearthed” (2021), the ethnographic film that documents four-year-long citizens’ efforts to excavate the sites of civilian genocide during the Korean War. Reading the film as an index for the alternative archive along with a tentative plan of my own participant observation – the ground of the missing, my paper explores a possibility of treating the land or the soil as a mass gravesite and unmarked archive of the violence and considers a temporal politics of here-and-now and aims to deliver the joy and sweats of griefs. Particularly, related to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s idea of care as repair, I would like to interrogate how ecological approaches to state violence helps to foster multi-issue and site-specific politics of repair.
Yeong Ran Kim, Digital Media Fellow, Sarah Lawrence College
Thinking with Pinks: Collaborative Aesthetics in the Creation of Queer Worlds
Korean queer independent cinema has played a pivotal role in articulating what it means to be "critically queer" within the post-authoritarian Korean society. This presentation explores the confluence of the global influx of queer culture and the enduring legacy of liberatory politics from the democratization movement, shaping the post-1990s history of Korean queer independent film. Drawing upon the works of연분홍치마(Pinks), an independent documentary filmmakers’ collective, I examine the intertwined nature of filmmaking and social justice movements within Korean queer communities. Specifically, the focus is on their 2021 YouTube production titled “Ola-Papa,” a three-part sitcom series, and the behind-the-scenes production documentary. I posit that the collective imagination of queer kinship and relationships portrayed in "Ola-Papa" is intricately linked to the accompanying documentary, which illuminates the nuanced processes of its production. This includes actor training and discussions aimed at fostering an equitable labor environment, all of which collectively contribute to establishing the material conditions that shape this particular queer world. Through the analysis of this series, I explore how queer independent film serves as an important cultural reservoir for the preservation and transmission of vernacular knowledge on queerness in South Korea and as a space of collaboration to imagine queer relationalities. In so doing, I demonstrate that collaboration functions as both an aesthetic platform and a guiding principle in queer independent filmmaking, contributing to the creation of queer worlds beyond the rubrics of identity politics.
Josephine F. Ong, Guarini Dean's Asian American Studies Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellow
"Constructions of Chamorro-Filipino Deviance: Chamorro-Filipino Relations in Late 19th Century Spanish-occupied Guåhan/Guam"
During the last few decades of Spanish colonization of Guåhan/Guam and the Philippines, the Spanish colonial government brought hundreds of Filipino convicts to work on its infrastructure projects in Guåhan. Many of these convicts remained in Guåhan after the Spanish government granted them lands and reduced their sentences in exchange for their work on farms and public works projects. Today, many of these convicts are remembered by Chamorros, the Indigenous peoples of Guåhan, as ancestors who learned Chamorro customs and became a part of Chamorro society. In contrast, contemporary Filipino migrants who work in the U.S. military and tourism industry’s construction projects are seen as unwilling to learn or be part of Chamorros’ ongoing struggles for Guåhan’s decolonization.
In this presentation, I focus on Chamorro political leaders’ deportation proceedings against Filipino convicts depicted in the Spanish colonial government records of the Marianas to interrogate what contemporary Chamorros and Filipinos now know of their historical relations.
I consider the extent to which Spanish carceral logics created ideological and material infrastructures that constructed Chamorro and Filipino deviance. Relatedly, I also analyze how some Chamorros used Spanish legal infrastructures to punish Filipino convicts who hurt their communities but did so in a way that also regulated Chamorro women’s sexual mobilities and gendered navigations of place.
Preeti Singh, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dartmouth College
Writing Postcolonial Authoritarianism: The Transnational Archives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977)
The national emergency declared by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s is one of the most memorialized events in postcolonial Indian history. Remembered as a “dark stain” in the life of Indian democracy and a key instance of postcolonial authoritarianism, the Emergency has been instrumental in shaping the rhetoric of democracy and its discontents in contemporary India. Memorializations of the Emergency in the literary, cultural, and political spheres continue to inform how political actors across the spectrum define their place in Indian politics.
Despite being forged in the crucible of the intersecting forces of decolonization and the global Cold War, scholarly studies on the Indian Emergency have posited it as a provincial event and an anomaly. Culturalist accounts of the Emergency as an instance of Global South authoritarianism continue to circulate, often hinging on the gendered figure of Indira Gandhi as an exceptionally despotic leader. My paper challenges such exceptional accounts of by investigating the embeddedness of the Emergency in transnational circuits of the global Cold War and how they shaped our understandings of freedom, authoritarianism, and resistance in the 20th and 21st century.
I locate the traces of the Emergency in Cold War archives, among others, the Public Law 480 program, to argue for a transnational and connected reading of postcolonial authoritarianisms that have recently been articulated by scholars such as Jini Kim Watson in the context of Southeast Asia. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, commonly known as PL–480 or Food for Peace. A key element of the United States' foreign assistance program, the PL-480 facilitated the import of South Asian archives to university libraries in the United States, in lieu of the interest on food loans offered by the US to India. This idea of postcolonial archives as “currency “and “interest” on humanitarian aid animates my rewriting of the Emergency as a postcolonial event shaped by the archival traces of the cold war.
Reading, in particular, the Indian magazine as a genre preserved in Cold War archives in the United States, I argue for a consideration of postcolonial archives that takes into account the conditions of their access and location while refining ideas in postcolonial theory that continue to be animated primarily by the colonial record of British and European colonialism in South Asia.