Illuminating Militarized Rupture: Four Asian American Community-Based Archives

Abstract

This essay argues for the importance of utilizing a framework of militarized rupture in analyzing the cultural narratives that shape the formations and meanings of many Asian American community-based archives. I focus upon four case studies: Aiko and John "Jack" Herzig's collection of U.S. government documents regarding the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans; Fred and Dorothy Cordova's development of the Filipino American National Historical Society and the National Pinoy Archives; the Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California, Irvine; and my own research gathering twentieth-century Indonesian American family materials in an interimperial context.

Mnemonic splinterings and disciplinary convergences: Memory studies, Vietnamese studies, and diasporic Vietnamese studies

“…Beyond this particular commemorative practice, archives and museums are additional portals into diasporic Vietnamese memories. These physical and digital repositories, spearheaded mostly by Vietnamese refugees, actively collect and safeguard documents, narratives, and objects pertaining to various aspects of Vietnamese American past and present (Fujita-Rony, 2020;Tran, 2023;Vo Dang, 2023). Diasporic Vietnamese memoryscapes are also populated not only with memorials to the Vietnam War, but at the turn of the twenty-first century, with memorials to the boat refugee exodus that emerged in the postwar context (Tran, 2012(Tran, , 2016.…”

Asian American Disability: A History and Its Archives

“…7 My exploration of the Asian American disability archive does not reproduce or reiterate stories of major "multicultural loss" and "loss of [historical] continuity" frequently associated with Asian American immigrants. 8 Derived from the loss of kinship, language, and homeland common among Asian Americans, these stories make frequent appearances in Asian American archives, making Asians in America seem psychosocially deficient. Not only has this dynamism nurtured the essentialist notion that their homeland is too disabled to become independent of US influence, as Dorothy Fujita-Rony argues, the dynamism has also obscured the "ongoing .…”

“…militarized constructs" from the moments of their formation. 9 As a result, archival records appear to present Asian American experiences of loss as challenges that individuals are expected, and able, to overcome, presumably thanks to the abundant opportunities for self-improvement in the United States. Seldom, if ever, are histories of Asian American disability seen as indicators of US structural failure, which requires more than reactive remedies such as medical treatment and social services.…”