AHA Session 9
Thursday, January 4, 2024: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Mission II (Parc 55, Fourth)
Chair:
Susan R. Grayzel, Utah State University
Papers:
Comment:
Susan R. Grayzel, Utah State University
Session Abstract
How do we write and frame histories of embodied experiences of borders by individuals when they moved or when the societies in which they lived underwent transformations in boundaries? This panel considers this question through three studies that connect South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and the US. Joseph Ho’s paper explores the evolution of visual cultures in relation to borders, belonging, and religious identity formation. He studies rare collections of visual material created by American Jesuit priests and camera-carrying Chinese families caught up in transitions from postwar China to new Taiwanese roots, representing how transnational actors visualized everyday lives and institutional change during the polarization of national borders and international politics. In their co-authored paper, Arunima Datta and Jonathan Fardy, study the marks on walls and other material remnants from the past produced by Asian (South, Southeast and East Asian) detainees at Angel Island, and focus on the counter-archive of resistance constituted by the detainees in the Angel Island station in the US. In the process, they show how these intimate and personal markings counter the archival violence of the state, allowing us to “read” the resilience and resistance of the immigrants against the state’s narratives about the migrants detained at Angel Island, which often archived the detainees as criminal bodies, or illegitimate bodies or diseased bodies. Joshua Tan’s paper reinterprets the archive of the United Board for Christian Higher Education at Yale Divinity School (hitherto been associated with US-China educational and cultural exchanges) to argue that the trope of “Third China” was not merely anticommunist propaganda stoking fears of a co-ethnic revolutionary fifth column, but also a conceptual category deployed by missionaries seeking to continue institutional and communal existences after their reluctant exodus from post-1949 China. Through these three studies, the panel examines shifting constructions of transnational identities in materiality, visuality, and boundary-making – merging microhistorical experiences with the slipperiness of envisioning global spaces and alternative futures.
SESSION CO-ORGANIZED BY: ARUNIMA DATTA AND JOSEPH HO
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