The Politics of the Archive: Reimagining the Histories of the Asian Diaspora

In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe describes the colonial archive as “a material bureaucracy of rule and the historical trace of imperial activities.” She argues that the organization of the colonial archive conceals the connections and interdependencies of histories and that one must read across various archives in order to nuance these entanglements. The epistemological and ontological formation of the Asian diaspora, whose histories have been ruptured through transnational and transgenerational experiences of displacement, erasure, and/or trauma, reveals the limited and contested nature of the colonial archive. Following Lowe’s work, this panel seeks to trouble and destabilize the notion of the archive in the visual history of the Asian diaspora. In so doing, we aim to remap the structural boundaries that shape its historical and contemporary conditions. How have Asian diasporic artists worked with and/or against the colonial archive? How have the failures of the colonial archive yielded productive means of recovery within the Asian diaspora, creating historical, geographical, or temporal connections? How have artists imaginatively reworked the absences and ambiguities of the archive to open the possibilities of alternative historical trajectories? We invite papers on a range of geographies, periods, and media that attend to the incomplete archive of histories, exploring alternative ways of knowledge production, engagement, and inquiry in the Asian diaspora.