Community Archives as Agency: Intersectionality as a Framework to Document Chinese American Experiences in the United States

Abstract

The U.S. has a history of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian. Asian Americans strive for agency in defining their identities. Intertwined with their history of exclusion is the absence and misrepresentation of Asian Americans in archives. In this dissertation, I first explore Chinese Americans’ understanding of their identity and its reflection of social inequality. Then, I investigate what they want to preserve to document their history to counter injustice. Lastly, I examine how Chinese Americans want to use community archives to enhance agency and fight against social injustice. I use interviews, workshops, and ethnographic methods to collect conversations with 17 participants who self-identify as Chinese descendants in the U.S. My dissertation finds that participants’ racial and ethnic identities shape their experiences of discrimination, pressure to assimilate to White society, a lack of belonging, and difficulty fitting into the Asian American Pacific Islander group. Furthermore, gender identity influences their experiences. For example, Chinese American women often face social expectations to prioritize family over themselves. Alongside unjust experiences, community members share lived experiences of resilience, joy, and achievements. My dissertation proposes intersectionality as a framework to understand the representational value of community archives. The intersectionality framework asserts, “it is not enough to simply ‘add race and stir’” (Smooth, 2013). My dissertation finds that participants challenge a thing-oriented approach that prioritizes preservation alone. Instead, they prefer an engagement-oriented approach that uses archives to transform counter-stories into agency, specifically into what Yosso (2005) calls cultural wealth, such as aspirational and social capital.

Full text

Community Archives as Agency: Intersectionality as a
Framework to Document Chinese American
Experiences in the United States
Yingying Hana
aUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
yh17@illinois.edu
ABSTRACT
The U.S. has a long history of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian. Asian Americans strive for
agency in defining their identities. Intertwined with their history of exclusion is the absence and
misrepresentation of Asian Americans in mainstream archives.
In this dissertation, I first explore Chinese Americans’ understanding of their identity and its
reflection of social inequality. Then, I investigate what they want to preserve to document their
history to counter injustice. Lastly, I examine how Chinese Americans want to use community
archives to enhance their agency and fight against social injustice.
I use interviews, workshops, and ethnographic methods to collect conversations with 17
participants who self-identify as Chinese descendants in the U.S. I use a thematic approach to
analyze the conversations.
My dissertation finds that participants’ racial and ethnic identities shape their experiences of
discrimination, pressure to assimilate to White society, a lack of belonging, and difficulty fitting
into the broader Asian American Pacific Islander group. Furthermore, gender identity influences
their experiences. For example, Chinese American women often face social expectations to
prioritize family over themselves. Alongside unjust experiences, community members also share
lived experiences of resilience, joy, and achievements. My dissertation proposes intersectionality
as a framework to understand the representational value of community archives. The
intersectionality framework asserts, “it is not enough to simply ‘add race and stir’” (Smooth,
2013).
My dissertation finds that participants challenge a thing-oriented approach that prioritizes
preservation alone. Instead, they prefer an engagement-oriented approach that uses archives to
transform counter-stories into agency, specifically into what Yosso (2005) calls cultural wealth,
such as aspirational and social capital.

ALISE RESEARCH TAXONOMY TOPICS
Archives; Social justice; Information needs; Community engagement; Collections development.
AUTHOR KEYWORDS
Community archives; Social justice; Digital preservation; Community engagement;
Intersectionality.
Copyright 2024 by the authors. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International License. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2024.1687
References:
Smooth, W. G. (2013). Intersectionality from theoretical framework to policy
intervention. Situating intersectionality: Politics, policy, and power, 11-41.
Yosso*, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community
cultural wealth. Race ethnicity and education, 8(1), 69-91.