370. Archival Production and Chinese Diaspora: New Approaches to Race, Belonging, and Migration in the 20th Century

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel foregrounds archival practices as central to the history and categories of belonging through which Asian diasporic communities experienced their lives. Through three distinct case studies that move between China, Burma, New Zealand, Australia, India, Hong Kong, and USA, the papers examine how racialized identities take form through state, institutional, and community efforts at documentation. Each paper analyses narratives of space and modes of expressing national consciousness, ideas of home, and appropriate intimacy evident in archival collections on: returned overseas Chinese from Burma, photographs of Chinese migrants in New Zealand and Australia, and Chinese mixed race relations in Hong Kong. Yet, we argue, we cannot limit analysis of the sources to shared modes of governance in the 20th century of racialized bodies moving across borders. We must also attend to archival production as acts of governance. Drawing upon critical archival studies, we explore how the specific archival institutions and practices relevant to each case study shape enunciation of place and belonging ascribed to, and embraced by, Chinese diasporas and scholars alike.

To encourage dialogue between diaspora studies and archival studies, the panel includes two discussants. Ricardo Punzalan, specialist in archives and collective memory, first provides commentary on the papers. Next, the three papers are presented, each substantially framed in response to Punzlan’s comments. Shelly Chan, historian of Chinese diaspora and migration, concludes the panel from the perspective of diaspora studies, with attention to how approaching the archive as historical agent proposes new ways of theorizing Asian diaspora and migration.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Tina Mai Chen, University of Manitoba

Chair

• Jon G. Malek, University of Western Ontario

Individual Presentations

• Tangled Trajectories: Chinese Migrants, Portrait Photography and the Borders of Exclusion in Early-20th-Century Australasia - Laura Madokoro, McGill University

• “And Two of Them are Learning How to Dance”: Institutionality and Multiracial Lives in the Colonial Transpacific - Nadine Attewell, McMaster University

• The Traces of Selection: Cultural Layers in the Documentation of Chinese “Return Migration” from Burma to China - Tina Mai Chen, University of Manitoba

Discussants

• Shelly Chan, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Ricardo L. Punzalan, University of Maryland, College Park