The Unfinished Project of Becoming Asian American: Intergenerational Dialogue, Storied Artifacts, and Multimodal Exploration (Poster 22)

• In Event: Thursday Poster Session 4:20 pm
  In Poster Session: Languages, Literacies, and Representations Poster Session

Abstract

Asian American stories of family, survival, and becoming are often the responsibility of immigrant children, whose identities are (re)shaped through memory, artifacts, and storytelling. In this paper, we engage in an intergenerational dialogue—with each other, peers, elders, writers, artists, and youth—that centers on the complexity of Asian American identity. Drawing from autobiographical, multimodal narratives collected across multiple years of conversation between the authors, we juxtapose our Asian American stories with data from two projects—a year-long interview study on popular culture and a digital ethnography with Asian American youth. By examining our cultural experiences across generations and across the diaspora, we emphasize Viet Thanh Nguyen’s call for “narrative plentitude” that resists monolithic and harmful narratives of the Asian American experience.

Authors

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Catherine Yanan Cheng Stahl, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Tran Templeton, Teachers College, Columbia University