Untold Mourning: The Epistemology of Naming and Grieving the Loss of Identities

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 4:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Re-membering Pedagogy: Mourning, Grieving and Healing as Part of Renewal (Table 1)

Abstract

Paper 3: Untold Mourning: The Epistemology of Naming and Grieving the Loss of Identities

Authors: Bao Diep and Verna Wong

Purpose
This paper explores the epistemology of mourning with regard to the lost identities of two Asian American scholars also pursuing doctoral degrees at a Midwest University. As East and Southeast Asian Americans with geographical roots in Vietnam, we seek to address the ongoing loss and trauma many 1.5 and 2nd-generation immigrant scholars and educators face in US. schools.

Perspective
We seek to explore the ways in which experiences of racialization in schools produce distances Vietnamese immigrants and refugees from their shared geo-political history. We utilize Viet Thanh Nguyen’s (2016) concept of just memory in conversation with racial melancholia (Eng & Han, 2019) to investigate the historical and contemporary fractures that produces uncertainty in our sense of affinity to each other as well as ourselves. It is guided by three questions 1) How do essentialized memories of Asian Americans in the United States create the boundaries between “us” and the “other” in education? 2) How does our nation’s memory of the Vietnam war that resulted in mass migration contribute to the ways in which immigrants in the Midwest take on and refuse identities? 3) What are the consequences and loss of these historical and continual erasures?

Methods
We engage critical collaborative autoethnography as a form of remedy. Collaborative autoethnography empowers and engages us in our examination of collective memories and lived experiences as immigrant scholars in hegemonic U.S. society. In our work, we collaboratively examine our individual autobiographies to understand a sociocultural phenomenon (Chang, Ngunijiri & Hernandez, 2013).

Findings
Mourning plays a critical role in our past and currently lived experiences. It is an ongoing loss and contention we continually face through processes of racialization, assimilation, and citizenship. We argue that collectively naming and grieving the loss of identities provide a remedy in constructing and reconstructing our memory of ourselves and our communities. We reimagine what equitable education and healthy communities might look like for Asian American immigrant scholars by naming and reconciling our grief and loss in this moment.

Significance
The study significantly contributes to the broader understanding of the experiences of Asian Americans in U.S. schools that are accentuated by grieving the loss of identities.

Authors

• Bao Diep, University of Minnesota

• Verna Wong, University of Minnesota