Crafting Counter-Archives of Hidden Civic Histories: Examples from an Asian American Youth-Centric Virtual Inquiry Community

• In Event: Politics and Possibilities of Collage as Archive: Centering Anticolonial Methods

Abstract

In the White supremacist, anti-Asian structures of U.S. public life, Asian American youth face civic marginalizations that transcend present-day injustices. Besides contending with contemporary instances of racism and xenophobia, they also face the erasure of Asian American histories across public settings (e.g., schools) where White-centric narratives of history are prevalent (Goodwin, 2010). Thus, they encounter few opportunities to grapple with their community civic legacies. In response to these realities, this paper draws on a practitioner research study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) of a virtual out-of-school critical civic education community in which I (an Indian American scholar-practitioner) invited a group of Indonesian American youth to use diverse forms of artistry to surface civically marginalized community and family histories. This group, which ran from Summer-Fall 2021, was a space where youth could explore their familial and communal civic legacies through their multiple ways of knowing. Drawing on data from this project, this paper explores: How, in a virtual, out-of-school civic education community, did eight Asian American youth utilize diverse artistic methods (including collaging) to create a counter-archive of buried Asian American civic histories?

This paper is conceptually anchored by critical sociocultural literacy studies which foreground the multiple modes through which people make meaning in conditions of power asymmetry (Luke, 2000; NLG, 1996). This capacious lens also encompasses artistic practices (e.g., collaging). It builds, too, on AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2018), a framework rendering explicit the unequal citizenship experienced by Asian Americans in conditions of intersectional oppressions (e.g., White supremacy, heteropatriarchy). These perspectives provide an interrelated framework from which to examine how the Indonesian American youth used aesthetic methods like collaging to surface intergenerational legacies.

My data for this paper included audio-visual inquiry session recordings; youth and facilitator-made artifacts; and field-notes. Drawing on critical literacy perspectives, I coded instances in the data when, in response to various activities in the inquiry community, youth mobilized diverse forms of artistry to highlight buried familial legacies (sample codes: “poetry,” “drawing”; “digital collaging”) (Saldaña, 2013). I layered these, next, with codes from AsianCrit to capture how youths’ meaning-making was informed by specific familial and communal legacies of survival (sample codes: “family journeys”; “concealed histories”). In later analytic rounds, I solidified themes through memo-writing.

This paper highlights two dimensions of youth’ aesthetic civic counter-archival practices. The first is how they 1) (re)assembled narratives of survival – that is, how they created compositions that brought together elements from their family legacies that were fragmented by the destabilizing ruptures of transnational migration. The second was how they 2) (re)surfaced submerged perspectives – that is, how they aesthetically foregrounded the voices of family and community members in and beyond Indonesia whose stories remain erased by dominant U.S. history narratives.

This session will contribute to the workshop focus by exploring how arts-based inquiry can create conditions for Asian American youth to aesthetically construct counter-archives that reclaim their intergenerational histories of cross-border survival.

Author

• Ankhi Guha Thakurta, Boston College