This week, as always, you can choose your own text and topic to studying relation to the issues, concepts, and frameworks we’ve taken up in ASTU. Remember that I’m looking for posts to develop analytical discussions of these texts, using specific examples to illustrate the abstractions that you’re engaging, and linking to + citing all your sources. You could blog about the materials you’re working on in the archives, or any of the archival readings or sites we’ve been studying as a class; this article, about a recent life narrative by an IRS survivor, Arthur Bear Chief, picks up on our discussions not just of the TRC and archives, but of the work of auto/biography in bearing witness and the need to speak so that his experiences, and those of others, will be remembered. This article might be of interest, too: it discusses a writer’s encounters with a woman’s WWII diary kept in the Mass Observation archives and how the ordinary beauty of this diary and its observations on daily life inspired her to write a novel based on it. (You yourselves don’t have time to write novels based on the archives for your projects! But maybe later.)
You can write about Diamond Grill or you might also take up topics about or inspired by Diamond Grill: e.g., biotexts or food memoirs or High Muck-a-Muck or the contemporary Canadian long poem or poems by on prison walls by Chinese immigrants, etc. You could extend our discussion of The Race Card Project.
Another direction inspired by our discussions of the complicated genealogy of the book would be to think more about Diamond Grill as a family memoir. Wah (Jr) is not, of course, writing in a vacuum but, as we’ve discussed, inscribing a relational story. As he acknowledges, he’s writing about his family and community. In an essay on The Conversation (a website in which scholars write for a general public, just like you will in your archives projects), sociologist Ashley Barnwell considers the ethics of the family memoir, looking at several instances of life narratives in which family members who were represented by these texts rejected, resented, or publicly protested the versions of the family that the author produced. Not only is Barnwell’s analysis relevant to our discussions, it’s also a cross-disciplinary encounter in action: how a sociologist reads life narratives (vs our readings as literary and cultural studies scholars). You could introduce and respond to her ideas by thinking about these issues in relation to Wah’s text or other life narratives.
ETA: I came across this photography project, in which the artist represents depression through auto/photography: “what if I tried on lives like I try on dresses,” she asks. This study connects in a number of conceptual ways to our course but also to our discussions of the visual, such as in HONY.
Posts are due Monday March 20, at noon. Comments are due Tuesday, March 21 @ 9:30 am. Please add comments to this post.
I really enjoyed reading Gabby’s blog post, ‘The New York Times Archive: Representation of the Vietnam War’. Gabby’s approach of exploring archives (past NYT articles) that were highly prevalent in shaping people’s belief at a certain time in history was unique and insightful. Gabby’s focus on the subjective nature of the archives, “the newspaper’s focus on the Western perspective of the (Vietnamese) war”, allowed me to see just how bias the media was and (most likely) still is. Such knowledge pushes me to be more critical with today’s different news sources, especially at a time where ‘fake news’ is on the rise.
Also posted on the indicated persons blog:
Kwezi
I quite enjoyed reading your blog post Kwezi. It brought a new perspective and new questions to think about when reading a family memoir. It makes me think about archives and how they resemble a memoir, such as Diamond Grill by Fred Wah. In archives, I believe there to is an embarrassment like Fred senior felt when mispronouncing soup, but the question of privacy and publication also come to mind. When materials of all kinds – diaries, journals, government documents, photographs, sketchbooks, letters- are put together to create an archive, the ones being represented in the archive also have to make the distinction between private and public. To decide what they want to share and what they feel should not be or do not feel comfortable sharing their personal information with the public.
While reading through Paige, Merial, and Selena’s blogs, I found the problem regarding racial acceptance to be very interesting. Specifically the fact that identifying with this “hyphenated” cultural identity still proves to be a prevalent problem today. Culture is often seen to be a big factor in constructing our identities, and these posts make me wonder more about how society will respond to these “hyphenated” identities, and the impact it has on individuals in their respective process of discovering their own identities. Does hegemonic societal views prove to be a hindrance in this process? Will society become more accepting? Would this allow individuals a greater freedom to explore and identify with perhaps various cultures that they identify with? I really enjoyed Selena’s post stating, “perhaps the best solution to this racism and ignorance is simply to not assume, but ask”, and I too agree that this is something society can abide by in overcoming racial discrimination.
I found that I could really connect with Selena’s post on “The Race Card Project” and hyphenated identities. I have often heard “You’re not Canadian, you’re Indo-Canadian” from people before. These people believe that they are more Canadian than me, but they too have roots in another country, whether that be Ireland or Germany. Even when I traveled to Italy and Greece, I had people approach me and tell me “Namaste” (a Hindu greeting), when, firstly, I am capable of speaking English because I am Canadian, and secondly, the “Indian” side of my identity is not Hindu. Relating Selena’s post to Merial’s post, personally, I can confirm that today, I am a lot more comfortable with my identity as a hyphenated Canadian than I was when I was younger. Merial noted features of Fred Wah’s and Sarah De Vries’ life that were indicative of their confusion over their identity when they were younger. Adding on to what Merial had to say, the fact that Canada values diversity and multiculturalism is helpful in making hyphens smaller, even if they are a “sign of impurity.”
I also found the insight Sam provided into the Fred Wah’s use of poetry interesting. I think his post connected well to my post on art as a way to reach an audience. He made me think more about applying analyzing the poetic concepts used to infer new meanings from the text.
After reading a couple blogs I found two blogs, Riva’s and Nicole’s, that tackled the same topic. Both their blogs concerned the topic of the Hyphen from Fred Wah’s Dimond Grill and the category of the biotext. I really enjoyed Riva’s blog because she connected how Fred Wah felt about living on the hyphen with two other people’s stories. Nicole’s blog was also very interesting because she connected the hyphen and the biotext together as they both don’t fit in with one category and are not fully able to be placed as they are not fully one nor the other. Overall I really enjoyed reading their blogs and exploring more of the class conversations and how they apply to the outside world as well as our ASTU class.
Selena’s, Karyn’s, and Merial’s different viewpoints on “the hyphen” have led me to consider how Wah’s addressing of “hyphenation” and “in between-ness” as an issue that still applies today – or does it? As Selena points out, we are living in an ongoing era of globalization, meaning the inter-connectivity of this process may expand to races as well. Fred Wah grew up in the mid-20th century, which most likely resulted in different social circumstances for him. Due to immigration policies and many other historical changes, I question whether hyphenation is as uncommon as Diamond Grill makes it seem.
Reading Gurveer’s comment and Karyn’s blog post, I too can relate to the idea of the “hyphen”. While I am of Chinese, Scottish, and German ethnicity, I choose to identify primarily as a Canadian. Like Selena’s post about The Race Card Project, I too have been asked, “No, where are you really from?”, since my race vs nationality appears to be important to them. Therefore, I noticed Merial’s point of how individuals can choose to live “in between” the hyphen – like Wah – and this may reflect that mixed race is becoming a more common identity, possibly due to globalization.
Reading through various posts, I found there to be a trend in interest in family memoirs and their legitimacy/accuracy. While I definitely wonder alongside Kwezi and Maya where the line should be drawn when sharing multiple peoples’ stories, I also see that family memoirs are generally just meant to be the story from a singular perspective, such as Diamond Grill and, in a sense, The Diary of Anne Frank as well. They are written by one person in order to share that one person’s perspective of a bigger story. I do agree, however, that members whose stories are being shared and interpreted should give consent before publishing. If anything, they should be able to read what is written about them before the story is shared with anyone. But, at the same time, these memoirs are often written by one person to share their perspective of life with many people and, thus, their biases and opinions and experiences — however positive or negative — are, and should be considered as, completely valid.
In this series of blog posts, I found the common theme of silences – whether archival or simply in life narratives – present in Maya, Kwezi, and Anna’s blogs. While Maya and Kwezi explore aspects of silences in memoirs, and whether it is right to represent certain people or experiences in this work, Anna connects this theme to the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and how in representing certain voices, we violate their right to silence. In their discussions about what writers and archivists should keep and leave out in their work, I am reminded of the ethics of life writing. In particular, I reflect on our previous work with Anne Frank – in compiling and editing his daughter’s diary, Otto Frank willingly constructs his own representation of Anne Frank. I ask, then, whether if that is ethically right – would the passages he selected been what Anne had wanted to include? What about the passages that he edited out? With the publication of Anne Frank’s diary having been done posthumously, we can never truly know.
There was common theme of the “hyphenated identity” for a number of this week’s round of blog posts. Personally, I chose to write about Fred Wah’s concept because, being both Chinese and white like Wah made me interested in exploring the experiences of more people who have experienced a hyphenated identity on the Race Card Project. I noticed that Nicole, too, had chosen to write on Wah’s concept and she also has a hyphenated identity. She writes that the sense of confusion and “[jumbledness]” that may come from reading Diamond Grill “may represent Wah’s unclear identity” that he is trying to portray. On another note, Karyn has also brought up the topic of the hyphenated identity. She talks about how she is a Chinese-Indonesian and the struggles that related to people with this identity at a certain point in time. With this said, I find the growing interest in this topic very promising. As I have seen through Diamond Grill, on the Race Card Project while writing my blog, and now through the posts of some of my colleagues, many people are eager to share their experiences and thoughts on hyphenated identities as it becomes an increasingly prevalent topic in our globalizing world. I feel that with the continuation of this discussion, perhaps we will be able to diminish the stigma and discrimination against people who hold these identities once and for all.
In a continuation of the study of archives, particularly the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and those from Aboriginal people who experienced Residential schools, Eva, Anna, and Andrew discuss silences in the archives. Anna talks about how certain stories were shared in the archives without the permission of those who told them and that a court ruling was made in their favour to keep their silence. Eva and Andrew, however, introduce Arthur Bear Chief, who shares his story partly on behalf of all those who experienced Residential schools, especially those who died in them. Going to school in the BC school system, at least at my high school, we learned about Residential schools and watched certain documentaries that shared experiences of some people. However, I do not think we ever talked about why people shared their stories– besides to acknowledge and educate people on what happened– or that some people chose not to share. The stories form survivors of Residential schools hold far more uses particularly for those recovering from the terribel experiences and as Eva and Andrew also share, they help with understanding identity, speak for others, and providing documentation for later generations.
In some ways archives can be places of discovery and knowledge that enhances the society that we live in, but there are certain times at which that discovery or knowledge is purposely limited. Silences in archives was one topic that was introduced in the blogs, and it seems a method through which to dispel certain parts of history. It reminds me of the book 1984, in which George Orwell writes that the past is owned by the people in power and can be changed at their discretion. The power of those marginalized groups would be then to either fight to be heard or use silence as a form of protest. Maddie wrote her blog on Biotexts, which brought up an interesting idea of bio text as more “real” than a non-fiction story. Primarily these two ideas show that there remains a certain amount of agency for discriminated or marginalized groups–there are many ways through which to share or not share their story as a form of protest against the existing hegemonic structures.
After reading Selena, Merial and Riva’s blogs I was greatly intrigued by their different interpretations pertaining to “living on the hyphen”. Despite everyone bringing Diamond Grill into the conversation, I found it interesting the other varying sources selected to strengthen their viewpoints. Riva incorporated an article from the Huffington Post written by a Canadian author who describes her struggle being labeled Chinese-Canadian. It was interesting to hear her struggle and point of view these many years later after Fred Wahs in Diamond Grill as they both share similar identity issues. However, during her article I saw the similarity between her and Wah most prevalently when she wrote about “the disconnect between the two selves.” This comparison really educated me on how although we may think decades later the issue has been resolved regarding those “living on the hyphen”, Riva’s article argues that some Canadians still face that issue.