Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the US, yet the long and diverse histories of Asian Americans, especially Asian American women, have often been absent from the research and teaching of American history. Much of this invisibility is due to the absence of Asian American women in the archives that historians traditionally use to write history. Asian American women’s experiences of migration, labor, and activism can be particularly hard to find in institutional archives. When they do appear, their lives have often been recorded by outsiders and under conditions and constraints of state surveillance or patriarchal family structures and ideologies. Yet, new historical scholarship and new efforts to collect and preserve the records of Asian American women in community-based and institutional archives have revealed their strength, resilience, and transformative power in shaping their own lives and impacting change within local, national, and transnational contexts.
HIST 16S