Spectral Archives: Asian Diasporic Literature in the Americas

Are minor lives worth documenting? How do we have access to the lives of the multitude, the dispossessed, the outcasts and the enslaved—the lives that archival documents have little to tell us about? Is it ethical to recreate and recover the unheard lives of peoples historically perceived as illiterate, undesirable, “diseased” and unassimilable? What is the power of imagining and writing about existing otherwise? We will consider these questions throughout the course by turning to the under-explored history of Asian diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will contextualize examples of life writing (broadly-defined) spanning from late seventeenth-century to the twenty-first century, both by members of the Asian diasporas themselves and as they have been re-imagined by contemporary authors. Some examples of primary texts include the spiritual biography of a seventeenth-century Mughal princess-slave who became a mystic in colonial Mexico, queer imagination of a Chinese “coolie” in late nineteenth-century Jamaica, the memoirs of Japanese-Peruvians in the internment camp during WW2, semi-autobiographical poems and short stories by contemporary Asian-Latinx writers. With the help of supplementary critical readings on radical life writing, we will consider throughout the course how imaginative, anti-racist, feminist and queer narratives may expand our current knowledge of the lives of the marginalized and the racialized.