LibGuides: Asian American Studies: Archival Materials

Resources at Duke (Selections from Rubenstein Library)

Zines, Art, and Activist Literature

GIDRA: The Monthly of the Asian American Experience"
GIDRA was a revolutionary monthly newspaper started by UCLA students as a way to platform Asian American interests and issues on campus. The newspaper ran from 1969 to 1974 and, by the end of its run, had found an audience among the greater Los Angeles community and beyond.
"Bamboo Girl" (Ailecia Ruscin Collection)
“Bamboo Girl” is a zine series published by Sabrina Margarita Alcantara-Tan. The series circulated widely in the United States between 1995 and 2005, and offered sharp commentary on homophobia, racism, and sexism. “Bamboo Girl” often featured the works of Filipina authors such as Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, and Perla Daly. Alcantara-Tan is now a licensed acupuncturist with a practice in New York.
• “Evolution of a Race Riot” (Ailecia Ruscin Collection)
“Evolution of a Race Riot” is a three-issue series compiled by Mimi Nguyen (see below). The series provided resources for people of color who were involved with punk rock and punk culture. A digital version of this issue can be found here: https://issuu.com/poczineproject/docs/evolution-of-a-race-riot-issue-1
“Aim Your Dick” (Sara Dyer Collection)
“Aim Your Dick” is a zine series published throughout the 1990s by Mimi Nguyen. Nguyen’s zines generally focus on race, gender, politics, postcoloniality, and feminisms, and she has contributed to other zines such as “How to Stage a Coup,” “Hard as Nails,” and “Slander.” Nguyen holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies (UC Berkeley) and is currently Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
• “Instigations from the whore revolution: a third wave feminist response to the sex work ‘controversy’: a collection”
This zine was put together by Emi Koyama, Japanese-American activist, artist, and independent writer. This zine focuses on several interrelated issues: feminism, intersex human rights, domestic violence, and sex work. The zine was published out of Portland, Oregon, where Koyama now resides. Koyama’s personal website can be found here: https://eminism.org/
"Asian American ? Project”
An open edition artist book by Irene Chan. Contains thirty-five loose and unnumbered cards, much like business cards, each with one or two lines confronting stereotypes and slurs typically aimed at Asian Americans. Print media on paper, with press name Ch’An punched out. Housed in a red, white, and blue paper case with slip-in envelope closure. The artist’s website can be found here: https://ch-anpress.com/home.html
“Cè.”
Inspired by a Chinese legend that the gift of writing comes from studying the objects of nature, the images of Cè were created from collected found organic material. These forms were arranged into 'sentences' to read as visual language. Cè is about reading nature's form, gestures, and movements as written language. The series of books take the reader through an experience much like a Taoist philosophical journey. [Taken from artist’s website]

Asian American and Asian Diasporic Histories

“Letter from Charlie Soong” (James Gordon Hackett Papers, 1788-1952)
Charlie Soong (born in China in 1861 as Han Chiao-chun) was Duke University’s first international student. He began at Duke (then Trinity College) in 1881 and lived as a Baptist in the Durham area. He returned to China as a missionary in 1886. This letter, transcribed below and generally preserved in the original English, to Gordon Hackett attests to the many friendships Charlie developed during his time here.
“Year’s Flight”
This is a set of yearbooks (1943-1945) of the Butte River High School at the Gila River incarceration camps, located in Arizona. These camps held close to 13,000 people, the majority of whom hailed from Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Almador Counties (California), but also many from Hawai’i.
“Chinatown, San Francisco, Cal.” (1893)
This is a visual and descriptive survey of Chinatown, San Francisco published in 1893. The first half provides textual description of the area with specific street names, populations, descriptions of spaces and architectures, and some first impressions. The second half provides images of various people in Chinatown. This item was meant for tourists visiting the area.
Ballard's Valley and Berry Hill Penn Plantation records, 1766-1873
Records of sugar and livestock plantations in St. Mary's Parish, Jamaica. Later papers include letters from managers of the estate to the owners describing crop conditions and potential land sales and leases, the end of the apprenticeship system in 1838, the importation of Asian laborers in 1846. This collection figures prominently in Frances Tran’s (Florida State University) dissertation, Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, and the Humanities, as well as in an article based on chapter two of her dissertation, titled “Time Traveling with Care: On Female Coolies and Archival Speculations.” You can rad more about how Dr. Tran used this collection in her research on her personal blog: https://francestran.com/2014/07/08/reading-the-archive/.

Local Resources

UNC

Chang and Eng Bunker: The Siamese Twins
- This digital collection contains extensive digitized primary source material by and about the original "Siamese Twins" Chang and Eng Bunker, who were born in Thailand in 1811 and settled in North Carolina in the 1830s, where they lived until their death in 1874. The materials are browseable by subject and include letters, photographs, account books, engravings and published works. The physical collection can be found in the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library (finding aid).
Southern Oral History Program
- Southern Communities: Listening for a Change: Asian Voices: This collection contains 51 interviews (with audio and transcript) with South Asians in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, N.C. It documents immigration stories.
- Montagnard Refugees from Vietnam: This collection includes a series of interviews conducted in the 1990s with Vietnamese refugees from the Montagnard (Degar) ethnic minority.
- Other interviews with Asian Americans can be found by searching "Asian" under the "Interviewee ethnicity" facet of the advanced search.
Davis Library Government Documents (Subject Search: "Asian Americans")
- Government documents relating to Asian Americans, including reports, guides, statistics and other publications in a range of subjects such as health, education, immigration, and legal issues.
North Carolina Collection (Subject Search: "Asian Americans")
- This collection contains published works (including theses, self-published and other works not found in the regular collection) related to the history and culture of North Carolina.

Online

Chinese Americans

The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 [UC Berkeley]
- This digital archive contains "8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Included are photographs, original art, cartoons and other illustrations; letters, excerpts from diaries, business records, and legal documents; as well as pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, sheet music, and other printed matter."
The Chinese Immigrant Experience, 1857-1892 [Digitized by HarpWeek]
- Primary sources (mostly newspaper articles and racist political cartoons), which document prejudice, violence and legislation against Chinese people in America.
United States National Archives: Chinese Heritage [National Archives]
- Information on and finding aids for government documents and others related to Chinese Americans

Japanese Americans

Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) [University of California]
- This collection of several thousand documents includes photographs, diaries, letters, drawings and more. They are divided into four browseable exhibits: "People," "Places," "Everyday Life," and "Personal Experiences."
Japanese American Relocation Collection Research Guide [Occidental College]
- Detailed guide to the collection at Occidental College which contains "correspondence, magazines, newspaper and journal articles clippings, and publications from the War Relocation Authority, religious groups, as well as civil liberties organizations." Some of these items are digitized.
Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar [Library of Congress]
- More than 200 photographs, mostly portraits
The Japanese America Legacy Project [Densho, a nonprofit organization created to document Japanese American incarceration during WWII]
Nikkei Newspapers Digital Archive (NNDA) [University of Washington]
- Online archive of two newspapers, the North American Times (1902-1942) and North American Post (1946-1950) which were published primarily in Japanese in America's Northwest.

Korean Americans

Korean American Digital Archive [University of Southern California]
- "The Korean American Digital Archive brings more than 13,000 pages of documents, over 1,900 photographs, and about 180 sound files together in one searchable collection that documents the Korean American community during the period of resistance to Japanese rule in Korea and reveal the organizational and private experience of Koreans in America between 1903 and 1965."

Southeast Asian Americans

Documenting the South East Asian American Experience (SEAAdoc) [UC Irvine]
- This collection of 1,500 images and 4,000 pages of text includes photographic prints, paintings, posters, maps, books and articles, ephemera and oral histories related to the experiences of Southeast Asian Americans. It's easily searchable by keyword, topic, format, and ethnic group.

South Asian Americans

South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) [Non-Profit Organization]
- This archive contains 3,213 unique items which document and preserve stories of South Asian immigrants to America, including oral interviews, photographs and written stories.
Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive [UC Davis]
- This archive includes over 700 video interviews, speeches, diaries, photographs, articles, and letters by or about Punjabi Americans. It's conveniently organized into time periods and also gives secondary sources.

Asian American Studies

Resources at Duke (Selections from Rubenstein Library)

Local Resources

Online

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