Salzburg Global Fellow Sonia Weiner analyzes the role of archival photographs and images in intermedial autofictional writing
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Sonia Weiner, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse” in September 2024.
Migrant writers have found conventional literary genres to be unsatisfactory channels for representing experience characterized by fragmented memory, historical lacuna, intergenerational trauma, and cultural loss. In the process of confronting, unraveling, and addressing their familial histories within their current experience, Asian American writers embrace genres that challenge boundaries between fact and fiction, such as autofiction and memoir. At the same time, they traverse media demarcations through word-image intermediality. Stepping across these generic and media lines echoes crossings of national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. This suggests that migrant writers find these composite modes of expression more suitable for the articulation of their entangled and complicated pasts, histories, and cultures and their lingering impact on their present.
In the process of mediating the past, authors and creators often draw on archives including historical and family photos, official documents, newspaper articles, author archives, etc. The authors interweave a variety of archival materials within their semi-factual life-writing, raising questions regarding their status within the work while simultaneously challenging the authoritative status of the archive itself. This becomes particularly poignant in reference to photos that are reproduced within texts.
If photographs traditionally authenticated the autobiographical subject, what role do they serve in autofictional texts which cannot be authenticated? What is their ontological status? How is meaning created in photo-text configurations, by whom, and for what purpose? How does the presence of an archival image within an autofictional text reflect on the status of the archive that contained it? How might archives obscure or erase a past, and how might they facilitate in constructing an alternative one - using what Saidiya Hartman has called “critical fabulation”? What possible differences and similarities occur between official state archives, colonial archives, and familial archives? In what ways can novels be understood as a new form of archive? How do visualizations of Asian Americans in mainstream U.S. culture inform the construction of intermedial texts by Asian American authors?
These questions inform my reading of intermedial autofictional writing. The brief paragraphs below provide an idea of how this works,and I hope that this exploration continues to be an ongoing dialogue.
In his graphic novel memoir "Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey" from 2011, G.B. Tran employs comics to represent and reconstruct his family’s fragmentation and connection across worlds and wars; he utilizes techniques of "breakdown" and "closure". Photographs occur in "Vietnamerica" on three levels. First, there are actual photographic images. Second, there are drawn reproductions of actual photographs, either from the family album or the archive of images from the Vietnam War. Third, there are drawn reproductions of imagined fictional photographs - these include snapshots that perform as belated witnessing of undocumented events and “imaginary photographs” of an absent father’s presence.
In "Accomplice to Memory" from 2017, Q.M. Zhang grapples with the implications of a revelation uttered by her father late in his life, which destabilizes her sense of past, history, and identity. She combines documentary, fiction, and memoir to probe lacunas and silences in her father’s past. Zhang describes her work as “a fiction within a fiction: a story about a daughter’s desire to know her immigrant father,” while recognizing the limits of that desire. Zhang hopes to unleash her father’s memories by showing him photographic images from the tumultuous historical events of the 1930s and 1940s in China, during which he served as an agent in the Kuomintang secret service. However, the images ultimately become spaces where Zhang is free to imagine what might have been. The photographs function as elements of expression, attempting to articulate what cannot be said, yet given the nature of the photographic image, they offer no clear answers. If Zhang’s father’s past remains opaque, she successfully carves a sense of familial and communal belonging for herself.
In her 2011 memoir, "Intimate: An American Family Photo Album," Paisley Rekdal, who is third generation Chinese on her mother’s side, includes photographs of Native Americans taken by Edward S. Curtis and by several ethnographers of his era. By including these photographs in her “family photo album,” Rekdal orchestrates a dialogue between the divergent images and creates intermedial interplay between them and her three-prong narrative. Focusing on the topic of miscegenation and assimilation within Native American photographs and communities, Rekdal problematizes the larger question of “intimacy” through intermediality. She illustrates how colonialism infiltrated the most intimate moments in the lives of American persons of color, including those of her own family, to assume control over conventions of racial identity.
The autofictional narrator of Amitava Kumar’s 2018 novel "Immigrant, Montana" reflects on his early American experiences as a graduate student in the 1990s. He interweaves his memories with colonial encounters and legacies, such as the violent Partition of India and Pakistan which was captured by American photographers. He also examines the American import of Indian Macaque monkeys for NASA’s space exploration and the FBI’s interrogation of Eqbal Ahmad (Harrisburg Seven). Kailash, the narrator, employs and deconstructs colonial archival materials, including photographs and documents, while crisscrossing between biography, history, and fiction.
Sonia Weiner is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of English Literature and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her work focuses on American Migration Literature and considers how Asian American and other migrant authors translate their spatial and temporal experience into varied media such as comics and intermedial photo-text configurations. Her book "American Migrant Fictions: Space, Narrative, Identity" was published with Brill in 2018.
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