Media Alchemy: Race, Gender and Archives of Asian/American Experiment

Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs the experimental artmaking practices of 20th century Asian/American women by analyzing “incomplete” media artifacts, such as unpublished manuscripts, unanswered letters and unfinished screenplays. It argues that many of the “founding sisters” of Asian/American art and literature pivoted between media forms throughout their careers, leaving behind an extensive collection of unfinished literary, photographic and cinematic projects. While Asian/American histories often wholly critique or celebrate these artists for their well-known legal and cultural accomplishments, this project asks instead how their unsuccessful ventures reveal the procedures by which Asian/American women nonetheless made space for themselves within the marketplaces of their time periods. In doing so, the project recasts its central figures as experimentalists, who actively negotiated with and pressed upon the boundaries of a racializing logic and legislative landscape that commodified Asian/American women. The project first examines the photographic experiments of civil rights activist Mary Tape, then turns to novelists Winnifred Eaton and Han Suyin’s unfinished screenplays and finally analyzes the ekphrastic projects of contemporary poets including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Although these contemporary poets are often associated with postmodernist movements, “Media Alchemy” argues that their experimental poetics register a much longer history of Asian/American women’s cross-media artmaking. Integrating formal analysis with archival methods, “Media Alchemy” reveals new insights into minoritarian women’s artistic productions while also centering a mode of cultural analysis attuned to locating and interpreting the unfinished texts of Asian/America.