Introduction
There is the archive and history of what happened—
The Asian American Literary Archive walked into my mind on a plane ride over to plan the 2023 Asian American Literature Festival. It was already a kind of historic moment: the gathering of several Asian American literary organizations for one moment to plan and vision a future for what Asian American literature could be.
The vision was, at first, that of a giant warehouse, a library with special collections where Asian American literary history was the point. The vision was for a home for the legacies of writers whose works go uncollected or submerged beneath other important collections of politics and facts on which Asian American studies has been build.
Yet, at the same time, as I met with new and old colleagues across the literary world of the early 2020s, as I taught poetry and wrote it, I was noticing a shift in the kind of writing my friends were doing. Their writing was suffused with research within institutional archives but also within their families; they worked on documentary poetry from texts of the US military or oral histories from within their families, chosen and otherwise. And when they couldn’t find anything in history, they began to make it up.
Simultaneously, I was embarking on my own research projects at institutional archives rifling through the papers of poets to learn about why and how they made what they made. I began to wonder about the papers of other Asian American poets who I admired. Where had they gone? Who was taking care of them? To my shock, more often than not, the answers were kitchen tables, back rooms, attics, and basements.
Then there’s the archive, and the making, of how it felt.
Many of these answers came from scholars, or writers-turned-scholars, who had done the digging themselves. These critical works enhanced and contextualized what I was reading. Their interpretations, which brought together history, theory, and literary analysis, in turn has made my own writing and teaching better.
The Asian American Literary Archive exists because this cycle of creation, preservation, and contextualization is a vital process between communities whose labor and love have been co-opted from each other for capital. The Archive’s mission, and vision, is the creation of a coalition that loves literature for, and by, each other.
—Yanyi, June 2024
