Diasporic Desires: The Role of Public History in Queer API Community Building (A Proposal)

   "Untitled by Alia Romagnoli"
   Instagram. Accessed June 1, 2019.
   https://www.instagram.com
   /p/BqS7GzADo8V.

History is a lens through which we reflect on and conceptualize our own lives. In seeking to navigate queer Asian Pacific Islander (API) identity, we fashion a composite experience from a network of ancestors to call our own. What emerges from our makeshift narratives are overarching themes that span time and place. Queer API histories and folklore evoke real and relevant connections between the past and present that keep us grounded, even when we are scattered.

This roundtable brings together queer API activists and scholars to engage the past, present, and potential role of public history in queer API community building and identity formation. What does it mean to be a queer API? Multigenerational narratives of immigration, culture and legacy—their facets and fissures—are complicated by the queer experience. Queer API diasporas are thrown in sharp relief when studied alongside the white lesbigay experience perpetuated by popular historical consciousness.

Queer people of color often seek to reclaim an “indigenous,” precolonial past as a means of decolonizing their sexual experiences and self-conceptions. What role has, does, or can public history play in this process of (a)historical validation? Why and how does the past confer a sense of legitimacy, especially for queer API in the diaspora?

In an American context, API stereotypes abound—the model minority, the perpetual foreigner, sexless or sexful. Meanwhile, queer API are rendered “the minority of the minority”—stifled, invisible, nonexistent. How have we internalized these frameworks and allowed them to circumscribe our queer historical imaginings—who we were and are, and what we could become? What role has, does, or can public history praxis play in perpetuating or disrupting this false narrative construction?

How do we find each other and ourselves? What are concrete and constructive examples of queer API community building and identity formation—past, present, and future? What role does historical consciousness play in this process, and is it exceptional to other modes of grassroots work? What can queer API bring to the table—to synthesize queer of color critique and public history theory for the benefit of political organizing and spiritual meaning-making?

–

Learn more on the Public History Commons.