Abstract
The dissertation, Asian Greek Sisterhoods: Archives, Affects, and Belongings in Asian American Sororities, 1929-2015, examines the kinds of archives produced by Asian American women in single-gender social organizations or Asian Greek-letter sororities. It conceives them (archives) as transformative acts of affects: embodied memory-keeping practices that transmit knowledge, traditions, cultural practices, and social customs as collective identities and communal histories across time and space, among different, diverse groups of ethnic-Asian women from one generation to the next. Thusly, the archives is reimagined as processes that create the corps and corpus of social belongings among a group, forming individual identities into the complex, crafted identities of social communities: their social structures and relationships, and in the case of Asian Greek sororities, their 'sisterhood.'
The affective archives of Asian American sororities complicate the conventional understandings of memory-keeping projects in minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised communities of color in the United States. These kinds of archives only revise the understanding of collective cultural remembering as recuperative practices motivated by the anxieties of loss and forgetting, but they also recast communal memory work as participatory acts that celebrate identities, perpetuate shared experiences, and foster kinship.
The research for this project is a multi-sited, multi-method study that includes thirty-three in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013, as well as ethnographic observations of and archival research on Active members and alumnae of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi, the two historically Asian American sororities established at the University of California, Los Angeles: Chi Alpha Delta, founded in 1929 and Theta Kappa Phi, founded in 1959.
The affective archives of Asian American sororities complicate the conventional understandings of memory-keeping projects in minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised communities of color in the United States. These kinds of archives only revise the understanding of collective cultural remembering as recuperative practices motivated by the anxieties of loss and forgetting, but they also recast communal memory work as participatory acts that celebrate identities, perpetuate shared experiences, and foster kinship.
The research for this project is a multi-sited, multi-method study that includes thirty-three in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013, as well as ethnographic observations of and archival research on Active members and alumnae of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi, the two historically Asian American sororities established at the University of California, Los Angeles: Chi Alpha Delta, founded in 1929 and Theta Kappa Phi, founded in 1959.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures…………………………………………………………….………..…....vii
List of Tables……………………………………………………………………...…..…ix
Glossary of Terms…………………………………………………………….........……x
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………...…....xii
Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………..xiv
Chapter 1 Asian American Greek Sisterhoods: An Introduction……………..……...1
Chapter 2 The Makings of Sisterhoods: Chis and Thetas………………………......42
Chapter 3 Crafting Sisterhood……………………………………………..………...85
Chapter 4 Serving Up Sisterhood: Contemporary Chi Cooking ………………….124
Chapter 5 Succeeding Archives, Exceeding Belongings: A Conclusion………….160
Bibliography………………………………………………………………….………194