Historians’ Fictions and U.S. Foreign Relations
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This summer, I worked with Professor Shanon Fitzpatrick in the Department of History and Classical Studies on an ARIA project entitled “Historians’ Fictions and U.S. Foreign Relations.” My role was to assist in researching the role that novels have historically played in crafting understandings of U.S. foreign relations events, especially those characterized by stark international asymmetries. Specifically, I was interrogating the roles of gender, labor, immigration policy, and mythmaking in the history of U.S foreign relations with Asian and Indigenous nations through the work of novelists such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. This entailed a variety of tasks including, but not limited to, compiling and cataloguing sources, making summaries of relevant sources and trends in scholarship, writing reflection pieces, and reviewing an article draft.
I was initially drawn to this research project having taken HIST 530: U.S. Foreign Relations with Professor Fitzpatrick in the winter 2020 semester. During my time at ±«ÓăÖ±˛Ą, I have been exposed to a very narrow understanding of foreign relations that centered states and a small group of elite decision makers. Instead, HIST 530 attempted to reconceptualize foreign relations to center immigrants, refugees, indigenous peoples, and other individuals that were not included in the dominant discourse of foreign relations. I wanted to pursue an ARIA to continue developing these ideas beyond the context of the class.
A highlight of my ARIA project was researching the role of graphic novels in U.S. foreign relations historiography. For example, my research on the Vietnam War and U.S. militarism in the Transpacific was enhanced by reading Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey by G.B. Tran, a graphic memoir detailing the author’s family history in Vietnam and their journey to America and refugees, and accompanying articles like “Environmental Graphic Memory: Remembering the Natural World and Revising History in Vietnamerica,” by Jeffrey Santa Ana in the edited collection Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels. As an undergraduate history student, I am often inundated with scholarly articles and books, encouraged to reference peer reviewed papers, and be wary of sources that were not authored by historians. In this bubble, it is easy to forget that for most people, history does not manifest in the form of scholarly sources, but popular media, such as novels and films, or oral histories passed down from friends and family. In recent years, there has been spike of historical graphic novels; this means that more people are learning history through graphic novels, and that graphic novelists can communicate new historical narratives. I find this trend incredibly interesting and I was intrigued in how the simultaneously pictorial and textual form of graphic novels can illuminate historical narratives eschewed by historians.
An unexpected challenge of my ARIA project was the fact that all ARIA research had to be conducted remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the general stress of the situation, I was accustomed to doing research work in libraries and structuring my day around spending time in the library. Now that the libraries were closed, I had difficulty finding an adequate study space. As well, I could not access physical resources. To overcome this challenge, I made sure create some comfortable research spaces in my home and stick to a strict work schedule to mirror the experience of conducting research in a library. This schedule included taking breaks outside to get some fresh air and clear my mind before jumping back into work. To combat the lack of physical resources, I found articles that referenced the books that were inaccessible to me to determine whether they were relevant to my research and whether I should pursue finding a full copy of the work. In the end, most of the sources that I needed were accessible online.
Prior to my ARIA project, I had never worked on a long-term interdisciplinary research project outside of the classroom. Since I am considering doing research in my future career or education path, it was important for me to understand how to conduct research without the time and scope constraints of university classes. Thank you to the Arts Internship Office for giving me this opportunity and to Mr. Mark W. Gallop for generously supporting my internship.
