Critique of Archived Life: Toward a Hesitation of Sikh Immigrant Accumulation

IF 0.4 4区社会学 0 ASIAN STUDIES

Positions-Asia Critique Pub Date : 2021-04-28 DOI:10.1215/10679847-8852098

Rajbir Singh Judge, J. Brar

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract:In 2016, the Pioneering Punjabi Digital Archive (PPDA) went online. Attempting to reveal how the Punjabi community struggled and then thrived in California, the PPDA accumulates narratives of Punjabi American life. Against such models of archival intimacy and recovery, which look to cultivate limitless public access to a knowable and transparent subject while reducing structural precarity to the failure of an exceptional Punjabi, this article hesitates in a vexed archival space without guarantees. Within this hesitation, it explores the traces of untimely lives displaced in creating archival legibility—traces that reveal a different form of being that challenge the additive logic of the PPDA. This hesitation is cultivated through a comparative approach that couples archival and ethnographic research based on articles about Punjabi American life in both the archive and public sphere alongside ethnographic work conducted with Sikh immigrants who work in canneries and the fields. The aim is to pause in the present impasse to consider the nonbecoming of unknown forms—an ethnographic "reaching and ungrasping" in which the future is not fixed as a requirement for thinking, refusing the accumulating demands of narrative sequence that archiving presents.

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档案生活批判:对锡克教移民积累的犹豫

摘要:2016年，先锋旁遮普数字档案馆(PPDA)上线。试图揭示旁遮普社区如何在加利福尼亚挣扎，然后繁荣起来，PPDA收集了旁遮普美国人生活的叙述。这种档案亲密和恢复的模式，寻求培养公众对一个可知和透明的主题的无限访问，同时减少结构上的不稳定性，使旁遮普成为一个特殊的失败，本文在一个没有保证的令人烦恼的档案空间中犹豫不决。在这种犹豫中，它探索了不合时宜的生活的痕迹，这些痕迹在创造档案的易读性中被取代——这些痕迹揭示了一种不同的存在形式，挑战了PPDA的附加逻辑。这种犹豫是通过一种比较方法培养出来的，这种比较方法将档案和民族志研究结合起来，这些研究基于档案和公共领域中关于旁遮普美国人生活的文章，以及在罐头厂和田地里工作的锡克教移民进行的民族志研究。其目的是在目前的僵局中停下来，考虑未知形式的不成为——一种民族志的“到达和理解”，在这种情况下，未来不是固定的，而是一种思考的要求，拒绝了归档所呈现的叙事顺序的累积要求。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Positions-Asia Critique ASIAN STUDIES-

CiteScore

0.70

自引率

0.00%

发文量