Topography of War

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Just a brief post about the Asian American Writers' Workshop anthology Topography of War, edited by Andrea Louie and Johnny Lew.



I've been teaching the personal essays in this collection, scattered throughout the weeks of this semester (matching essays on particular wars to the other readings of the week -- for example, Vietnam War essays this week paired with Jeannie Barroga's Walls). I like the collection as a whole. It's actually quite provocative to consider the extent to which Asian Americans carry with them these memories (whether personal or familial) of war and how that manifests as haunting, silences, melancholia, and so on.

One aspect of the collection that is especially interesting is the presence of family photographs for virtually every essay. The use of the photograph as archival evidence, especially as reproduced in black and white (whether or not they originally were so) gives the essays a sense of authority about the past, or maybe a sense of connection with the past that the authors all try to understand. Most if not all the authors in the collection were either young children during the war-time past in Asia or were born after their parents fled their war-torn homeland. It would be fascinating to see how the collection might have looked differently if the essays came more from an older generation that survived war as adults and had to undergo radical changes in starting a new life in a different country.

PS If you read the list of donors at the end, you'll find my name!