ABSTRACT

In the early 1990s, Roberta Uno, founding artistic director of New WORLD Theater, instituted the Uno Collection of Plays by Asian American women playwrights at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.1 Housed at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, this extraordinary collection currently holds over 200 plays as well as supplementary materials documenting the work of Asian American women playwrights. While the collection contains the writings of many contemporary playwrights, such as Alice Tuan, Jeannie Barroga, and Velina Hasu Houston, it also houses rare materials by early writers, including those of Gladys Ling-ai Li, a Hawai’i based playwright whose play was staged in New York as early as 1924.2 My discussion of the emergence of this particular archiving project is embedded in multiple understandings of the term “archive” and of the processes of “archiving” within the specific context of Asian American women playwrights. I use “archive” and “archiving” here to mean the gathering of objects, in this case plays by Asian American women, for preservation and centralization of access. I deploy these terms to equally refer to the process by which an institutional entity emerges as a source of and material site for plays by Asian American women. Such a history of the Uno Collection is thus grounded in an understanding of archival projects as always already engaged in entangled structures of poetics, power and politics.3