ABSTRACT
Against Invisibility is a multi-modal project built on a digital archive of some 5,000 family photographs and documents that chronicle the experience of two Chinese American families from 1890 to 1993. The digital project has been the basis of a graduate level seminar entitled “Against Invisibility: Asian American History, Vernacular Photography and the Public Humanities.” The purpose of the project and the seminar has been to enable us to think about the ways that Asian Americans have used family photography to assert their subjectivity in the face of cultural erasure. In the past several years the project has taken several forms and resulted in several unexpected outcomes.
