Asian/Diasporic Encounters in the Archives of War
Cecil Beaton, “British officers in the mess at British Army Aid Group Headquarters, Kweilin,” undated (c. 1943): Cecil Beaton Photographs, Album 21, IB 4094C, Imperial War Museum. In the front room, five young men from differing racial backgrounds in a mix of civilian and military garb are gathered, lounging Two are conversing with one another, as one looks on, and two others gaze towards the camera. In the back room, a blurry Asian man in something approaching a uniform leans in front of a table laden with glassware. Pinned along the back wall are (from left to right) the American and British flags, as well as the flag of the Republic of China (1928-1949).
In this, the first of two collaboratively-written articles, Wesley Attewell and I stage a conversation about our experiences researching everyday histories of encounter between Asian and Asian diasporic subjects during the Pacific and Vietnam Wars. Whereas Wes does some preliminary thinking about the Benedicto K. Villaverde archive that is at the heart of our recent JAAS article (see above), I reflect on the centrality of inter-Asian, Afro-Asian, and diasporic kinship and social networks to British (counter)intelligence activities in southern Free China and Japanese-occupied Hong Kong during the Second World War, as documented in materials held by the Australian War Memorial in Canberra (an archive I also return to in Archives of Intimacy as well as in a short essay recently published in Verge: Studies in Global Asias). Throughout, we attend to the infrastructures — material, institutional, epistemological, affective — that make our conversation possible. If our archives resonate, what does this tell us about the trans-imperial durability of the intimate infrastructures we show taking shape in 1940s China and 1960s Vietnam respectively? Originally published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies in June 2019 @ https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2019.1613725.