Research Grants Help Bowdoin Faculty Across the Spectrum

Professor of Asian Studies and English Belinda Kong has been teaching Asian American and Asian diaspora literature at Bowdoin for twenty years. Her latest award, a Mellon Fellowship issued by the Huntington Library in California, will allow her to further explore her latest project on Asian diaspora during a one-month residency.

Kong will be researching library's collections on early Chinese America and the Pacific Rim, with an emphasis on Cantonese migrants from the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century to the "Chinese Exclusion era," which began in the 1880s and severely limited the rights of Chinese workers in the US for six decades.

This research is part of Kong's new book project, Subaltern Sensoriums of Early Cantonese America, which tells the stories of early Cantonese American immigrants. "As a child immigrant from Hong Kong myself," she says, "I want this project to focus on Cantonese immigrants, to pay homage to the richness and resilience of these early forerunners."

More than a hundred thousand Chinese came to the US during this period, but most of them did not leave behind any written records. Kong therefore proposes a framework of "alternative literacies" to explore what she calls the "multisensory dimensions" of immigrant lives, looking beyond written archives toward photographs, objects, sound recordings, and spaces.

"Despite the long history of Asians' cultural exclusion and disempowerment in the US," says Kong, "they have always had tremendous creative agency as they make meaning and beauty in their everyday lives."