Archaeology of the Future: Chinese Oral History in the Digital Age

Elizabeth Carter
Asian Languages and Cultures
UC Los Angeles

Lin Du
Asian Languages and Cultures
UC Los Angeles

Yiyang Ho
Asian Languages and Cultures
UC Los Angeles

Qiyu Lu
Asian Languages and Cultures
UC Los Angeles

This graduate working group is a collaborative project envisioned by graduate students working at the intersection of many disciplines (Chinese studies, history, art history, literature, film and media studies and linguistics) from five UC campuses: UC Los Angeles, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. With the emergence of oral history as a research method in Chinese studies, the group 1) examines existing practices and theorization of Chinese oral history and their applicability to different humanities disciplines; 2) experiments with the oral history method through the students’ individual research projects and reflect on the experience; 3) builds an open-access platform for the exchange and preservation of Chinese language oral history. Borrowing from Fredric Jameson’s classic Archaeologies of the Future, this working group traverses across the boundary of time and contemplates on ways of interpreting the past at present and historicizing the present for the future.