Recent historical silences force researchers to reimagine archives

Evidence

The challenge of studying a visibly invisible group became significant again once I turned to the historical record to better contextualize, or in some cases, challenge my interpretations of the qualitative data I had collected. The lack of reliable, comprehensive demographic data on Iranian Americans is compounded by their newness as an immigrant group. There simply doesn’t exist the same rich archive of historical documents and accounts of the Iranian American experience as for other groups. Even tracking down the identity of the “first” Iranian immigrant to America is murky due to issues of racial categorization and national identity. By virtue of these limitations, I had to make an epistemological shift: to reimagine the recent past and present as a developing Iranian American archive that could offer insights into the social futures of the young people whose stories form the bulk of my original data. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 582

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the productive notion of treating the ‘developing’ present as an archive in the making when historical records are absent.
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘visibly invisible’ immigrant groups force a redefinition of what counts as an archive, and what researchers of such groups must improvise.
• XREF: connects to: Defeated cultural movements can be re-potentiated from their archives after decades