Intro: During the second OHMA workshop, Newest Americans: Stories from the Global City, co-founder and director Tim Raphael presented an exciting possibility for the activation of oral history archives: collaborative multimedia and social media platforms. In this blog post, Thu Anh Le explores the unique nuances of this creative storytelling process with the reflection of her advocacy works in Vietnam, and contemplates further implication of oral history as a discipline that challenges our current understanding of academic legitimization and epistemology.
The moment I clicked enter on We Came & Stayed: Coyt Jones/Ras Baraka, I was drawn in hook, line and sinker. I never thought that I could feel such a strong urge to explore the stories of African American Newark immigrants, buried for years in an archive. Yet here I was, taking in not only the fascinating lives of Newark’s first black mayor Ras Baraka and his grandfather Coyt Jones, but also the bigger picture of Newark as a global city, unlike anything that I have heard from national media. Newark is the land of struggles and opportunities, of systematic oppression and grassroots resistance. Newest Americans invited me, a stranger in many senses, into a past made alive, thanks to the reactivation of incredible oral history records that could have been forgotten for years more to come. The collaborative efforts behind the project have successfully employed multimedia as the platform for oral history to come closer to the public, and proposed a fundamental question: how can we, as oral historians, produce works that reach and resonate with a broad audience, in this ever changing world of technology? The more I looked at the seven amazing issues Newest Americans has released in the past five years, the more I could not help but thinking back about the work I had been doing back home in Vietnam, and pondered on what the question meant for me personally.
Figure 1: A black and white photo. Mayor Baraka standing with two white men, one white women and a white girl under the sun. The light cast an almost halo on top of Baraka’s head. It was the Newark St. Patrick's Day Parade in downtown Newark, New Jersey, on March 13, 2015.
When I came to the Oral History Master’s Program at Columbia, I told people that I have been doing oral history without knowing that it was oral history, and I was here to explore the different paradigms of producing and researching oral history. The works of Dr. Raphael gives me grounding that I very much need in this journey. My organization, Human Library Vietnam, works in two separate mediums. In our events, we bring in people with marginalized identities to orally share their life histories with the public in a small group setting, which leads to broader questions and reflections of current Vietnamese societal structures and dynamics, and what can be done to dismantle them. Online, we are active on Facebook, with a fan page of nearly 60,000 likes, presenting different items created from the interviews that the organization conducts, such as cuts of video interviews, blogpost and quotes, photos essays, etc. For the longest time, I contemplated the possibility of bridging the two worlds, of bringing the unique orality of oral history to social media. How can the personal narratives that reflect the emerging national narrative have a visible online representation in order to engage the broad audiences in in-depth conversations?
Newest Americans have managed to provide a possible answer to my questions in their unique hybridity of scholarly research, professional media production and public humanities programming at the Rutgers University - Newark. In his talk, Dr. Raphael discussed his hybrid academic and theater background and his venture as an outsider working his way in, which offered a different approach to how oral history can be used. In our classes at OHMA, we have been reading scholarly texts on oral history, learning about the archives, and writing about our future projects. While the contents challenge my notions of ethical, meaningful oral history in every session, I can’t help but thinking: Who else, but oral historians in higher education institutes, would care about this? In the same way that the Krueger-Scott African American oral history collection was left in the “chamber of death”, as Dr. Raphael jokingly said, fascinating and crucial narratives that oral historians manage to record here have a high chance of existing only in the archives, accessible to only a selected few, and remain that way unless another Newest American-esque attempt is able to locate them. But why? What is stopping oral history as a legitimized field to reach its full potential in orality, and connect back to the root of storytelling - a medium whose power lies within the communal sharing and interactions?
In the workshop, Dr. Raphael touched on a major contributing factor to this oral history paradox, the normalized Western epistemology in both academia and the outside world. In emphasizing the values of archiving research, the practical application of oral history is sometimes undermined, even when all of the elements above work best in conjunction. The work behind a meaningful oral history project should not stop after it becomes a part of an archive or a published document somewhere. Newest Americans shows one possible way to fill in the gaps for a cohesive attempt at making oral history by community, for the community.
Figure 1: Ashley Gilberston, Ed Kashi, Julie Winokurey, digital photograph, Newest American, September 29, 2019, http://newestamericans.com/wecameandstayed-baraka/#.
Thu Anh Le is an Vietnamese student at OHMA. She is interested in using oral history as a tool for advocacy in contemporary Vietnam, and bringing oral history methodologies to her community for sustainable and meaningful practices.
This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.