UCLA

The dissertation, Asian Greek Sisterhoods: Archives, Affects, and Belongings in Asian American Sororities, 1929-2015, examines the kinds of archives produced by Asian American women in single-gender social organizations or Asian Greek-letter sororities, reconceiving them as transformative acts of affects: embodied memory-keeping practices that transmit knowledge, traditions, cultural practices, and social customs as collective identities and communal histories across time and space, among different, diverse groups of ethnic-Asian women from one generation to the next. The archives reconceived as the transformative acts of affects and participatory memory-keeping practices in Asian American women sororities demonstrate collective and individual identities in complex, crafted social communities.

The affective archives of the Asian American sisterhoods of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi complicate the conventional understandings of the archives and memory-keeping projects in minority, marginalized, and disenfranchised communities of color in the United States. These sororities’ archives of affects and affections not only revise remembering as recuperative practices motivated by the anxieties of personal and collective community forgetting and loss, but also serve as the embodied performances of communal memories that celebrate identities, social cultures, and shared histories and experiences.

The dissertation is a multi-method study that includes thirty-three in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in 2013, as well as ethnographic observations of and archival research on Active members and alumnae of Chi Alpha Delta and Theta Kappa Phi, the two historically Asian American sororities established at the University of California, Los Angeles: Chi Alpha Delta, founded in 1929 and Theta Kappa Phi, founded in 1959.