Typographic Design as Visual Historiography and Racial Formation

This paper maps the theoretical and methodological dimensions of an on-going project called 1882–1982–2019 which entails the design of a “chop suey” typeface and specimen book. The project experiments with typography’s indexical affordances and capacity for historical narration. The typeface is not optimized for legibility, but is rather developed for unpacking critical questions surrounding the relationship between labor, design, craft, quality, value, and race. While most of these notions would not be out of place in discourses of typography, the latter term — race — is seldom given serious attention in the field. The typographic (or, type) specimen is taken up as a genre of commercial writing that invests letterforms with significance and value. It is framed by a synthesis of scholarly work from a variety of fields including performance studies, whiteness studies, and Asian-American studies, and the history of illustration. This idiosyncratic composition of reference points strives towards a more radical resonance. That is, 1882–1982–2019 is rooted in an examination of the historical persistence of the anti-Asian tropes as one constitutive element in the construction of normative, white-supremacist ideas around labor, craft, and value. It explores how the language and attitudes of such tropes are resonant in typographic discourse, pedagogy, and practice. A primary methodological vehicle — endemic to type design — entails the mining of archival sources for letterforms. These are extracted from a variety of historical documents ranging from late-19th century political cartoons to contemporary popular media, and digitized. Artificial intelligence image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney are also applied to generate typographic form to stage a further examination of the performativity of contemporary typographic labor. This project opens critical questions about the disciplinary aims of typographic history, implicates it in racial discourses, and challenges normative, ostensibly de-racialized, processes of valorization in typography.