ASIANNESS: Racial Construction in Oral Histories from the American South

Although prior research has discussed what Asian identity means beyond the often-binary Black-white racial relations in the American South, my research will be using oral histories to deepen understandings of people’s perceptions of identity formation and racialization. All oral history analysis has been through the narrators on Southern Mix, and the narrators I have interviewed have been from UNC housekeeping and Transplanting Traditions Community Farm. Qualitative analysis of oral history interviews and coding with Dedoose programming will be used to find common themes across interviews. As an intern with the Southern Oral History Project, I conducted two of my own oral histories and analyzed 30+ existing ones in the Southern Mix database, a community archive that aims to record and amplify the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans in the South. Oral histories are primarily about allowing the narrator to tell their life story from their own viewpoint, with the interviewer and narrator generating knowledge together. Although the interview is highly unstructured, most oral histories cover chronological life history and major life events, and community and identity.