Scholars who conduct ethnic archival research and who use material texts and practices in institutions in order to examine human memory and interpret human meaning-making face the challenge of placing differently archived traces of intellectual genealogies in conversation, conflict, and convergence with Western-oriented intellectual genealogies and methodologies. Such a challenge reveals the question at the heart of the proposition of the “ethnic” archive: how do scholars use archival collections as only part of the larger constellation of inscription systems produced, maintained, and institutionalized by cultural groups no longer beholden to the relational dynamic of “othering”?

A brief moment in karen tei yamashita's recent novel i hotel (2010) resurrects a crucial fragment of asian american literary history. Yamashita's book—part send-up and part recounting of actual events—pays homage to and reimagines the multiple paths that were critical to the late-1960s and 1970s Asian American movement. In a small yet important scene, I Hotel highlights how the development of an Asian American literary canon was entwined with the production of heroic masculinity. Three men drive four hundred miles to visit Dorothy Okada, widow of the author John Okada, on a mission of archival recovery and masculinist “heroics” (96). Their adventure begins when one of the men discovers Okada's 1957 novel No-No Boy (now a canonical work) and a letter that mentions the possible existence of an unpublished manuscript by Okada. Ultimately, the trip is unsuccessful. “What happens next,” the narrator tells us, “is history” (97). Confronted by the lack of public interest in Okada's work, Dorothy has burned his papers, and the disappointed men can only ask ridiculously inappropriate questions about the couple's marriage and sexual relationship. In this story, the men who set out to become heroes of Asian American literary studies are thwarted by a woman's failure to preserve the text, and they reduce Dorothy to a supporting role. Yet in recapturing the gendered division at the heart of this defining moment in Asian American literary history, I Hotel also reminds us of other narrative, methodological, and theoretical paths. “As time drags on,” the narrator muses a few pages earlier, “other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option” (95).

Recovering the U.S. hispanic literary heritage is a program that works with an international board of scholars, librarians, and archivists to constitute and make accessible an archive of cultural productions by Hispanic or Latino peoples who have existed since the sixteenth century in the areas that eventually became part of the United States. Founded in 1992 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and subsequently funded by many other organizations, the project brought together scholars who wanted to make accessible to any interested person, with any level of education, the full range of texts generated by Hispanic peoples and to reform the concept of American nationhood. Depending on available funds, the program underwrites scholarly research, creates virtual and paper archives, microfilms for preservation, digitizes for accessibility, publishes material in conventional and digital form, organizes conferences, and maintains communications with some five thousand associates. The program has found, accessioned, and made accessible tens of thousands of books and documents that were heretofore unknown. It has digitized more than 500,000 items, ranging from published books and newspapers to manuscripts of varying lengths from the first encounters between Hispanic and indigenous peoples in North America to broadsides and photographs from the twentieth century—in short, all the materials that a literate community generates over centuries.

Many scholars have recently attempted to think critically about the archive, to conceive of it not simply as a neutral repository of information but also as governed by often indiscernible laws and intricate relations of desire and power. Certainly the scholarly products of detailed archival research are themselves the result of complicated archival negotiations, sortings, and withholdings. I wish to focus here on what I will call archival withholding—the attempt to disrupt the transmission function of the archive—in the context of the Western American Jewish archives that I work on; I will leave lingering the question of what, if anything, lends a Jewish, or “ethnic,” specificity to such withholding. The materials at issue—archives and cemeteries related to rural Jewish settlers in the American West in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century—might strike some as incongruous, since Jewish American settlement is generally associated with East Coast urban centers and not with smalltown agricultural America. But in fact the American West is littered with traces of Jewish settlements and (often short-lived) agricultural communities, and a considerable amount of work documents this topic. Just as there were ethnicities of all sorts in the rural American West—Chinese workers and African Americans have certainly been given deserved attention—so there were Jewish settlers.

Native americans have long been the missing subjects of american literature, either excised from narratives of nation through colonial erasure or limited to the discourse of the “vanishing Indian.” Such marginalization is no longer the case, or at least not to the same extent, particularly for literary studies of national, transnational, and hemispheric constructions of race and citizenship. As critics from Vine Deloria to Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Craig Womack have demonstrated, a wide range of indigenous practices and forms of knowledge must be reclaimed within academic forms of inquiry, representation, and circulation. One strategy for Native American literary studies has been to expand notions of text to include winter counts, wampum, and other forms of material culture. Even with a narrower definition of text, however, the current archive of American Indian literature encompasses such diverse works as early songs and oratory, nineteenth-century poems in Ojibwe and English by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a range of boarding school narratives, contemporary graphic novels, and the amplified (digital) poetry of Brandy Nalani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez.