A Genealogy of Subject Formation in and around Education at the Museum of Chinese in America
Open Access DepositedNYCHP’s Eight Pound Livelihood project in the 1980s on Chinese laundry workers, MOCA’s 2017 exhibition FOLD
Golden Venture Paper Sculptures, and MOCA’s 2025–2026 exhibition Heaven & Earth
The Blue Maps of China. These case studies demonstrate how subjects have been represented and reconstituted across historical and institutional contexts. The dissertation also analyzes NYCHP’s experiments with critical pedagogy and coalition politics, which sought to transform the everyday experiences of Chinatown residents into critical consciousness through oral history and community practice. Together, these analyses reveal how cultural productions and political practices shaped Chinese immigrant and Chinese American subjectivities, while showing how critique itself has been absorbed, contested, and reconfigured within broader regimes of power and knowledge. The dissertation contributes to the educational potential of informal learning environments by offering alternative narratives of the political imagination of individual life. It shows subjectivity as contingent and shifting, shaped through folds of power and knowledge yet always capable of new configurations. It rethinks museums and education not as sites of reproduction or resistance, but as generative spaces of becoming that remain open for subjectivation.
The current dissertation investigates how Chinese immigrant and Chinese American subjectivities have been constituted within shifting formations of power and knowledge, and how subjectivation might remain open to new possibilities beyond fixed identity categories. It proposes a topological approach to subjectivation by bridging Foucault’s genealogical inquiry with Deleuze’s concept of the fold. This framework illuminates how external forces of power and knowledge fold into self-relations, generating new configurations of subjectivity that move beyond linear narratives of assimilation or oppression. Focusing on the New York Chinatown History Project (NYCHP) and its institutional successor, the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), the study draws on archival materials and oral histories to examine three major initiatives
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.