Toward a New Literary Archives:
Recovering Marginalized Texts, Authors, and Cultures,
from Medieval Persian Poetry to the Expanded Star Wars Universe
Finding the Forgotten Ones
What do children, Chicanos, Japanese Americans, and Romani “Gypsies” have in common? History has tried to define them—imagining, if not distorting, their stories for imperialist or protectionist aims. The documents and artefacts in this collection invite you to travel back in time to when artists and authors, at best, gave voice to, or, at worst, appropriated the voices of the voiceless. Take a trip down the rabbit hole from Lewis Carroll’s first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, capturing for the first time the child’s imagination, to a magazine cover discussing the postwar efforts to re-assimilate Japanese Americans, to an eighteenth-century British painting of a fortune-telling gypsy, to a 1970s coloring book for Chicano children. Prepare to be bewildered, befuddled, and bamboozled all at once.