In this blog post, 2023 Junior Fellow Amina Malik discusses her project to inventory the Asian Division’s serials in South Asian languages. The post also offers insight into this collection by looking at the Urdu publication “Ak̲h̲bār-i k̲h̲avātīn,” a serial for Pakistani women on education, society, international news, and many other topics.
On Friday September 29, the Asian Division of the Library of Congress will be hosting a partial day display and talk in the Thomas Jefferson Building (rooms LJ110/119) celebrating the diversity of the Library’s collections through textiles, in collaboration with the African and Middle Eastern, Prints & Photographs, Geography & Maps, and Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Rooms.
The Library’s 4 Corners of the World blog recently reached 500 posts since its launch in April 2016. This post presents some highlights of the stories and topics covered by reference staff from the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room, Asian Reading Room, European Reading Room, and Hispanic Reading Room.
The Southeast Asian Rare Book Collection, accessible at the Asian Reading Room, contains some unique items from the Cold War era; specifically, documents produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA) and disseminated in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar. This blog features the USIA Cold War-era Thai collection and a series of posters, “Communism or freedom?”
Lao poetry in America has gone in diverse directions since the end of the Southeast Asian conflicts in the 1970s. It has served a variety of social and cultural purposes for many of the communities who were rebuilding their lives and considering their next directions. Over the last five decades, poetry has been one of the leading forms of literary expression among those with roots in Laos, including ethnic Lao, Khmu, Tai Dam, Lue, Iu Mien, and Hmong, with works composed primarily in American English but often introducing new words from their heritage, in addition to sharing their perspectives on history and traditional beliefs, myths, and their personal and collective dreams as they engaged with an America on the verge of significant cultural shifts thanks to computers and the internet. This post takes a look at some of the opportunities and challenges readers and writers alike have faced to collect and share these works.
While staff work is what allows researchers to conduct research, their presence in the Library of Congress is foundational to the creation of the culture at the Library. This blog is an interview with Phong Tran, a librarian, and currently, Deputy Director of the New Delhi Overseas Operations Field Office, conducted by Charlotte Giles.
This blog post highlights the Library of Congress Asian Division’s “Collection of Wartime Messages from China to the American People (1943-1945) and Other Materials.” The collection is made up of items related to the Second Sino-Japanese War, among which are 2,100 rarely seen hand-written letters, booklets, and scrolls in Chinese that were created in wartime China.
