Asia/Asians in Contemporary Latin American Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the changing place of Asia in contemporary Latin American culture at the intersection of globalization, the rise of Asia-Pacific as a new model of modernity, growing Asian immigration, and Latin America’s multicultural turn, which has significantly increased the visibility of Latin Americans of Asian descent. Through an array of contemporary cultural manifestations that reveal how Asia and Asians are imagined in Latin America today--from film to literature and K-pop--the papers in this panel examine how these particular portrayals of Asia articulate local issues of class, migration, national boundaries, and racial and gender performativity, or broader politico-theoretical concerns about the limitations of anti-orientalism and the singularization of Asia. The panel includes five scholars based in the U.S., U.K, Korea, and Hong Kong, and at all points of their careers from graduate students to lecture and full-time faculty.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizer

• Teresa Ko, Ursinus College

Chair

• Teresa Ko, Ursinus College

Individual Presentations

• Anti-orientalist Orientalism?: Reading César Aira - Teresa Ko, Ursinus College

• Inclusion, exclusion and 'being singular plural': the Chinatown as a space for gender and racial performativity in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Verde Shanghai (2011) - Maria Montt Strabucchi, University of Manchester

• Unreliable Documentation: Maps of the Orient in Bernardo Carvalho - Allison E White, Tulane University

• Beyond China and Japan: Unequal Representations of Asia in Latin American Cultural Discourses - Jungwon Park, Kyung Hee University

• Reconfiguring Identities: Latin American Cinema by Asian Filmmakers - Maria Mercedes Vazquez Vazquez, The University of Hong Kong