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Orientations and Cacophonies: Asia-Latin America as Method in the Time of COVID-19
Sat, February 19, 8:00 to 9:30am, Virtual Building, VR107Abstract
In this presentation, I revisit my proposal of Asia-Latin America as method to make sense of the complexity of our current historical moment marked both by the COVID-19 pandemic and US-China relations. Asia-Latin America as method by calling attention to the relationalities between geopolitics and biopolitics, that is, between area and race, points to the intimate connection between the construction of “area” –as a target of military intervention, capitalist extractivism, humanitarian initiatives and academic study– and the creation of racialized (sub-, anti-) humanity that refused differentiation on the level of the individual while generating “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, The Golden Gulag, 28). Our present moment demonstrates the inseparability between geopolitics and biopolitics, as COVID-19 has become both associated with the area of “China” and racialized as Asian. In order to make sense of the intensifying Sinophobia and xenophobia in this context, I contend that we cannot confine our analysis to the narrow parameters of the pandemic. Rather, we need to examine it in the context of complex geopolitics and racial histories. As such, it is necessary to adopt a critical transoceanic analytic that pulls critical race studies away from the mainland of North America and offshore to Latin America and Asia. Asia-Latin America as method in the time of COVID-19 asks that we not only pay attention to overlooked connectivites and relationalities, but also to grapple with cacophonies, dissonances and incommensurabilities that cannot be voiced or understood in our established grammar of knowledge.