BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary

Afro-Asia in Latin America: Religion, Literature, and Film

Thu, May 28, 12:00 to 1:45pm, TBA

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Afro-Asian has become a term that scholars use to study the contradictions and like-mindedness of two distinctive regions across a south-south forum. And yet, Latin America, since the 16th century Manila-Accapulco Galleon Trade, has served as a location in which Africans and Asians arrived, sharing histories, labor, and bodies. In these moments of integration and collaboration, there emerged an anticolonial and antiracist communal interest despite the continuous othering and exotification of a colonial mentality that validated whiteness and white notions of race against understandings of diasporic trauma. The displacement of these peoples, as they move, worship, labor, and interact collapses racial terminology that seeks to render invisible Afro-Asian “contact zones.” These papers function as ciphers for Afro-Asian solidarities, how to understand religious history, how these histories transfer into literature as embodiments of marked Afro-Asian-Latin American bodies, and finally how these bodies suffer during the economic ruin of neoliberal capitalist culture. This panel seeks to move beyond the trauma to understand the negotiation and symbolic languages that are revealed in Afro-Asian interactions, creating a framework that challenges ideas of race in global networks.

Sub Track

Session Organizer

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant