Transpacific Studies as Method: Beyond Area Studies and Latinamericanism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel examines the emerging field of transpacific studies and the possibilities it offers in redrawing global maps and questioning naturalized modes of knowledge production. By calling our attention to contact zones, historical/cultural/economic interactions, geopolitical and biopolitical connectivities, and human/social/intellectual movements and migrations between Asia and the hemispheric Americas, the transpacific as both a spatial and temporal episteme has the potential to critically intervene in the current debate on area studies and Latinamericanism. In recent years, the construction of Latin America as a defined object of study by academic disciplines such as area studies has been the focus of much debate and criticism. Transpacific studies engages in this discussion by not only questioning putative notions of “area”-- such as “Asia,” “America,” “Latin America” or “Pacific”-- but also by unsettling dominant methodologies and epistemic models that frame temporality in lineal or teleological terms or pose a simplistic opposition between the universal/global and the particular/local. As such, this panel adopts transpacific studies as method to explore new conceptual directions and transregional frameworks.

Sub Track

• Interrogating Latin American Studies

Session Organizer

• Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh

Chair

• Koichi Hagimoto, Wellesley College

Discussant

• Chisu Teresa Ko, Ursinus College

Individual Presentations

• Transpacific Developments: From Re-routing to Re-thinking Latin American Development Politics in the Age of China - Monica C DeHart, University of Puget Sound

• The Transpacific Expansion of the Chee Kung Tong - Fredy González, University of Colorado Boulder

• Cannibalizing Modernity: Brazilian Anthropophagy and its Others - Pedro R Erber, Cornell University

• Searching for the Universal in a Transpacific Context: Dependency Theory in South Korea and Maoism in Latin America - Youngkyun Choi

• Coolies and Soldiers: Transpacific Circuits of Labor, Racial Capitalism and Empire - Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh