Interview on my research by the academic journal Verge. Studies in Global Asias 3.2 (Fall 2017): 13-16 (Special issue “Between Asia and Latin America: New Transpacific Perspectives”). Ed. Pedro Erber and Andrea Bachner

I was interviewed on my research by the academic journal Verge. Studies in Global Asias 3.2 (Fall 2017): 13-16 (Special issue “Between Asia and Latin  America: New Transpacific Perspectives”). Ed. Pedro Erber and Andrea Bachner   

For a published version, click here

1. Why Asia and Latin America? What led you to bring together these two regions in your academic research? On what specific regions, disciplinary fields, and texts have you focused your work on Asia and Latin America? 

Two experiences led me to carry out research on Asians in Latin America. The first one took place in early 2000s, back when I lived in Los Angeles, California. I met an elderly lady named Yuli in Alhambra, California, who looked like a Westerner but spoke Cantonese with the locals. I conducted a series of interviews with her with the initial idea of writing a testimonial or perhaps a fictional text based on her life. It turns out that her Chinese father, who lived most of the time in Cuba, had two families, one in Cuba and the other one in China. After Yuli’s mother died giving birth to her, her father took her to China where she was badly mistreated for years by her stepmother. At age eighteen, Yuli’s father took her back to Cuba and married her to one of his Chinese friends, but she divorced him and married a Chinese Cuban man with whom she eventually moved to the United States. 

The second and concomitant source of inspiration was my first reading of Esteban Montejo’s and Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (1966), where I found out about the Chinese community in Cuba. These two experiences, one literary and the other one in real life, led me to write Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (University Press of Florida, 2008), which, to my knowledge, was the first literary criticism monograph focused on Asians in Latin America, along with another book published by Debbie Lee-DiStefano on the same year. I enjoyed writing this book so much that I decided to continue the research on the Asian diaspora in Latin America, this time in Peru. As a result, I published two other books: The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (U of Arizona P, 2013) and Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru (U of Arizona P, 2014). In addition, I edited three volumes on Orientalism and East-West cross-cultural relations throughout the world: Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (2007), One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (2009); and Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic World and “the Orient” (2012).     

     

This work has evolved, therefore, from the imaging of the Chinese in Cuban cultural production, to the self-representation of both the Chinese and the Japanese in Peru and Brazil. Within the context of cultural nationalism, identity politics, and the politics of cultural belonging, I study representative works showing an immigrant or Mestiza/o consciousness in the context of what they mean to the construction of national projects in Latin America. Besides publishing research on the topic, so far I have organized eight international conferences on the Asian presence and cultural production in Latin America as well as on East-West intercultural relations, which have taken place, among other places, in Morocco, Russia, Japan, and India. 

2. Would you call the kind of research you do comparative? How would you describe the theoretical underpinnings of your work on Asia and Latin America? 

Part of my research definitely has a comparative nature. In three different books, for example, I have compared Spanish American and Brazilian authors of Asian ancestry both among themselves and with Asian authors and testimonialists.  For instance, I often compare the experience and cultural production of Sino-Peruvian authors with those of their Nippo-Peruvian peers. And in the book manuscript I have just finished, I often compare Nippo-Brazilian cultural production with that of Nippo-Peruvian authors, or the life experience of Nikkei in Mexico, the United States and other regions in the Americas and the Caribben. More recently, I have compared the works of Mexican/Peruvian novelist Mario Bellatin and Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and the work of Peruvian chronicler Julio Villanueva Chang with the literature Spanish Baroque writers. Most of these publications were written from the perspective of cultural studies, decolonial/postcolonial theories, and critical race theory. 

3. What sort of difficulties, both practical and theoretical, institutional and intellectual have you encountered so far in working concomitantly on both Asian and Latin America?

Clearly, the main difficulty I have encountered has been of a linguistic nature, since I cannot read Chinese or Japanese. Although most of the work I study was written in either Spanish or Portuguese, or was written in Chinese or Japanese but translated to English, I have encountered some texts and films that have not been translated yet. A few months ago, for example, one of my colleagues had to translate a Japanese-language documentary on Brazilian dekasegi in Japan for me. 

The second difficulty I encounter is that I write most of my research in English, so I constantly have to translate quotations from Portuguese and Spanish into English. I am not a professional translator, so sometimes I have to rely on the proofreading of experts. And of course, initially the world of Asian communities in Latin America and the Caribbean was completely new to me, so I had to travel to Cuba, Peru, and Brazil to buy books, conduct interviews, and visit key places and archives. I also took courses on Japanese culture and traveled several times to Japan, Korea, China, India, the Philippines, and other Asian countries in order to become more familiar with Asian cultures.

On some occasions, I have also had to explain my research to my peers, who looked at me in disbelief or confusion every time I mentioned that I studied Asians in Latin America. In one case, for example, the reaction was the following: “I don’t quite understand. So do you study Asia or Latin America?” This unfamiliarity with the subfield was also reflected in the peer reviews of my publications or even in the review of an NEH course on the cultural production of Latin American authors of Asian ancestry that I was invited to prepare. One reviewer, for example, claimed that I exaggerated about the suffering of Chinese coolies and Nikkei colonos in my proposal, “because Asians have always been treated very well in Latin America.”

           

From a theoretical point of view, for me it has not been difficult to apply decolonial/postcolonial theories, affect theory, and cultural studies to the texts and films I have analyzed.

             

4. Can you tell us about your plans for future research involving material from both Asia and Latin America? How do you see the future of this field of trans-regional research?

I have just finished a book-length study on Nippo-Brazilian cultural production that I hope to publish with Colorado University Press. In the near future, I plan to publish a book about the image of Asians in Peruvian literature from the perspective of affect theory as well as another one of Spanish-language Filipino cultural production.

As the co-founder and co-executive director (along with Cristián H. Ricci) of the open-access, interdisciplinary, academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, which often publishes articles and reviews on this topic, I plan to continue editing my peers’ work on these topics. I am likewise the co-executive director (along with Debbie Lee-DiStefano and Kathy López) of the Palgrave Macmillan Book Series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia,” and I hope to receive many manuscripts dealing with this relatively new subfield in the upcoming years. I am also excited about the organization of another interdisciplinary conference on East-West intercultural relations in March 2017, which will take place at Seoul National University, in Korea.

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