Abstract

When Global East Meets Global South: East Asia & Latin America

University of Kansas Conference

March 29, 2024

Keynote Abstract

Junyoung Verónica Kim, PhD

Assistant Professor, Visual Culture & Media

University of Pittsburgh

Asia-Latin America: Method/Praxis/Pedagogy

Taking seriously the theme of this conference, “When Global East Meets Global South: East Asia & Latin America,” this keynote explores the possibilities that adopting Asia-Latin America as method offers in examining entangled histories across the Pacific, redrawing global maps, and recalibrating a counter-hegemonic politics. I contend that Asia-Latin America, as a capacious methodology and praxis, reveals and centers the dynamic transpacific intimacies and encounters that have often been overlooked, such as the overlapping histories of imperialism/settler colonialism/racial capitalism, geopolitical and biopolitical connectivities, and migrations between and across East Asia and Latin America.  Asia-Latin America as method, by questioning putative notions of “area” ­–such as “Asia” and “Latin America”– and unsettling received notions of ethnicity and political identity, unhinges dominant conceptualizations of time and space which are always already racialized and gendered: time as a lineal and/or teleological progression in which certain places and peoples are “denied coevalness”; and space that is configured through borders and topographical taxonomies which naturalize territorial hierarchies (e.g., nation-states, overseas territories, land, ocean, camps, bases).  As such, Asia-Latin America as method explores new conceptual directions, pedagogical practices, and transpacific networks of coalition and collaboration.