Already, many scholars have called attention to the ways in which a reliance on European theory for comparative literary research is imbricated in forms of epistemic violence. By presuming the so-called “West” as a model for humanistic universalism, we risk naturalizing the structures of imperialism, racism, and patriarchy in our academic praxes. For instance, in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), Lisa Lowe calls attention to what she calls the “violence of affirmation and forgetting” embodied in the scarcity of methodologies that take into account lost or hidden forms of relation, or intimacies, between subjects and spaces amidst the repetitive tendency for institutions, discourses, and practices to uncritically adopt colonial modes of knowledge production. While, as Lowe states, it may seem impossible to escape the present we inhabit, we must develop ways to dislocate and retranslate the languages of intellectual practice in order to address those hidden, lost, or absent histories and recover disavowed connections. To do so, we propose new methodologies for such a project by imagining different archival constellations from the ones that are always already given within academic discourses.
Our panel asks: What forms of comparison may emerge from frameworks that engage the connections between Asia and Latin America? How do these connections help us bypass the centrality of the United States in transpacific and Asian American scholarship and of Europe in comparative literary studies? What kinds of vantage points would such a dislocation open up for both Asian and Latin American Studies, as fields rarely thought together, yet equipped to provide conceptual and historical tools for the critique of regimes of coloniality and modernity in its many racial, medial, and sexual iterations? To address these questions, each of our papers addresses the gap between critical humanities discourses—which usually undertake comparison as either regional or eurocentered—and the structures of coloniality/modernity—which enfold the world in transregional, transnational, and transoceanic regimes of circulation. By expanding upon possible new vocabularies, archives, and frameworks, the panel engages approaches that exemplify “comparison as dislocation.”
We bring together four scholars whose work engages in these critical questions through different objects and areas. All panelists contributed to the pioneering issue on "Between Asia and Latin America," published at the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias (2017), and their works engage in Latin American and Asian Studies, in a critical theorization on the limits of comparison and its historical, political, and aesthetic implications.
In “Transpacific Nonencounters,” Andrea Mendoza builds on a transpacific framework for comparison that theorizes the productive absence of encounters or relations—or, the nonencounter. In her talk, Mendoza develops an approach to forging dialogues between discourses on race, imperialism, and nationalism in twentieth century Japanese and Mexican literatures and intellectual histories as they intertwine in the production of masculinized modern subjectivities. Through her critical juxtaposition of these histories of intellectual and cultural production, Mendoza examines how transpacific nonencounters allow us to confront questions of comparative methodology alongside the limits of the area studies model in order to rethink questions of racial and gender difference in global modernity.
Considering film (like capitalist modernity) a technology for embodied comparison towards a "phenomenological certainty," Keiji Kunigami's paper "Phenomenological Doubt" considers the intersections between “yellowness," labor, and technology in the drive to modernization/whitening of the Brazilian and Japanese elites in the 1920s and 1930s, in order to explore moments when the limits of comparison emerge as "phenomenological doubt." To understand how a temporalized notion of the racialized body emerges through/as the filmic apparatus, allowing for a possible counter-method to comparison, Kunigami's talk questions the phenomenological dimension of comparison, looking at what happens to the notion of “becoming,” central for film-philosophy, when racial frictions give traction to the comparative gaze of peripheral elites.
As we consider the importance of the study of race, in conjunction with questions regarding history and the formation of the nation-state, Junyoung Verónica Kim’s “The Specter of North Korea and Transpacific Intimacies,” considers the specter of North Korea in the post-Cold War world and in the study of Asia-Latin America. In her paper, Kim examines how the specter of North Korea troubles putative transpacific intimacies. Looking at narratives of transpacific solidarity and connectivity during the Cold War, the history of post-1945 Korean migration to the Americas, and, above all, the question of memory in the Tricontinental movement, Kim argues that the intimate relationalities between North Korea and Cuba haunt our current moment of the Beijing Consensus in which Asia-Latin American relations are overdetermined by the figure of “Asian” capital.
Finally, Andrea Bachner's talk, "Uncomparison," resituates the possibility of intercultural comparison by way of negation. This does not mean to simply set aside comparison. In fact, the question of what intercultural work would look like if we dispensed with comparison altogether is moot. Bachner’s talk thus models a methodology of uncomparison: a working through of the multiple comparative patterns that underlie any intercultural phenomenon. By decentering naturalized patterns of comparison, this method allows for a critical perspective on their underlying logic and power structures. Intercultural articulations between China and Latin America lend themselves particularly well to uncomparing, Bachner argues, as they traverse different disciplines and geopolitical frameworks, and stand in productive friction to traditional grounds of comparison.