This panel aims to complement and dialogue with “Rethinking 19^th-Century (Latin) America: Hemispheric Approaches” (guaranteed by the 19^th-Century Latin America Forum). Whereas “Hemispheric Approaches” builds on California’s long-standing tradition as a site of hemispheric encounters and multilingual literary and cultural production, the panel hereby proposed aims to build upon Los Angeles’s location not only as a crossroads between north and south, but also as a junction that connects the east to the west through the waves of the Pacific Ocean.

In this sense, “Hemispheric Approaches” privileges a vertical axis (north-south) to interrogate the boundaries of Latin America during the 19^th century, emphasizing the need for 19^th-Century Latin American Studies to engage in fruitful dialogue with Latinx and Hemispheric Studies. In contrast, “Transatlantic and Transpacific Approaches” underscores the connective nature of oceans and shifts our attention to the horizontal axis (east-west) in 19^th-century Latin America’s material and cultural transformations. In this regard, it aims to contribute to ongoing conversations between 19^th-Century Latin American Studies, African-American Studies, Afro-Latina/o/x Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Transatlantic Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Transpacific Studies.

Following the path of groundbreaking scholars such as Lowe (The Intimacies of Four Continents, 2015), Alvarez (Border Land, Border Water, 2022), Hoskins and Nguyen (Transpacific Studies, 2014), Luis (The First Asians in the Americas, 2024) Scott (The Common Wind, 2018), and Judd (Feelin, 2022), this panel seeks to address questions such as: How did the renewed flows of migrants, goods, labor, ideas, texts, and spiritual practices across the Pacific Rim impact 19^th-century (Latin) American material and cultural landscapes? How did Asian-(Latin) American subjects unsettle/reshape postcolonial racial formations across the Western Hemisphere? How did 19^th-century Afro-Latina/o/x authors insert themselves into the emerging hemispheric literary field? How did they manage to interweave diasporic knowledges and structures of feeling into the nascent ―but also somewhat rigid― 19^th-century literary forms? How, and with what theoretical and methodological tools, should we read surveillance structures, such as border markers?

To address these questions, the panel will feature four presentations. First, in “Bordering the Private Sphere: 19th-Century Trans-Pacific Chinese Migration in Gold Mountain Blues,” Jianru Song will discuss the trans-Pacific labor circuits that shaped the 19th-century American hemisphere through Ling Zhang’s novel Gold Mountain Blues (2011).

Then, Constance von Igel de Mello will present “‘Away Down in Jamaica’: Turn of the Century Caribbean Race Through the Asian American Lens of Sui Sin Far,” to explore how white-passing, Asian-British-Canadian author Sui Sin Far upended Caribbean racial categories through the short stories she published in the local press during her brief stay in Jamaica at the turn of the century.

In “Feelin Banzo in the Lyric Poetry of Maria Firmina dos Reis and Auta de Souza,” John T. Maddox IV will center on affect to uncover how two Afro-Brazilian 19^th-century women writers established hemispheric ties through lyric poetry. The presentation centers on banzo, a distinctive affective experience that encapsulates the longing that enslaved Africans felt for their homeland.

To conclude Mariajosé Rodríguez Pleigo will focus on the literary afterlives of surveillance infrastructures in “From Boundary Obelisks to Surveillance Infrastructures: The Afterlives of the 19th Century Boundary Commissions that Traced the U.S.-Mexico Border”. Building on the 19th-century diary of the first U.S. Border Commissioner John Russel Bartlett, David Taylor’s photograph series Monuments (2007), and the land art intervention Repellent Fence (2015) by the Native American art collective Postcommodity, she traces how state-driven forms of reading land from the 19th century to the present reframes the contemporary border crisis as a slow process of sedimentation.

Considered independently, this panel engages with recent transoceanic and transcontinental approaches to (Latin) America that highlight the demographic, epistemological, and cultural flows that connected the Americas to Africa and Asia along the east-west axis facilitated by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. When combined with its counterpart ―“Hemispheric Approaches”―, our proposal not only establishes a dialogue across east and west, north and south, but also facilitates conversations between scholars from diverse institutions and at different stages in their academic careers.