East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies (Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia) 3030745279, 9783030745271

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HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND ASIA

East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies Edited by Chiara Olivieri · Jordi Serrano-Muñoz

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia Series Editors Ignacio López-Calvo University of California, Merced Merced, CA, USA Kathleen López Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA

This series is devoted to the diversity of encounters between Latin America and Asia through multiple points of contact across time and space. It welcomes different theoretical and disciplinary approaches to define, describe, and explore the histories and cultural production of people of Asian descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. It also welcomes research on Hispano-Filipino history and cultural production. Themes may include Asian immigration and geopolitics, the influence and/or representation of the Hispanic world in Asian cultures, Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Hispanic world and Asia, and other transpacific and southsouth exchanges that disrupt the boundaries of traditional academic fields and singular notions of identity. The geographical scope of the series incorporates the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean region. We welcome single-author monographs and volumes of essays from experts in the field from different academic backgrounds. About the series editors: Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced, USA and director of the UC Merced Center for the Humanities. He is author of several books on Latin American and US Latino literature. He is co-executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. Kathleen López is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA.  She is author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (2013) and a contributor to Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2015), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (2016), and Imagining Asia in the Americas (2016). Advisory Board: Koichi Hagimoto, Wellesley College, USA Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, USA Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh, USA Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University, USA Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Southeast Missouri State University, USA Shigeko Mato, Waseda University, Japan Zelideth María Rivas, Marshall University, USA Robert Chao Romero, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Lok Siu, University of California, Berkeley, USA Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York, USA Laura Torres-Rodríguez, New York University, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15129

Chiara Olivieri  •  Jordi Serrano-Muñoz Editors

East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies

Editors Chiara Olivieri Department of Anthropology University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

Jordi Serrano-Muñoz CEAA, El Colegio de México Mexico City, Mexico

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia ISBN 978-3-030-74527-1    ISBN 978-3-030-74528-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

There was a time, the era of the Manila Galleons, when Mexico and the rest of Latin America looked to the East. All types of human, cultural, economic, and material exchanges took place between 1565 and 1815, when the end of the Silver Trade route dramatically decreased the presence of East Asia in the Latin American and Spanish imaginaries. With the twentieth-century re-emergence of Japan and China as economic and geopolitical juggernauts, Latin America has once again turned to look at Asia as an economic and cultural partner. Books such as East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, edited by Jordi Serrano-Muñoz and Chiara Olivieri, respond to this new reality with fresh explorations of these ever-increasing transpacific exchanges, by providing new and exciting analytical tools. While Serrano-Muñoz, editor and co-­ founder of Asiademica: Open Journal of East Asian Studies, has published on the relationship between literature, memory, and protest in post-­ Fukushima literary production, his coeditor, Olivieri, has worked on oral histories from the Uyghur diaspora, sinology studies, Oriental Asian studies, migration studies, epistemologies of the South, Islamophobia, and Islam studies. In this edited volume, they have put their East Asian studies academic training in dialogue with Latin American studies. More specifically, they propose to address South–South connections without necessarily resorting to metropolitan mediations originating in the North. In a way, their book provincializes Europe and the United States in order to recenter East Asia–Latin America as an epistemological lens through which to consider these sophisticated networks and produce new knowledge, v

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rather than conceiving this huge region as a mere passive object of study (an area studies leftover). The following chapters challenge Eurocentric and Orientalist stereotypes that, as Edward Said suggested, were used, during the age of empire, as hardly veiled tools for hegemonic domination and colonization. Leaving behind the dated, colonial, US-centric and Eurocentric approaches of area studies and resorting, instead, to decolonial, comparative approaches, East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies looks, from the Global South, at current theoretical debates within that same transpacific Global South and attempts to establish non-hegemonic, cross-­ cultural epistemological bridges. The contributors to this volume explore, in their case studies, comparative views of these centuries-long Pacific Ocean narratives, dialogues, clashes, and exchanges. With this goal in mind, the volume questions the viability of certain common terms and addresses some of the dark chapters in these exchanges, including predatory extractivism and human exploitation. The new decolonial-transpacific model proposed argues for a more fluid reorientation of knowledge production about this complex network between the two Pacific shores, which, for decades, has been caught between fixed, traditional disciplines and areas. This approach, the coeditors argue, will enhance epistemic justice, thus offsetting previous obsolete, colonial representations. The volume, which combines research by established scholars with that of promising researchers from Canada, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and other countries, offers theoretical tools to analyze current transpacific migrations from a decolonial perspective that challenges the reproduction of a time-tested capitalist coloniality of power. The never-ending source of cheap labor is considered from the points of view of world-system and world-ecology theories, as well as from decolonial thinking. It also explores contemporary, transpacific commodity extraction and exchanges, including those of animals (whales, turtles), plants, and scientific knowledge. This book addresses extractivism and the transpacific implications (the emergence of Brazil as a regional power and China as a global one) of international infrastructures such as the Belt and Road Initiative, promoted by China and aimed at the facilitation of the export of Latin American raw materials and natural resources. Extractive violence is also explored from the perspective of decolonial feminism as well as the juncture of coloniality and patriarchy in a comparative study of its impact on racialized, indigenous women in Colombia and Indonesia.

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In the field of literary studies, we find shared experiences of colonialism: the colonized Chinese May Fourth literature, the Chinese experience in the Japanese Empire, and Yu Dafu’s depiction of being Chinese in Japan are compared to the Antillean Black experience in the French Empire, as described by Frantz Fanon’s interpretation of the colonized mind. Another comparative study, this time about the commonalities between indigenous ancestor worship in Mexico and Okinawa, proposes a decolonized epistemological reading aimed at broadening our Western conception of death. Moving on to performance studies, another chapter analyzes how the vedette china’s diva performance in Havana’s cabaret stages during the 1950s not only exceeded the boundaries of Cuban racial categories and the constraints of normative femininity but also unveiled Cuba’s historical—albeit erased—connections with China. It demonstrates how, by performing a cosmopolitan vision of Cuba for white American tourists hungry for sensual tropical fantasies, the mulata vedette china turned herself into a national icon and into an echo of Cuba’s historical, intercontinental exchanges via the so-called Coolie Trade of Chinese contract laborers and the Middle Passage or Atlantic Slave Trade. In turn, from the perspective of museum studies and memory studies, another chapter examines the construction of national narratives in postcolonial countries and the role of the representation. It compares Colombian participation in the Korean War as represented at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul with its small presence at the Korea Gallery of the Military Museum in Bogotá. We learn that while today the participation of Colombian troops (the only ones from Latin America) in the Korean War has been, for the most part, forgotten among Colombian citizenry, it is, by contrast, prominently represented in South Korean museums as an important component of the victory over the North. Another chapter compares, also from a decolonial perspective, the #iamnotavirus global social network campaign, launched by East Asian and East-Asian-­ descendant groups, with the campaign #YourCauseIsMyCause, spearheaded by Venezuelan immigrants in Peru and Ecuador who were being accused of spreading coronavirus. The chapter exposes these groups’ resistance against structural racism and racist violence in the shape of “jokes,” social network memes, drawings in newspaper articles, and denominations such as “Chinese virus,” which represent attempts to Otherize them and their phenotypes as the metonymy of the virus. The concluding chapter focuses on the post-Mexico philosophy and theories of the Japanese historian, political activist, and traveler Tsurumi

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Shunsuke, including his understanding of a relationship that could develop empathy and solidarity among Pacific nations, as expressed in his 1976 travel account Guadaru ̄pe no Seibo (The Virgin of Guadalupe). Tsurumi highlights, for example, commonalities between Mexican and Japanese cultures, such as their struggle against US imperialism and capitalism. Overall, its innovative blend of transpacific studies and decolonial thought makes East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies an indispensable, interdisciplinary tool for all those scholars interested in new ways to look at this emerging field from a non-­ hegemonic perspective. A blend of case studies with different theoretical postulations, including epistemologies of the South, makes this book (with its economic, historical, historiographical, literary, sociopolitical, environmental perspectives) useful far beyond the scope of the topics discussed. Merced, CA, USA

Ignacio López-Calvo

Acknowledgments

A collective work such as East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies would not have been possible without the help of friends, colleagues, and family along the way. The year 2020 has been particularly ruthless but having this project to nurture was at the same time a source of courage, inspiration, and hope for a future where collaboration is central to our many undertakings. The editors would like to express their gratitude to Ignacio López-­ Calvo and Kathy López for welcoming our idea of a book on approaching transpacific encounters through decolonial frameworks into the collection they manage, providing invaluable feedback, and turning it into a thing by pitching the volume to the people at Palgrave Macmillan. In this regard, we are also thankful for the warm, patient, and steadfast support we have received from the publishers, especially by Camille Davies and Raghupathy Kalyanaraman. We want to extend our thanks also to our colleagues at the STAND-­ UGR research group and the Center of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México. A special thanks to Maria Paula Meneses, from the Centro de Estudos Sociais at the University of Coimbra, who put us in contact with one another in early 2019. Without her, neither this book nor our friendships would have been possible. A big, gargantuan thank you to the authors of this collective volume: Gennaro Avallone, Angélica Cabrera Torrecilla, Núria Canalda Moreno, Matías Chiappe Ippolito, Helios Escalante Moreno, Raúl Holz, Gina León-Cabrera, Ashley Liu, Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau, Antonio Ortega Santos, Paulina Pávez, Rosanne Sia, and Andrés Felipe Vargas Herreño. ix

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Acknowledgments

Life, both academic and personal and specially during these very disturbing times, would have been more dispassionate without our significant others. Jordi would like to thank Mireia, for her critical eye, attention to detail, spring of ideas, and love as a life companion. Chiara is grateful to Carlos, for all the interest and suggestions on this project, and for their breakfast conversations, monopolized by the transpacific ever since this book was first imagined. And to Salvador: thank you for reminding me how important it is to keep struggling against inequities and abuses, and for a more just world: because you are going to live in it.

Contents

1 When East Is North and South  1 Jordi Serrano-Muñoz and Chiara Olivieri 2 Confronting “the Ends” of Area: Murmurs Toward a Transpacific Phenomenology 19 Andrea Mendoza 3 Decolonial Notes on How to Do Research on International Migrations in the World-System 43 Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau and Gennaro Avallone 4 Ocean Narratives: Fluxes of Commodities Across the Pacific in the Contemporary Age 67 Antonio Ortega Santos 5 From IIRSA-COSIPLAN to the Belt and Road Initiative: Infrastructure for Extractivism in Latin America 89 Helios Escalante-Moreno 6 The Feminization of Extractive Violence: A Comparative Study from Colombia and Indonesia115 Raúl Holz and Paulina J. Pavez

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7 China’s Lost Connection to the Global South: A Fanonian Reading of Yu Dafu and the Colonized Status of May Fourth Literature in the Japanese Empire139 Ashley Liu 8 Worshipping Ancestors: A Decolonized Epistemology on Death Conceptions in Indigenous Okinawan and Mexican Worldviews159 Angélica Cabrera Torrecilla 9 The Vedette China on Havana’s International Cabaret Stage183 Rosanne Sia 10 Between North and South: Colombia in Korean War Exhibitions203 Gina Catherine León Cabrera 11 This Coronavirus Shit Is Real: Racialized People, Vulnerability and Intersectional Care in Virtual Social Networks During the Pandemic227 Núria Canalda Moreno and Andrés Vargas Herreño 12 Latin America as a Catalyst to Restore Japanese Culture: Tsurumi Shunsuke’s Post-­Mexico Philosophy251 Matías Chiappe Ippolito Index267

List of Contributors

Gennaro Avallone  holds a PhD in sociology and social research and is an associate professor in sociology of environment and territory at the Department of Politics and Social Studies, University of Salerno. Angélica  Cabrera  Torrecilla  is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Núria Canalda Moreno  is a postgraduate student of Publicly Oriented Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Matías Chiappe Ippolito  is an assistant professor of the course Japanese Literature in Translation at Kyoritsu and Waseda Universities. Helios  Escalante-Moreno is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Granada. Raúl Holz  is an economist and holds a PhD in political economy from the University of Sydney, a master’s degree in development economics from Sussex University, and a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Chile. Gina  Catherine  León  Cabrera is a PhD candidate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She has been a curatorial assistant and researcher in museums in Colombia.

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Ashley Liu  is a lecturer of modern Chinese literature at the University of Maryland and has recently obtained a PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. Andrea Mendoza  is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Yoan  Molinero-Gerbeau  holds a PhD in political science and international relations. He is a researcher both at the University Institute on Migration Studies (IUEM) at Comillas University in Madrid and at the Institute of Economy, Geography and Demography (IEGD) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Chiara Olivieri  holds a PhD in migration studies. She is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Toronto and a member of the research group STAND (University of Granada). Antonio  Ortega  Santos is a senior professor at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Granada, coordinator of the International Doctoral Program of History and Arts, and the leader of the research group STAND. Paulina J. Pavez  is a sociologist with a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of Chile. Jordi Serrano-Muñoz  is a lecturer and guest researcher at El Colegio de México and a lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia. He holds a PhD in humanities from Pompeu Fabra University. Rosanne Sia  is an assistant professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Andrés  Vargas  Herreño  is an anthropologist from Rosario University, Colombia. He is a postgraduate student in public oriented anthropology from the Autonomous University of Madrid.

List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2

Fallen in Combat Panel, Military Museum. (Thanks O.M. for the photographs) Military Museum armament showcase

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2

Financing channels of BRI South American countries that have signed an MoU with the BRI and relevant projects

105 107

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CHAPTER 1

When East Is North and South Jordi Serrano-Muñoz and Chiara Olivieri

Introduction Oceans have been conceived throughout history alternatively as frontiers and routes. They have served both to hold peoples apart and to bring them together. Oceans provide communication paths, but also ways to conquer, plunder, and spoil. The intensification of international and local inequalities and the relentless push of the climate crisis, both caused by the hazardous but foretold outcome of global capitalism, have brought to the spotlight of political and research agendas the critical study of the multiple relationships between human beings and their natural environment. There is a growing sense of correlation between understanding social, individual, and natural phenomena as mutually correlated and not

J. Serrano-Muñoz (*) CEAA, El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] C. Olivieri Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_1

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as easily compartmentalized subjects. This paradigm of cross-sectional interpretation is brought about by a pursuit of epistemic justice as one of the keys to unlock social justice. The challenges faced by the world today cannot be tackled only with what we have identified as Eurocentric epistemologies. They demand a reconceptualization of spaces, connections, narratives, and experiences that brings to the forefront marginalized epistemologies and creates new channels for assessing not only what is going wrong but also how we can approach potential solutions. This exercise of reconceptualization can take place within certain shared paradigms that mirror our contemporary struggles: ontological and epistemological inequalities that are transnational both in their origins and in their consequences. In this book, we wish to frame the transpacific using decolonial ideas as one of these “concept spaces” that allow the opportunity to seek justice in action through research. While some works are a brave attempt at bringing complex concepts to a narrower but more concrete, consensual, and manageable understanding, we believe that some ideas need to be explored by adopting an expansive approach to their comprehension. This has been our approach when discussing the transpacific—not presenting it as a territory to be conquered, pillaged, and extracted but as a point of encounter and transit, a place for dialogue and exchange. This conceptualization of contemporary struggles is essential to the framing of the transpacific as part of parallel ongoing demands. By fostering an environment that not only accepts a plurality of views but actively looks to accommodate analogous, tangential, and even contradicting approaches to the study of our ideas, we seek a double objective. First, we hope to highlight precisely the richness within the idea of the transpacific, avoiding sticking to any particular conception to it while at the same time acknowledging and owning each of our points of enunciation. We do not advocate for an unrestricted, acritical embrace of relativity that would validate any position just for the sake of existing. Instead, we believe that the idea of the transpacific needs to be flexible and malleable, an open-source tool that integrates different meanings within its bosom to nurture abundant and varied perspectives. It may work like a fertile soil from which many different species sprout out or, indeed, like the lush and fecund stock of life that is an ocean. In this book, we find different ways of tackling the idea of the transpacific, either by definition or by method, with varying degrees of similarity. We must avoid mistaking variety with

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dissonance and always keep in mind that a healthy ecosystem is that which welcomes balance in diversity. Our second objective is part of a constant struggle in the quest toward social and epistemic justice. Capitalist modernity has long plundered our bodies, minds, and territories. An imperialist North, tangible in its politics and violence, has discovered, created, and extracted from the South(s). It converted them into commodity factories from which natural and human resources have been removed in order to feed hegemonic and epistemicidal societies. We hereby read, in some chapters gestated in and from parts of these Souths, the voice of the re-existence of those who articulate the struggles for life throughout our eco- and biocidal modernity. We embrace their memories of the territory, silent knowledges, inter-epistemic dialogues, and anti-hegemonic projects, coming from many peripheries. By adopting this stance of plurality, we can fight against structures of knowledge production and reproduction that willingly or unintentionally instill specific interpretations in ways that inculcate exclusivity. In this introductory chapter, we want to open the debate regarding the idea of the transpacific by briefly discussing our understanding of it. We position our approach to the transpacific in relation to its most recent attempts of critical definition. We also engage with the daunting task of problematizing what we mean by decolonizing transpacific studies. This exercise is intended to contextualize our positions regarding a framework of action and thought that tackles systemic structures of epistemic oppression against non-Western ways of doing and thinking, commonly—but not exclusively—known as practices of decolonization. We also sketch two of the ways in which we identify decolonial transpacific work can be done in practical terms—by rescuing historically marginalized connections and by signaling new connections that emerge once we approach the agents and phenomena across the Pacific without Eurocentric lenses. Finally, we acknowledge part of our limitations and contradictions in shaping this work.

Debating the Idea of the Transpacific Both the critical overview of the concept of the transpacific and questions regarding what we have decided to refer to as decolonizing practices in this book are relatively recent concerns in academia. Although this is as of today an underrepresented, understudied subject—we refrain from using terms such as “field” and “discipline,” as they are too rooted in an

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institutionalized, North-centric understanding of knowledge production from academia—we want to honor and reference here a few commendable attempts of approaching the matter. They inform our current understanding of the issue and represent complementary partners in this ongoing conversation. The works that constitute part of our forerunners are recent attempts to critically revisit and redefine the idea of the transpacific itself. These authors have struggled before us in freeing this term from previously held conceptions of connections across the Pacific. One of the first works to contest these ideas was Arif Dirlik’s What is a Rim? It problematized the construction of the “Pacific Rim” as a term supposedly foretelling prosperity (1998). Dirlik’s criticism of “Rim” focuses particularly on those narratives that have framed the Pacific as a space of exchange of commodities. It included condemnations of the neoliberal optimism at those times—the prospect of a bright future brought by the expansion of trade under global capitalism. The work of authors like Dirlik is important, for it signals one of the main axes of epistemic oppression that has dwarfed the potentialities of the Pacific in any direction other than economic exchange. The next step in that direction would be to not stop at criticizing the limitations of a Pacific solely defined by capitalist frames but also include the systemic erasure of the many different narratives and experiences that have happened, are occurring now, and could come up in the future between the different agents and territories encompassed by this ocean. To denounce how North-centric thought has inflicted epistemicide in the Pacific and demonstrate how it could be different with a critical reinterpretation of Pacific connections—that is, through an embrace of critical transpacific ideals. This path was tentatively walked by Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo, who in 2012 coedited The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society. This work is an early attempt to reformulate the subject of area studies, free from the political inheritance of Western Cold War needs, and into the twenty-first century, writing particularly after the economic disaster of 2008 and the slow decline of US hegemony. Their plea is for the understanding of the Pacific as a “space of traffic and convergence rather than a barrier or separation” (Sakai and Yoo 2012, viii). Despite our shared goal of transcending the practical and epistemological barriers of area and disciplines (a question of continuous concern for Sakai as he showed in his recent co-edition of a special issue of positions: asia critique (Sakai and Walker 2019, 20), The Trans-Pacific

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Imagination shows a quite North-centric grasp of agents in the transpacific, focusing almost exclusively on the contact between East Asia and the United States. Similarly, Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen collected a series of essays critically evaluating what they deemed as the “field” of transpacific studies that tackles “a centuries-old problem: the Pacific as an arena of economic development and imperial fantasy or the Pacific as a site of critical engagement with and evaluation of such development and fantasy” (2014, 3). In their book, they offer attempts to create a model to approach the Pacific as an opportunity not only for conscious-minded US scholars wishing to confront the country’s imperial past and present but also for Asian scholars to build their own theoretical and methodological approaches to the ocean and its connections to the different shores. Although the essays are rich and the discussion brought up by this volume relevant, the main representative for the whole of America is the United States, a circumstance that, to their credit, the editors acknowledge (Hoskins and Nguyen 2014, 33). It nevertheless reifies a North-centric, hegemonic understanding of transpacific connections that epistemologically belittles the potential of the concept. It is at this point that we wish to recognize the seminal work of two scholars in a reconceptualization of the idea of the transpacific as a conceptspace beneficial for the reevaluation of our larger modes of knowledge production. Lisa Lowe and Lisa Yoneyama have worked either independently or together (as in their piece written with Yên Lê Espiritu, “Transpacific Entanglements,” for the book Flashpoints for American Studies) seeking to decolonize the Pacific as a territory and a set of idea(l) s occupied both physically and intellectually by different hegemonic powers, usually the United States but not necessarily restricted to the West. They remind us of the ways hegemonies in the North have built their supremacy abroad but also nationally using the Pacific as a site for the nurturing and development of their sources of domination. Military expansionism, neoliberal trade routes, racial inequalities, migratory predations, and extractivist deals are pillars of the current order. They also take place in the Pacific, sometimes outside public attention. Understanding these processes and how they develop in transpacific connections can help us dismantle the power oppressions instituted not only in this territory and communities but also across the globe. The emergence and rise in the last decade of bolder discussions on epistemic negligence for non-Eurocentric research, the noble shortcomings of postcolonial studies, and the crisis and revamping of so-called area studies

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by mark of decolonial-like criticism pave the way for a more encompassing and plural understanding of transpacific connections. Andre Bachner and Pedro Erber’s 2017 co-edition of “Between Asia and Latin America: New Transpacific Perspectives,” the special issue of Verge, is an endeavor closer to this book. The transpacific is again framed as an opportunity to move beyond more rigid, traditional, and institutionally bound definitions of area, discipline, and subject matter to welcome new ways of conceiving and producing research. As they put it in their introductory piece, their aim is to think about intercultural exchange and transregionalism beyond naturalized relationships by being open to patterns of analogy, contemporaneity, parallelism, uneven dialogues, and failed encounters. Uncovering, exploring, and analyzing such connections, which are not merely factual but also ontological, epistemological, and imaginary, is crucial to understanding the constitution of the contemporary world. (Bachner and Erber 2017, vii)

This is a good point in which to make our statements on what we consider to be our idea of the transpacific. We espouse an approach to regions as unstable, movable, relational ideas that must be used operationally, for they help us organize phenomena and experiences, but cannot be considered ontologically sound ideas. Regions, like areas or any other moniker used to categorize communities and their knowledges, should not be treated as permanent, readily identifiable, subjects. We think of them instead as dynamic concepts that hold fluctuating positions of power depending on their circumstances and their opposite partners. Our understanding of “agents” in a reformulated transpacific that goes beyond the paradigm of Cold War narratives needs to include other subjects beyond nation-states: peoples, organizations, communities, artists, transnational companies, and activists all have a role in shaping the multiple realities of the Pacific. As mentioned above, we reject treating this ocean as land in dispute, a realm to be conquered or passed along hegemonic powers, but that does not stop us from criticizing these powers and those who frame the Pacific in such terms. This book is, however, not a manifesto for another single understanding of the transpacific. We do not want “transpacific” to become a buzzword, a term in vogue, or an empty signifier. We stress again that this volume does not abide by a single description of the transpacific. Doing so would limit the scope of our inquiry to a certain angle, similar to

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designing a house with only one window. The authors bring their reflections, criticisms, doubts, and proposals and share them so as to bring more voices to this ongoing conversation. The premise of having their works together in this volume is to explore ways in which an open struggle for the decolonization of the transpacific can become performative while simultaneously tackling the specific research question of many different case studies. As Ignacio López-Calvo has anticipated in the foreword, the authors of this book offer bold attempts at bringing to the forefront the exchange of epistemological knowledges that can help us, in turn, to broaden these debates. We should refrain then from aspiring to homogeneous Swiss-Army-­ knife principles that could explain transpacific phenomena. This process of redefinition goes together with our objective of cracking open the idea of the transpacific through a sense of active problematization. We hold a position of simultaneously approaching the Pacific as a space, a territory defined by its shores and everything in between, and as a joint, a notion defined by its capacity to bend articulate closeness despite its vast physical stretch. The sheer magnitude of the Pacific and its diversity and complexity are a constant reminder of the vanity of wishing to narrow it down. The ocean and its connections warn you that the only workable embrace is a plural one. Even adopting a naming convention for the term is problematic and invites debate. Should it be capitalized? Should it be hyphenated? In this regard, we opt for a lowercase version so as not to reify the concept. We also write the two parts of the words glued together to keep being consistent (as Pacific would need to be upper-cased). There are good arguments in favor of hyphenating the word, as presenting it so emphasizes the crosses and fluxes that determine these phenomena. We welcome any variation to the term and have respected the authors’ wishes on the matter. This book does not aspire to set a new standard definition of transpacific. The most important aspect we want readers to take away from the chapters hereby comprised is the exciting sense of opportunity present in decolonizing the idea of the transpacific. It opens up compelling venues for rethinking ideas such as area, region, nation-state, globalization, migration, extractive industries, cultural influence, identity, and race. It does so without shoehorning a specific definition for any of them. Instead, the transpacific can jolt open the conceptual cages of these concepts by revealing how dependent they are not only from a Eurocentric hegemonic worldview but also from a Eurocentric critical apparatus to this same

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hegemony. The lessons brought forward by the transpacific can—and perhaps should—lead us then to rethink, for example, the transatlantic. Freeing ourselves from the imposition of committing to a standardized definition reminds us therefore of the fact that the Pacific means many things for the plurality communities that relate to it. It should be no different, therefore, if the transpacific adopts and embraces its intrinsically polysemic nature.

Questioning What It Means to Do Decolonial Work Instead of thinking of this volume as a how-to on decolonizing the transpacific, we wish readers to look at it as a vindication of the many ways in which this struggle can be addressed. Our goal is to normalize the importance of this task so that, in the future, we integrate the tools and the spirit embedded in each of the contributions present here. Eventually, we want to go out and produce committed transpacific and decolonial work that does not need to be confined to a book tailored for this specific purpose. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos says when discussing the concept of epistemologies of the South, the objective is not the replacement of hegemons; “we do not need alternatives; we need rather an alternative thinking of alternatives” (2018, 6). We approach decolonization as the development of emancipating dynamics of knowledge production and reproduction from North-centric epistemological cages. Postcolonial national independence presented the necessity to rethink territories in their whole political and cultural complexity, as well as to promote supra-national projects respectful of plurality. UN geoschemes, far from aiding in the construction of a plural and diverse vision, perpetuate a waterproof partition of territories, homogenizing differences and establishing categories. Those categories are the result of our modern/colonial North-centric world-system, which Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) defines as a space-time zone that crosses multiple political and cultural units, representing an integrated zone of activity and institutions that obey certain systemic rules. Moreover, as Aníbal Quijano (2014) suggests, within the modern world-system hegemony leads to a common character trait in the coloniality of cognitive perspectives: ethnocentrism. With this in mind, decolonizing our research experience means, therefore, questioning the very epistemology of ethnocentrism, the myths of “Western” rise, the evolutionist vision of social systems, and the liberal conception of capitalism. Decolonizing the transpacific, hence, includes an

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exercise to vivify and dignify experiences arisen from disqualified peoples, social actors, artists, communities, and epistemes. We detach ourselves from discourses that promote the narrative of a Pacific century. We refuse to relocate the center: we advocate for ending the idea of centrality. We try here to propose a pluri-centered scenario in which diversity is enhanced by de-hierarchizing peoples, ideas, and the exchange of resources throughout the Pacific. Identifying these differences in a non-centered world is important. We don’t believe that decentering automatically brings about horizontality. Decentering efforts need to be paralleled with an open exercise of analyzing the differences in degree and category between movements and connections to properly identify embedded oppressions that can survive a non-Eurocentric world. The transpacific is not per se a decolonized idea. It requires plenty of conscious and constant work to make it so. As it stands, it nevertheless signifies an excellent opportunity to reformulate not only the experiences in the Pacific but also practices and knowledges—on migration, comparative literature, and sustainability, just to mention a few that are present in this book—that exist in other parts of the world. The recent history of decolonization struggles has been riddled with troubles that have risen from linguistic complexities. There has been a need to retake, reformulate, and redefine historical processes like “colonization” and “colonialism” from a narrow Eurocentric matrix. This essential uncorking of ideas has engendered a new-found need to name circumstances and models brought to light by reappropriation. Concepts from marginalized epistemologies or neologisms created to fit these new necessities have flooded the field. We are not utterly against new designations, but we are very cautious of wild coinages. An excess of labels might lead to more opacity, to a forest too thick to explore. It also risks shifting the attention from the objective of bringing about social justice through epistemic justice toward focusing merely on banal, frivolous academic banter. An undue love for new or updated terminologies can also lead to division and factionalism, as it is already happening within so-called “decolonial” families. Academic and other intellectual institutions need to be a tool for the production and dissemination of our work, but we must be aware of its limitations and inherent perils, especially researchers from the Global North. We have a clear idea in mind: to call a work “decolonial” does not automatically turn it into decolonial research. Decolonizing transpacific studies means for us to deeply examine our own role both as academics and as

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social actors, to acknowledge our place of enunciation, and to promote the suppression of scholar subject/studied object that has traditionally shaped hierarchical ontologies within academia. Decoloniality is and shall continue to be more than mere reflection. The proposal of a real decolonial praxis arises from the need to politically and socially activate tangible changes in the lives of involved actors. As other researchers and activists have already stated, one of the first steps in practicing decoloniality is promoting non-abyssal research. Santos defines abyssal lines as follows: Radical lines that divide social reality into two different universes: ‘this side of the line’ and ‘the other side of the line’ … The fundamental characteristic of abyssal thinking is the impossibility of co-presence on both sides of the line. The universe ‘on this side of the line’ only prevails to the extent that it exhausts the field of relevant reality: beyond the line there is only non-­ existence, invisibility, and non-dialectical absence.1 (2007, 71)

It is hence necessary to epistemologically situate and position a decolonial analysis. We acknowledge the privileges of our places of enunciation, which vary across the authors of this volume but which include categories such as class, gender, racialization, and our shared access to higher education. Academia bestowed upon us this tribune from which we can reach out to the world, but we are extremely wary of its connotations. We do not speak for those oppressed by coloniality. We are not—for we should not become—spokespersons for these struggles. These chapters expect to narrate—for, as Edward Said (1984) pointed out, we have the privilege to do so. However, we seek here to establish an open, constant, contrastive, and rigorous conversation while rejecting to be the voice of an alleged, vain, and arrogant objectivity (Ramos Tolosa and Checa Hidalgo 2019, 29). Our part within these efforts is to provide tools for the identification, analysis, and proposal of operational ways to confront either situations of conflict or promising connections that emerge by adopting the transpacific as framework. The modern/capitalist/colonialist world-system we live in creates an abyssal division that does not just separate the North from the South. It 1  “Linhas radicais que dividem a realidade social em dois universos distintos: o ‘deste lado da linha’ e o ‘do outro lado da linha’. […] A característica fundamental do pensa- mento abissal é a impossibilidade da co-presença dos dois lados da linha. O universo ‘deste lado da linha’ só prevalece na medida em que esgota o campo da realidade relevante: para além da linha há apenas inexistência, invisibilidade e ausência não-dialética.” Own translation.

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hegemonically produces Souths within the Norths and Norths within the Souths. The tentacles of coloniality tie together fields of being, power, and knowledge. The perverse flexibility of levels of oppression and the fluidity of abyssal lines traverse transpacific connections. As explored by Antonio Ortega Santos in Chap. 4 and Helios Escalante Moreno in Chap. 5, for instance, China’s extractive policies in Latin America go in line with previous and ongoing strategies for resource mining promoted by Western nations and corporations. China acts in this regard as a power of the Global North. National governments in Latin America from the different ideological sides of the aisle also allow and continue a polemic extractive agenda, many times against the will of the communities that they are theoretically representing. How does coloniality apply here? Where do we draw the abyssal line? Nation-state governments from the different shores of the Pacific share an itinerary of so-called progress whose rules were determined by the North-centric world-system. Affected communities across the transpacific also shared the effects of these policies, as Raúl Holz and Paulina Pavez show in Chap. 6. Another example: as much as the Chinese government and their business conglomerates exploit natural resources in parts of the Global South, Chinese epistemologies, however, have been framed by both Western nations and Latin-American communities as peripheral, secondary, nothing resembling universality. In this sense, they are considered below the abyssal line. The effects of this hierarchization have been historically also present within so-called East Asia and between what are now great powers such as Japan and China, as explored by Ashley Liu in Chap. 7 of the present volume. The South-South dialogue that we present here gives then the necessary prominence back to the exchanges, influences, and mutual enrichments generated between Pacific coasts. Migrant knowledges, mobile and fluid, arise within the South and need to be understood as part of a different way of apprehending migration, as seen in Chap. 3, free from the narrow—albeit fully valid in itself—view of migration in the North. They move with and within the experiences we collect in these chapters—and in many others. We aspire to the decolonization of not only our research, understood as logics of acquiring, sharing, and reevaluating knowledge, but also our practices as individuals and members of a community beyond intellectual enquires. The act of decolonization includes inextricably a commitment to action that goes side by side with our thoughts. The exercise of translating intellectual work into concrete action is a plea that appeals to all of us, but

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there is not a universal bridge to connect the two realms. We must learn from each other and exchange strategies while working on our ways to make the two interventions dialogue. We should not be dismayed by the sheer magnitude of this task. Feeling that something is not enough must drive our quest to hone our ways. It is, simultaneously, a reminder that switches and levers can be found outside our familiar zone and our common epistemologies, so we need to bring more actors and experiences into the debate to complete our processes.

Methodologies of Action in Investigation The voices in this collective volume show the wealth of potential strategies for the endeavor of decolonizing our ways of knowing and doing. We shy away from the cursed wish of shaping a functional and cohesive textbook on how to understand transpacific connections or how to decolonize our approaches to the task. There is no single recipe to the matter, and enforcing a model to our ways of working and understanding these processes carries the risk of falling back into the same traps from which we want to escape. This commitment means that the “studies” in our title will always remain plural. The authors in the present book share nevertheless a sense of fighting against a North-centric conceptual and methodological scaffold that has conditioned our way of understanding the manners, agents, and experiences constituting transpacific (non)encounters, as Andrea Mendoza sharply points out in Chap. 2. They include voices from East Asia and Latin America, while reframing and repurposing those associated with what we critically have considered the North/the West. As we have been discussing throughout this chapter, the transpacific can become a productive framework that, used to decolonize our ways of doing and thinking, allows the production of critical research and strategic action. We believe that the transpacific provides the opportunity to engage with work that serves the interests of particular communities affected by colonial modernity, not only in the Pacific but across the Global South. It shines a light on different ways of oppression but also on potential strategies of resistance and empathy through identifying shared struggles. In this sense, working through a paradigm of the decolonial(izing) transpacific not only exposes situations of conflict but can also inform our methods to combat it. In this book, we acknowledge two types of identifying and working with transpacific connections in ways that serve the purpose of

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decolonizing our research and guide effective action. The first kind is those links that have been buried, discarded, ignored, or overlooked by conventional North-centric research. These are silenced narratives that have been at best treated as footnotes to history because they do not have Western powers as their main protagonists. They may be describing processes that had been previously described as exclusive of routes, spaces, and conditions that prioritized North-North streams or North-South floods. They expose how contacts across the Pacific were not restricted, for instance, to those established between the United States and East or Southeast Asia or limited to trade and the exchange of labor and goods as per capitalist design. These works show how contact manifests itself in a plurality of forms, and the exchange of knowledge and experiences is not something new to look forward to but has already existed before and is essential to the shaping of the different communities across the ocean. Rosanne Sia and Matías Chiappe Ippolito explore these kinds of connections in Chap. 9 and Chap. 12 respectively. Their pieces uncover the role of these relationships in the formation of the cultural and intellectual identity of Latin America. The second type of work is those connections that are yet to be discovered and highlighted. The sharedness or discrepancy between communities, local experiences, methods, and ways of knowing is worked through novel comparative discoveries constructed with a horizontal approach to the task. These are narratives and experiences that have been cast to the margins, below the abyssal line, for they might disclose the faulty strings stitching together the current world-system based on material oppressions that are sustained through epistemic domination. Gina León Cabrera, in Chap. 10, discusses the ways in which the memory of Colombia’s participation in the Korean War (the only Latin-American country to do so) is represented and shows how these processes of narrative formation get institutionalized in museums across the Pacific. These two types of connections reveal a different side of the struggle: the resistance against oblivion and the fight for the construction of different stories, revelations, and modes of being and doing. We have not differentiated between the two in this book. They coexist as part of a shared conversation. We attempt to challenge both the univocal character of statist discourses and the hierarchical organization of dominant struggles, as Maria Paula Meneses suggests:

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The idea of a non-plural History is an attempt to broaden modern social sciences beyond their limits, with the aim to (re)construct the knowledge cartography and the experiences of humanity. This call to plurality comes from acknowledging the extreme diversity of those very experiences, which richness, in terms of change possibilities, cannot be reduced to just one disciplinary horizon, to just one form to conceive the alternative.2 (2011, 33)

Dialogue, within the chapters of this book, is established as in a constant state of evolution and proposes ways to escape the totaling universe in which we live. The glocality of the experiences narrated in this book shapes it a pluriverse (Grosfoguel 2008) of practices and realities, and experiments and contingencies, launching chains of solidarity toward other geographical places, oppressed by the yoke of our world-system. “These are small voices which are drowned in the noise of statist commands. […] They have many stories to tell” (Guha 2009, 307).

Contradictions, Absences, and Promises for the Future The year 2020 has forced us to rethink the idea of pluricentrality and its practical consequences. The global pandemic we are experiencing pushes us into reconsidering most of our activities: our personal, work- and family-­related, social ones, but also, on a massive scale, the economic and productive mechanisms of our world-system. It has been long proved by now how the ban or reduction of trade and extractive industries caused by the pandemic had a positive impact on oceans. These short-term benefits cannot overshadow the fact that the subsistence of millions of people may be critically affected by the precariousness of our current model. Pollution, overfishing, the loss/conversion of habitats, the introduction of invasive species, and the effect of climate change on oceans are the direct results of a world-system that is indifferent to the needs of the environment. The personal losses caused by the pandemic have been devastating. Many of us have also been experiencing distance, loneliness, isolation, 2  “La idea de una historia no plural es un intento de ampliar las ciencias sociales modernas más allá de sus límites, con el objetivo de (re)construir la cartografía de los saberes y las experiencias de la Humanidad. Este llamamiento a la pluralidad procede de un reconocimiento de la extrema diversidad de experiencias, cuya riqueza, en términos de posibilidades de cambio, no puede reducirse a un único horizonte disciplinario, a una única forma de concebir la alternativa.” Own translation.

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precariousness, uncertainty, and distress. The pre-COVID world had made us used to contact immediacy, to feel close despite the physical separation, to a tangible—and, maybe, unsustainable—globality. It is in this situation that this collective book project was born. Although “This Coronavirus shit is real”—to quote the title of Chap. 11 by Núria Canalda Moreno and Andrés Vargas Herreño—and despite all the difficulties and urgencies exacerbated by the global pandemic, the project of this book and the promise of exploring the concept of the transpacific brought together scholars from different disciplines, geographies, research experiences, and epistemes, to foster a plural vision of a space—physical and ontological—traditionally inserted as peripheral in North-centric studies. We assume and accept the limitations of this endeavor, embracing them with humbleness and an eagerness to keep toiling in similar directions. We also assume a certain level of contradictions. This volume gathers researchers from different parts of the world, but the language used to articulate their works is English. Why, if the idea is to connect Latin America with East Asia, do we use a language that is not the most spoken in either of these two so-called regions? The key is to focus on the idea of connection and understanding. English is still the lingua franca in academia and international relations. Our aspiration is that readers from any part of the Pacific can have easier access to this work, and the chances are higher if it is in English. Cho Younghan has discussed the headaches and conflicts that this reliance on English carries for him when reflecting upon academic exchange in East Asia (2012, 662). We acknowledge that languages carry ideological and hegemonic connotations. This contradiction is especially intense when we are at the same time amid a struggle for the decolonization of our ways of producing and reproducing knowledge. In the end, however, we side with a pragmatic, strategic approach to this matter that is ready to assume to sacrifice a bit of coherence if it leads in the direction of large-scale structures of oppression. Let’s pick the battles one by one. We shy away from framing our collective book as a complete, representative show of all the different ways in which we can do work on transpacific matters with a decolonizing aim. The authors provide here a diverse sample that can appeal to many different researchers, activists, and other enthusiastic readers from diverse backgrounds and interests. There are, however, some voices and experiences that would enrich our conversation. As a sample of cases and experiences that could have shared the space in this book, we miss having works on, to, and from many other communities of Abya Yala (especially in the Cono Sur), Taiwan, the Pacific Islands,

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and the Philippines. On the latter, Paula C.  Park’s “Transpacific Intercoloniality: Rethinking the Globality of Philippine Literature in Spanish” is an excellent piece because of its theoretical insightfulness and inspiring analytical awareness. We would like our omissions to become an encouragement for the development of further works based on (or in opposition to) some of the points that we raise in this book. We are forever grateful for the way the authors have turned East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies into an exciting opportunity to foster conversations with researchers committed to better understanding connections and divergences within agents that are in and across the Pacific. One of our goals has been to include the space, circumstances, and agents intersected by the concept of the transpacific in a broader debate happening across the globe on decolonization and other forms of fighting for epistemic and social justice. Any faults in conveying this message can only be attributed to our limitations as editors. We hope readers find the questions and points raised by the work compiled here as engaging as we do.

References Bachner, Andrea, and Pedro Erber. 2017. Remapping the Transpacific: Critical Approaches Between Asia and Latin America. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3 (2): vi–xiii. Cho, Younghan. 2012. Colonial Modernity Matters? Cultural Studies 26 (5): 645–669. Dirlik, Arif, ed. 1998. What Is a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Espiritu, Yên Lê, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama. 2018. Transpacific Entanglements. In Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, 175–189. New York: Fordham University Press. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2008. Hacia un pluri-versalismo transmoderno decolonial. Tabula Rasa 9: 199–215. Guha, Ranajit. 2009. The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Hoskins, Janet, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, eds. 2014. Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Meneses, Maria Paula. 2011. Epistemologías del Sur: diálogos que crean espacios para un encuentro de las historias. Paper Presented at the Formas-Otras: Saber, nombrar, narrar, hacer, Barcelona. https://www.cidob.org/en/media2/publicacions/monografias/iv_training_seminar/meneses Accessed 2 Dec 2020.

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Park, Paula C. 2018. Transpacific Intercoloniality: Rethinking the Globality of Philippine Literature in Spanish. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20 (1–2): 83–97. Quijano, Aníbal. 2014. Cuestiones y horizontes: de la dependencia histórico-­ estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Ramos Tolosa, Jorge, and Diego Checa Hidalgo. 2019. Comprender Palestina-­ Israel. Estudios pluridisciplinares y decoloniales. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Said, Edward W. 1984. Permission to Narrate. The London Review of Books 6 (3): 13–17. Sakai, Naoki, and Gavin Walker. 2019. The End of Area. Positions: Asia Critique 27 (1): 1–31. Sakai, Naoki, and Hyon Joo Yoo, eds. 2012. The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society. Singapore: World Scientific. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2007. Para além do Pensamento Abissal: Das linhas globais a uma ecologia de saberes. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 78: 3–46. ———. 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Confronting “the Ends” of Area: Murmurs Toward a Transpacific Phenomenology Andrea Mendoza

Dig into the earth trace the footsteps of memory the rest transferred and left Burial in translation I will become a ghost and wander the earth, and if that too is not possible, I will pay visit in someone’s memories. —Lee Chonghwa, “Words for a Preface: Jindalle/Azaleas or Flowers for Body Offerings” (2009) The meaning of the word is its addressee: the other being who hears it, understands it, and who, when she answers, converts her questioner into a listener and understander, establishing in this way the relationship of dialogue that is only possible between two beings who consider themselves

A. Mendoza (*) Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_2

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and deal with each other as equals. And that is only fruitful between those who wish each other to be free. —Rosario Castellanos, “Language as an Instrument of Domination” (1973)

Introduction Transpacific studies is replete with now almost perfunctory reflections on what the burgeoning field means in relation to the disciplinary categories of area studies. Lisa Yoneyama (2017), for instance, discusses transpacific studies as a response “to the cross-hemispheric turn in the ongoing transnational questioning of the single-nation framework of area-based research,” viewing the transpacific as a framework for “groundbreaking scholarship” (471). Indeed, the idea of transpacific studies garners an array of provocative and theoretically promiscuous scholarship, each expressing a desire to create spaces to speak, as intellectual and political projects, on the ways that area-based research poses more roadblocks than pathways in our post-Cold War, globalizing era of the liberal humanities. Attention to transpacific studies has increased in recent years, furthermore, with the inauguration of symposia, new publications, and institutional programs that center debates across disciplines—particularly those participating in producing scholarship beyond the rubrics of area studies. Yet, as Yoneyama points out in “Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific” (2017), a certain type of transpacific studies seems to continually point us back to re-articulations of “a transnational Asian/ American critique of the United States’ militarized colonial presence and the Asia Pacific Islands” (472). There is, of course, a valid argument that the transpacific framework, as a colonial successor to what has been regarded as critical area studies, works toward exhuming the voices, histories, and memories that haunt US-Pacific relations. But if the transpacific re-orients our understanding of what it means to figure a spatiotemporal in-betweenness that arbitrates the silences between the ends of area, its theoretical work must look beyond Anglo-America as the center point for its critique. In short, the transpacific requires its theorization as a critical phenomenology that moves beyond the inflections of area and nation-­ based scholarship and turns toward decolonial analyses of the effects created by the imagined boundaries of communities and bodies. A critical transpacific phenomenology, I argue, is a reorientation of the way we listen to and understand the conditions of the world.

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To begin this process, we must recognize that the theoretical framework of transpacific studies, as an epistemological model and vantage point for activism, has roots in transnational feminist practices. As Natalie Cisernos writes, “feminist border thinkers have for decades been philosophizing about the existence of borderlands, despite the great difficulty of theorizing experiences that often fell outside the dominant constructions of selfhood or normative identity” (Weiss et al. 2019, 47). Following this understanding, my fundamental premise here is that a transpacific phenomenology begins as a feminist practice that critically confronts the foreclosures of area. The aim of this chapter is to consider the transpacific turn within a framework that decenters Anglo-America as a point of reference for its critique. In this effort, I use the critical phenomenological method to negotiate practices of knowledge production that bring together cultural productions from Asia and Latin America, specifically Japan and Mexico. Indebted to the important work of scholars such as Andrea Bachner (2017), Junyoung Verónica Kim (2017), Zelideth Maria Rivas and Debbie Lee-DiStefano (2016), Laura Torres Rodríguez (2019), and many others, I use the optic of Asia-Latin America to emphasize a comparative model that directly addresses and creates accounts for relations, questions, and histories that are disavowed by the model of area. Elsewhere, I have discussed my methodology as taking up the issue of area studies as a critical study of the epistemic construction of nonencounters (Mendoza 2017). I employ nonencounter to examine how objects of study that are deemed geopolitically, historically, or culturally disparate can be put in dialogue through critical comparison. Nonencounter, I should clarify, does not signal the absence of encounter or a radical negation of connections between contexts and their histories. To think that Latin America and Asia, with all the history and lived experience of diasporic, inter-­ textual, and political entanglements readily available, are in any way estranged from each other is a disservice to the critical method. Nonencounter is a heuristic, rather, for re-directing our attention to the meaning of constructed absences and disparities. Throughout the chapter, I pose the transpacific turn as a critical phenomenological question. I begin with an overview of what is commonly referred to as the “crisis” of area studies. I argue that a transpacific phenomenology begins by turning away from area studies and toward its “ends.” In particular, my critique here focuses on a reading of the 1997 poem Tsubuyaki no seiji shisō: motomerareru manazashi kanashimi e no/ soshite himerareta mono e no (Murmurs as Political Thought: In Search of

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Ways of Seeing the Sorrow and Things Hidden, 1998) by the Korean-­ born feminist philosopher and poet Lee Chonghwa, whose words give this chapter its opening epigraph. Lee’s poem, which enquires into the possibility to bear witness to the trauma of wartime sexual violence, offers the provocation that a discourse of murmurs (tsubuyaki) begins with a body “which refuses all things that can be named” and gives itself in to use the body “to talk about those things” for which “we need to find words that cannot be consumed” and acts of speaking that will not be exceptionalized (Lee 1998, np). This figure of the “murmur” is an effort to re-direct, or even misdirect, our attention from the Cold War narratives of area and helps us imagine new orientations for intellectual production and, crucially, modes of solidarity that resist the boundaries of nation, state, and ethnos. Taking orientation as a key concept for a transpacific phenomenology, the premise of my analysis stages re-direction and misdirection in the impasse of the transpacific framework. In the second part, I turn to Rosario Castellanos’s deployment of intertextuality to reflect on language, indigeneity, and nationalism from a standpoint I identify as transnational feminist in her 1954 novel Balún-Canán. My analysis of Castellanos’s writings locates a legacy of feminist thought that renders the state of Chiapas, Mexico, as a point of departure for its tensions, traumas, and hauntings. While her texts offer no explicit connection to the Pacific, much like Lee’s Tsubuyaki, Castellanos’s prose uses voice to create an important site for exhuming, excavating, and connecting traumatic histories beyond the borders of the modern-nation state. In its highlighting the local and global legacies of colonialism, we are taught to bear witness to gendered and racial violence. The framework of critical phenomenology is useful for addressing what transpacific nonencounters tell us about the figure of area because it requires an expansion of the “classical horizons” (the area) of the phenomenological method, first conceived and elaborated by Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Weiss et al. 2019, xiii). One of Husserl’s central discussions, which follows us here, is the importance of orientation for critical phenomenology. In Ideas, he describes perception as an “‘orientation’ which necessarily carries with it sketched out in advance the system of arrangements which makes fresh orientations possible” (Husserl 2017 [1913], 135). Orientation is described, then, as a “turning to or towards,” “as a mode of givenness,” and a “centre” (451). Taking the discussion of orientation

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seriously, as Sara Ahmed (2006) does in her conception of queer phenomenology, I view a transpacific phenomenology as a framework for bringing to attention, turning toward, “fields of perception” that mobilize interconnected experiences, knowledges, and worlds that have been foreclosed by dominant disciplinary paradigms. A critical transpacific phenomenology confronts, in fact, the limits, the ends, of disciplinary shapes and formations to highlight the importance of re-orienting ourselves not toward a particular center but toward the suspension of previous centers so as to expand the depth of the trans in transpacific. In emphasizing a transpacific phenomenology as a “turn away” from area studies, I understand the transpacific as a figure whose point of departure is not Anglo-America. It does not have a point of departure on any shore of the Pacific. The transpacific can be understood, rather, as a designation of “not being” on a side and that therefore helps us think about practices, questions, and modes of embodiment that are not privileged in given disciplinary orientations. In other words, the transpacific cannot be a proper “field” so long as it remains theorized as that which “cannot be.” The question I posed when I first conceptualized this contribution to the volume reflects the limits of the transpacific model: If the transpacific turn offers us a phenomenology of “the transpacific” as one that turns away from hegemonic models of perceiving and producing knowledge about “areas,” which texts, voices, and phenomena help us find a new way of perceiving and producing knowledge? I write from the standpoint of a moment in time when the liberal model of the nation-state increasingly reveals its fragmentations as a global pandemic rages. I write from the standpoint of a political space that once feasted on the myths of its own exceptionalism, its gaze, and its avoidance of how it, too, could become a target of anthropological knowledge. Rather than a process of resignification, I argue that we are amid a gradual revision of the directions that we must take to better represent and reflect on the current status of “area” and its epistemological stranglehold over notions of culture, progress, and history. A critical transpacific phenomenology allows me to problematize the pursuit of area-based models that render geographic and political spaces into representable objects of knowledge about people, histories, and cultures. If we understand the transpacific as an archive that lets us read beyond the confines of the relations of power implied by area, we cannot approach its theorization as another formulation of area studies. Rather, as this chapter journeys across regions, texts, and concepts often studied as disparate from rather than intimate to

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each other, I explore the transpacific as a tendency toward, a future direction, modes of knowledge that disown––that is, refuse connections to— the exceptionalist myths of area while grasping for an ethics for tying together the tenuous, loose ends of its legacies.

On the Stakes of “Area” While the concept of “area” is traditionally considered a place outside of Europe or Anglo-America, Junyoung Verónica Kim (2017) argues that the comparison of Asia and Latin America does not simply dismantle the notion of the West and the Euro-American view of globality. Yet, as Kim argues, emphasizing connections between Asia and Latin America that affirm the idea that the “rest” ought to be studied through the lenses of either anthropological difference or mimesis (i.e., European modernity outside Europe) only affirms the dominance of the hierarchical model of literary studies. Even from the most critical vantage points in the study of cultural productions in the Americas, studies of colonialism and its legacies often remain rooted in the paradigm of a history wherein the Americas only look toward Europe, toward the consolidation of the idea of the West, for their histories. Following Kim, I argue in this section for a critique of area studies and a mode of Asia-Latin America transpacific studies that does more than give credibility to what the philosopher Sylvia Wynter termed the “Figure of Man”––a category of bourgeois EuroAmerican whiteness that often dominates representations of humanistic knowledge and disavows racialized and queer epistemological paradigms. The critique of area studies, after all, began more or less with the argument  that racialized and classed heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy have played significant and conspicuous roles in shaping the mid-­twentieth-­ century institution of disciplines characterized by purports of intellectual authority over geographic units (East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, etc.). Rey Chow (2006), who connects the imperialistic function of area studies and its evolution with a “world that has come to be grasped and conceived as a target—to be destroyed as soon as it is made visible,” argues that the emergence of intellectual production that follows the formation of these geographic units coincides with the trajectory of US military interests (12). Area studies does not reflect the world; it worlds—it produces a world to inscribe the hegemonic specter of Euro-American imperialism and white supremacy onto an imaginary figuration of the world.

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Area studies, in other words, has its own phenomenology. It has an orientation and unfolds the world toward a specific direction. One of the more significant developments over the past few decades has been the increasing volume of scholarship from the standpoint of critical area studies—deconstructive critiques of the traditional model of area studies. According to such critiques, we stand on the epistemological precipice of not simply the decline but the death of the disciplines that comprise, for example, Asian studies, Africana studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Latin American studies. We are, we could say, but a step away from completely undoing the violence of their politics, which rested, for half a century, on the agenda of Cold War politics. On the other side of this ongoing endeavor for critique are those works and projects that seek to validate area studies through the rhetoric of their “rebirth” or “rearticulation” into formats that better relate to a current global moment. Whether it be through the adoption of popular cultural materials or an undue emphasis on “updated” forms of inter- and trans-disciplinarity, such projects tend to adopt the rhetoric of diversity, inclusion, and equity to offset the “dead” model of Cold War era trends in the fields. But if we understand the task of these current debates as that of giving a moment of rebirth to area studies, to what extent are we at risk of, employing Audre Lorde’s language here, using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house? So long as scholars continue to strive for protecting the nation-based model of scholarship on area, area studies continues to resort to the same messy identity politics that perpetuate racism at the primal scene of area’s inception. When we take up the phenomenology of area, as conceived by the agendas of US Cold War mentalities, to orient ourselves toward the survival of what we have understood as problematic, racist, and heterosexist colonial structures wrapped in the rhetoric of academic discipline, we are defining that very structure as our only source of support.1 The phrase “the end of area” can thus be employed to refer to a number of things. In the 2019 special issue of positions, “The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History,” Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai describe how the phrase does not refer to “the end of the importance of specific knowledge, linguistic study, or historically particular circumstances”; rather “the end of area” refers to “the end of the schema area, the end of the regime area”—in other words, of the model of production through 1  Here, I am working with Audre Lorde’s language on white feminism in her seminal essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (2007 [1984]: 110–114).

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which epistemologies are retroactively rendered “natural” or “inherent” to nationalized contexts (Walker and Sakai 2019, 21). In my own formulation, I employ the phrase “ends of area” to refer to not merely the reimagining of knowledge in the afterlife of the schema of area but to the threads left loose, after being cut off by the schema, of area and what they may extend to. What are the questions, critiques, and epistemic possibilities arising out of the retroactive threading together of objects of study that were created for isolated frames? The concept of “area” therefore functions much like the concept of “Man” that Sylvia Wynter (1987) critiques as part of the myth of liberal humanism and is no different, no less essentialist, than the concept of “the West,” upon which so much liberal humanistic knowledge production relies. As Sakai (2001) has elaborated, conceptions of “the West” in Euro-­ American academic imaginaries have been geopolitically effectual in posturing notions of civilizational progress and cultural difference. Yet, “the West,” like area, is a paradigm, a regime, for the articulation of “suturing” the intelligibility of culture. “Neither the West nor the Rest,” he co-writes in the introduction to “The End of Area,” drawing from Stuart Hall, “is, as a matter of fact, a geographic category, yet people act as if these civilizational identities were geographically determinable by ascribing them to points on the map of the world” (Walker and Sakai 2019, 8). Such is the uncritical phenomenology of area; it normalizes and renders routine strategic positionalities of knowing and being known and maps a performance of intellectualization onto repetitive acts of colonial power and conquest, redistributing, in the form of epistemology, racial capitalism. For this reason, any formulation of transpacific studies that brings together the histories and cultural productions of Asia and Latin America must begin with the rejection of the schemas of the “West and the Rest,” even those that claim a decolonial project. In her contribution to the Walker and Sakai special issue of positions, “Racializing Area Studies, Defetishizing China,” Shu-mei Shih addresses the demand for such a critique in Asian studies through the very question of the idea of the “crisis of area studies.” She writes: There can only be two reasons for what appears to be the passing of the crisis. Either the “revitalizing” has been so successful that it is now a transformed and different area studies, which at its logical limit, should no longer be area studies as we know it, hence there is no more crisis. Or, the Cold War knowledge/power formation has somehow morphed into another

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form that continues to support and reproduce area studies to the extent that the crisis no longer exists; area studies has a new raison d’être. (Shih 2019, 33)

The regime of area studies follows a racialized and gendered logic that Shih describes as involving multiple actors: white, male area experts, the “natives” who become spouses and interlocutors, and the “natives” who become experts and are pressured to preserve the “area” by “authenticating” it. Conversely, she continues, “it is an open secret that there is a dearth of African American or other non-Asian minority scholars in Asian studies” (45). Shih importantly observes how area studies’ tense relationship to race and racism often leads to the disavowal of any critical study of race and ethnicity. The genealogies of area studies, she points out, reinforce and institutionalize deracialization—meaning, a willful ignorance to the notion that race and ethnicity participate in how scholars think about their relationship to the object of their study. area studies, until very recently, could offer, in Shih’s words, the “convenient excuse” that it did not engage with the reality of racial tensions in North America (57). The praxes of area studies occurred and continued to occur in contexts that were underscored by the persistence of racial and cultural hegemony, whether it be, as Shih points out, Han hegemony in the study of China and the misappropriation of issues relating to minoritized and persecuted communities in China or the hegemonic idea of ethnic Japanese identity, which often relegates the study of Okinawan and Ainu histories and cultural productions to a subcategory, or, more spuriously, an element of Japan studies. It is no secret that the deracialization of area studies and its tension with the ideas of critical race and ethnic studies emerged through area studies’ links to the Cold War era policies of the United States and what Yoneyama describes as “the problematic pedagogy about non-American others” that the critique of area studies has documented. Yoneyama (2016) cites that the function of the area studies specialist was, initially, to identify within foreign populations social and kinship systems and behaviors that could lead targeted cultural groups “onto the next stage of universal history and help achieve a modernity paralleling that of the United States” (62). Through this cross-cultural “functional equivalency,” observed societies, which were seen diachronically as inherent cultural others and potentially assimilable strangers, area studies operated as a technology that identified and diagnosed the impediments to modernization in the “backwards”

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elements of the Asian and Pacific other.2 Coupled with Shih’s argument that the function of a deracialized Asian studies was to maintain the order of racial hegemony—within the country that is the object of study as well as within the field itself, as the field has few non-Asian minority scholars— this historical tension between race and area studies clearly suggests the need for a response. The disavowal problem of racism in area studies, on the one hand, makes it seem as if area studies does not engage critically with race because its epistemologies are targeted at not dealing with “racism” as a problem for scholarship. On the other hand, I argue, this disengagement not only produces a heightened sensitivity to the racial logic of area studies but also makes imperative the task of transpacific studies to address it. When we fall into the gaps excavated by the forceful disintegration of critical race theory from area studies—a disintegration that is a transpacific one—they do not render us aliens in our own field; they are the very paths through which we can address the present reality of knowledge production back to the past. With them, we can confront, even, the willful and happy disavowals of area studies by tracing the genealogies inscribed in the transpacific archive of racism. In this formulation, the transpacific archive of racism represents a tracing of the unthought. Following Tiffany Lethabo King’s (2019) theorization of the unthought as an intervention for bringing together Black and indigenous scholarship, a critical transpacific phenomenology offers the reader a new vantage point through which to examine “the relational and ethical spaces” that lie between epistemologies often kept disparate from each other. The unthought and the nonencounter, for my premise here, are key concepts for decolonial and abolitionist practices of reading and writing the spaces left scarred in the wake of area and its crisis. In the next section, I examine these tensions among the regime of area, racialization, and the transpacific with the work of the poet and philosopher Lee Chonghwa.

A Politics of Murmurs In her edited volume Zanshō no oto: Ajia, seiji, art no mirai e (Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come, 2008; 2015), Lee brings together essays around the 2006 Asia, Politics, and Art project. The 2  For Yoneyama’s discussion, see the chapter “Liminal Justice: Okinawa” in Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (2016).

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project, according to the preface by the volume’s translation’s co-editor Rebecca Jennison, created a dialogue among feminist performance groups, artists, activists, and scholars in Kyoto, Tokyo, and Seattle (Lee et al. 2015, xvii). Following the global momentum of the 1990s project, titled Pafo ̄mansu āto to jendā ni kan suru rironteki kenkyū–Ajia josei āttisuto o chu ̄shin ni (Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Gender and Performance Art: On Asian Women Artists), the Asia, Politics, Art project brought together over a dozen artists to workshops and teach-in events in Okinawa and Tokyo. As Jennison describes: During the Asia, Politics, Art project, the number of interested participants grew from two dozen to nearly a hundred. One reason for this is Lee Chonghwa’s vision and practice as a poet and political philosopher. Following the publication of her earlier work, Tsubuyaki no seiji shiso–̄ – Motomerareru manazashi/kanashimi e no, soshite himerareta mono e no…, Lee had become known for her stance and practice as a shisakuka (思索家, or thinker), shijin (詩人 or poet), and seijishisōka (政治思想家 or political philosopher). (Lee et al. 2015, xix)

The multiplicity of Lee’s oeuvre serves as an instructive point of departure for this section, which looks at her contribution through a transpacific framework, focusing in particular on her political theorization of the manazashi (the gaze) and its relationship to tsubuyaki (the murmur). The manazashi, a concept that Lee adapts from the work of Mary Louise Pratt (1992), functions in Tsubuyaki no seiji shisō to bring our attention to objects, questions, and histories that appear anew, pivoting the way we perceive what it means to be in and part of the world. Prompted by this concept of the manazashi, of looking at connections among history, politics, art, and experience anew, we can explore how Lee’s poem, and its political philosophical thrust, exemplifies a form of transpacific feminist practice and uses orientation to posit a critical phenomenology of trauma. At the heart of Tsubuyaki, I argue, lies a powerful argument for a new way to bear witness to the treatment of former comfort women—women who were subjected to sexual violence and sex trafficking by the Japanese Imperial Army and yet whose testimonies were suppressed by both the Korean and Japanese states for decades—as more than contentious figures in a postcolonial Asia. Tsubuyaki is a work of political theory, in particular, about the liminality and limit of language that delineates the grounds for postcolonial critique that goes beyond “the other side,” of the category of the nation.

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Born in Jejū Island, Lee moved to Japan in the late 1980s and worked as professor of political philosophy, politics of culture, and postcolonial studies in the Department of Law at Seikei University, Tokyo (Lee, Jennison, and de Bary 139). Her collaborations thread together the languages of political philosophy, art, and activism to highlight questions of identity, language, and memory, intimately lingering, in particular, on metaphors such as “wound” and “murmur” to provide an understanding of the dilemmas confronting geopolitics in a post-Cold War East Asia. In Tsubuyaki no seiji shisō, Lee draws on the motifs of “murmur” and “gaze” to critically probe into the transgenerational effects of colonial violence. The poem opens with the word bē, written in both hiragana and kanji as (ベー • 舟). The Korean word bē simultaneously means a person’s stomach and the Japanese word “boat,” Lee will tell us in the fifth stanza. But the word, which carries multiple modalities of translation but refuses to give in to any one meaning or interpretation, opens the first part of Lee’s prose: Bē/Boat Things that we don’t know. Things that we cannot know. Things that you have to take in rather than consume. From the outside, we can interpret them however we like. But, from the moment we enter the frame. We cannot refuse their interpretation. Because that frame is where we live. (Lee 1998, np)3

From the onset, Lee references “things that we cannot know”—that which remain unknown, unthought, and untestified—as that which become, over time, unspeakable. Tsubuyaki is, above all, a philosophical piece on the testimony of the harumoni (women elders) who were victims of the so-called comfort woman system (ianfuseido) during the Asia Pacific War. Thus, the concept of unknowability (unthinkability) carries, serves as a vessel, a ship, in Tsubuyaki for what Ukai Satoshi (2001) describes as the “poematic event” of haji o hanikamu (being bashful, or ashamed, of  (ベー•舟) 分からないこと。わかってはならないこと。消費するのではなく受容し なければならないこと。それは語る私に、聞く我々に、居心地悪さを残す 外部からはどう解釈してもいい。だが、いったん枠に入った瞬間からは。 解釈することを拒否しなくてはならない。 それが生きる場だから。 Author’s translation. 3

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shame).4 More pronouncedly, the unknown and unthought in Lee’s formulation operate as figures of the undigestible wounds of history. The stakes of shame, wound, and trauma, however, are taken up in Tsubuyaki not merely as historical but as part of a postcolonial present, wherein the language of traumatic experience prompts an ability to interpret and respond. Lee’s prose refracts the differences between space, temporality, as the thematic intergenerational inheritance inhabits the murmur (tsubuyaki) and becomes a refrain and figure of citational politics. Throughout Tsubuyaki, Lee incorporates excerpts from the works of Korean poets Park Nohae, Han Yong-un, and Song Ki-won, each folding into the multiple “Tales of Bē” (Be ̄ no monogatari) that evoke numerous ways of seeing (manazashi) and addressing postcolonial trauma. Before each “Story,” Lee writes four concepts that frame the narrative of the citations, including nation-state (kokka), ethnicity (minzoku), man (otoko), woman (onna), family (kazoku), homeland (kokkyō), mother (haha), child (kodomo), body (karada), memory (kioku), individual (kojin), and loneliness (kodoku), as recurring framing devices for these interjections. These concepts have stakes, she tells us, both in the ways that they are produced in geopolitical discourses and in how the visceral refusals of those discourses are inherited through the murmurs of historical trauma. Tracing the inheritances of postcolonial trauma through citational poetic practice enables Lee to dwell on the geopolitical present in Asia and the Pacific, wherein what she terms “history” overlaps continually with the histories of others. The recurrence of the figure of the “bē” is organized around the refusal of a language of separation: In fact, my body, which refuses all things that can be named, Gives itself up to the “bē,” to that boat. Through these tales, I hope that my life can overlap with yours. (Lee 1998, np)5

4  In “The Future of Affect,” Ukai engages Lee’s work to problematize the interiorization of Ruth Benedict’s idea of Japan as a “culture of shame” in right-wing politics. See Ukai (2001) and Gabrakova (2015). 5  実はもう名付けられるあらゆるものを拒否している私の体は、その に、その舟に身をゆだねている。これらの物語が、私の、そしてあ なたの生に重なることを願いつつ。 Author’s translation.

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“Bē,” in short, functions as a “contact zone” for an emerging language of transpacific postcolonial refusal. Lee’s poetics constantly turn toward a sense of entanglement to refuse the promises of the modern nation-state, whether it be the nation-state of South Korea, which promises the language of ethnonational sovereignty, or that of Japan, whose present relies on the abstraction and repression of its colonial violence. The place of Lee’s address is gendered in its vulnerable embodiment of traumatic memory and the double-consciousness borne by the figure of the stomach/ vessel. The recurrence of the relationship between mothers and daughters throughout the text develops its political project into one that speaks in both abstract and concrete ways about the inheritance of memories at odds with formalized discourses on history. Tsubuyaki, after all, resists and refuses discourses of “progress” and “liberation” aimed at resolving traumatic entanglements. The text directly contests, for example, the premise that these entanglements must be “resolved” or moved away from by embracing them as part of what it means to live, think, and politically act in the present. Tsubuyaki no seiji shiso ̄ therefore, I argue, murmurs testimony to the limitless dimensions of what Gloria Anzaldúa would call the interstices of the transpacific, shedding light on the liminal spaces of memory and history. What appears as moments of misdirection, stagnancy, or silence offer a critical potential for understanding what history means when we listen, and bear witness, to the politics of such murmurs. In the following section, we turn to these questions of orientation and entanglement to examine how transpacific phenomenology displaces the processes that inform the inheritances of racial, class, and gendered differences in the work of Rosario Castellanos.

Confronting the Inheritance of Murmurs So far, we have focused on the critical conceptual weight of a transpacific phenomenology. I proposed that a transpacific phenomenology re-directs our attention to the remains of the scheme of area, pushing us to consider what knowledge production looks like at its ends. In this section, I discuss how we use this re-direction to confront the unclaimed inheritances of historical violence using the writing of the Mexican poet, philosopher, and novelist Rosario Castellanos for both its instructive dimensions and its attempts to claim histories of expropriation and violence against vulnerable populations, mainly indigenous women. Like Lee, Castellanos takes to task

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the question of language and its role in perpetuating colonial violence. Throughout her career, which began in the late 1940s and was cut short by her untimely death in 1974, Castellanos wrote, before the publication of Hélène Cixous’s La Rire de la Méduse (The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975), deconstructive analyses of what Ann Rosalind Jones (1981) calls “the attention to silences of what is repressed or only obliquely suggested in womenauthored texts” (96). For Castellanos, intertextuality pieces together the fragments of women’s exclusion and reduction within literature, history, and cultural life. From dialogues with twentieth-century French feminists to examinations of the sociopolitical afterlives of stereotypical images of Mexican women, her writings engage a practice that calls to mind the phenomenological processes of Adrienne Rich’s (1972) “re-­vision”—acts of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering old texts from new critical directions (18). While, unlike Lee, Castellanos’s work is not usually discussed in the context of transpacific optics, I propose that it occupies an important space in thinking about the flows of voices, memories, and histories that occupy the figure of the border, often raising the dilemma of coloniality in Mexico’s indigenous lands as a transnational, global question. Rosario Castellanos was born in Mexico City, but she considered herself a native of Comitán, a city in the border state of Chiapas. Chiapas, as Gloria Elizabeth Chacón writes in Indigenous Cosmolectics (2018), “occupies a unique space in the political and cultural imagination” of the modern Mexican state as it serves an important place in the genealogy of indigenous women’s writing and political activism (84). It borders Guatemala, with which it shares a coast along the Pacific Ocean, historically serving as a site for transpacific political exchanges between Mexico and Japan during the Porfiriato (the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz, which spanned from 1874 to 1910).6 In this context, I read Castellanos’s writings on Chiapas, specifically her reflections on the sociopolitical landscape of its indigenous populations, as part of a complex archive of transpacific racial politics. One of the most emblematic examples of this sensibility can be found in her 1954 novel, Balún-Canán.7 The story has been interpreted, both 6  For a discussion on the late nineteenth-century history of Mexican-Japanese political relations, see Cortés (1980). 7  Dora Sales details the background of the novel, drawing from Eduardo Mejía’s studies of Castellanos’s work, in her introduction to the 2004 edition of Balún-Canán. See Castellanos (2001).

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for its location and its focus on the relationship between a young girl and her Tzeltal caretaker, as one of Castellanos’s first attempts at autobiographical writing. Set in post-revolutionary Mexico, the novel treats racial and social conflicts arising from legislative reform during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) by highlighting the roles of indigeneity and femininity as central, rather than peripheral, figures within the construction of hegemonic culture in Mexico. With Balún-Canán, Castellanos crafts a narrative that explores layers of racial, sexual, and class oppression through the voice of its protagonist and narrator, an unnamed seven-year-­ old girl who is the daughter of a wealthy ladino (upper-middle-class Hispanic mestizos) landowner in Comitán and often read as a fragment of Castellanos’s own autobiographical voice. In the story, this narrator occupies the main perspective of the novel for its first and third parts, with the second part focusing on the internal dialogues of the adult characters in the novel. The young girl, however, operates as an important interlocutor for the symbolic relationship between the expropriation and exploitation of indigenous people—in particular, women—in Comitán and the logic of the Mexican heteropatriarchy. Raised primarily by her indigenous caretaker, the girl acts as the transmitter of both the manazashi and tsubuyaki beneath the layers of political and familial drama that frame the narrative. The very first voice that appears in Balún-Canán is, in fact, not the voice of the ladina girl but lines from a Maya K’iche’ text, Popol Vuh (The Book of the Community), speaking on the relationship among history, murmurs, and memory: We will murmur (musitaremos) the origin. We will murmur only the history, its account. We will not do more than return; we have accomplished our task; our days are numbered. Think about us, don’t erase us from your memory, don’t forget us.8 (Castellanos (2001, 133)

These lines then open up to a dialogue between the girl and her indigenous nana, who gives an account of the Spanish colonialism in the Americas:

 “Musitaremos el origen. Musitaremos solamente la historia, el relato. Nosotros no hacemos más que regresar; hemos cumplido nuestra tarea; nuestros dias están acabados Pensad en nosotros, no nos borréis de vuestra memoria, no nos olvidéis.” 8

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…And so, choleric, they dispossessed us, they took away what we have treasured: the word, which is the arc of memory. Since those days, they have been burning and consumed, kindled by the bonfire. The smoke rises in the wind and disperses, leaving only ashes in its wake. So that you could come, and so that the one who is younger than you can come, and so that you could each get just one breath... Don’t tell me that story, nana. Was I speaking with you? Or was I speaking with the anise seeds?9 (133)

Ready or not, the young girl enters the story in the role of a witness, watching and tuning into the hidden voices of histories and events that happen too soon, and in excess too, for her to understand. Primarily, we could argue, Balún-Canán offers us a classical story of trauma,10 headed by the K’iche’ palimpsests that augur the events of the novel. We, as readers, are invited, through the eyes of a seven-year-old, to bear witness to the downfall of a wealthy ladino family as we learn that its only heir, the narrator’s brother Mario, dies prematurely, leaving behind a question about the paradox of heteropatriarchal cultural norms. Consequently, the voices that remain are not those of the ladina girl or her family members but those that call back to the origins of the sins of colonial violence and that remain, etched into the intertextuality of the text, to testify to the limits of mestizo nationalism. With Balún-Canán, I locate the transpacific within broader constellations as a figure of  mobilized in-betweenness that disrupts the smooth articulation of the nation-state. To an extent, this figure resonates with Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza,” whose hybridity encompasses the paradoxical ways in which indigenous identity is both coopted into subversive articulations of Latinx identity and suppressed by those articulations simultaneously.  In Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Anzaldúa proposed the concept of the “new mestiza” to call back to and push against the 9  —…Y entonces, coléricos, nos desposeyeron, nos arrebataron lo que habíamos atesorado: la palabra, que es el arca de la memoria. Desde aquellos días arden y se consumen con el leño en la hoguera. Sube el humo en el viento y se deshace. Queda la ceniza sin rostro. Para que puedas venir tú y el que es menor que tú y les baste un soplo, solamente un soplo… —No me cuentes ese cuento, nana. —¿Acaso hablaba contigo? ¿Acaso se habla con los granos de anís? Author’s translation. 10  In Unclaimed Experience (2016), Cathy Caruth defines the structure of trauma as that of an accident “that comes too soon to be expected” and that leaves behind the address of a wound whose voice cannot be fully known, translated, but exists to be witnessed.

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nationalistic idea of the mestizo in writings of twentieth-­century philosophers such as José Vasconcelos. In the preface to her text, Anzaldúa describes: La mestiza is a product of the transfer of cultural and spiritual values of one group to another. Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of the dark-skinned mother listen to? (Anzaldúa 78)

The figure of the new mestiza, a figure of racial, linguistic, and gendered multiplicities, and the figure of the dark-skinned woman are yoked together in Anzaldúa’s writing and bonded to a history of violence, internal and external, that intergenerationally disperses itself at the site of the borderland. Of course, Anzaldúa’s concept does not sufficiently encapsulate the intricacies of the material and immaterial realities faced by indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere. Concepts such as the “new mestiza” may nonetheless  provide, however, a space for confronting that history of violence. A transpacific phenomenology acts as a confrontational concept. We might say that Castellanos, like Lee, begins with a body that loses itself to a tenuous relationship with language. Rather than securing her place within it, the gendered and racialized body becomes an object that moves in history alongside other objects of a history of the unthought, nonencountered. It is a body that confronts its own erasures. The experience is one of crisis—the crisis of never finding one’s place in the world, of not being given a place in one’s language. But it is a crisis that nonetheless turns the body back to the thing that rejects it, allowing confrontations with a litany of mechanisms of objectification: the heteropatriarchal nation-state, race, ethnicity, colonialism, modernity, sexual difference, and so on. All of these are mechanisms through which tsubuyaki (murmurs) and musitaciones (murmurs) remain, latent and bubbling in the voices that orient a geopolitics around wounds that cannot be located, fixed, and that remain beyond the context of the present. In this sense, it is the role of the listener, as Castellanos emphasizes in Mujer que sabe latín, to pivot herself toward a relationship of responsibility, of understanding, and of being in dialogue with those wounds.

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At the Ends: Misdirections as Re-directions Throughout this chapter, I have noted the role of directionality in articulating a transpacific phenomenology. I develop this schema by engaging, in particular, transnational feminist conceptualizations of perception, temporality, orientation, and affect. Affect can be understood as that which acts not on individuals but on ways of being in the world and those worlds themselves. In this regard, the transpacific is an affective figure that lends itself to a phenomenological structure of observing, perceiving, and embodying ways to respond to patterns that direct us away from the frames of area, region, and nation. Feminist approaches can mobilize phenomenology to draw attention to the ways that “power moves our bodies and our lives” (Weiss et al. 2019: xiii) by focusing on modes of embodiment experienced as marginal. In the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2013 [1945]), the body is successful if it can extend itself through objects and act on and in the world. As Sara Ahmed (2006) discusses, phenomenology is primarily interested in the question of the body and therefore allows for a queer approach to intersubjective embodiment. Bodies exist in the world as sites of affect, feeling, and sensory perception and experience. They allow us to understand and take in the world. Bodies affect how we exist, how we experience being in the world. A discussion of the phenomenological approach to thinking about “being-in-the-world” informs our understanding of the figure of the transpacific. Nahum Chandler, through his critical readings of W. E. B. Du Bois’s phenomenology of race, helps us recall that a transpacific parallax is crucial to the concept of double consciousness. In “On the Virtues of Seeing—At Least, But Never Only—Double” (2012), Chandler argues that addressing, for example, African American political and philosophical thought requires understanding and developing a narrative about global political relations. He turns to references of Japan in Du Bois’s intellectual production to argue that a parallactic view of history is “persistent and densely interwoven” in his work to question the possibility of a transformative contemporary moment, wherein, in particular, racial differences can garner a “whole other understanding” (Chandler 2012, 1–2). The motif of double sight and perception gives Chandler’s analysis its significance and depth, as the duplicity of the parallax—the effect that displacement has on the appearance of an object viewed along multiple lines of sight—yields to a project of highlighting the movement of critical references. We can propose, through Chandler, that the parallax is key to a transpacific

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phenomenology, as it garners a transformative recalibration of how we understand, speak of, and study categories of difference and disparity. Similarly, Anne McKnight (2011), writing on the work of the burakumin writer Nakagami Kenji, employs Karatani Kojin’s elaborations on the concept of the parallax and Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” to emphasize how the question of perspective shapes and disturbs models of difference and subject-­making.11 In other words, a transpacific phenomenology displaces a proscriptive view of categorical differences and trains us to redirect critique to the way that an object in question or a “problem”—in this case, race—appears anew from a different line of perception. In view of the parallactic effects of the transpacific, I argue that a transpacific phenomenology acts as a confrontational concept. We can say that Castellanos and Lee begin with a body that loses itself to a relationship with language. Rather than securing her place in both their works, the female subject and her body become objects that move in history alongside other historical objects. The experience of this movement is one of displacement but not of crisis—in fact, an insistence on refusing a place in the world is what propels me to juxtapose the dynamics of their texts as giving life to a critical phenomenology of race, gender, liminality, and borderscapes. A transpacific phenomenology turns the body back to the thing that rejects it and allows confrontations with a litany of oppressive mechanisms—the nation-state, colonialism, modernity—to forge new grounds on which to proceed. The concept of a transpacific phenomenology, no doubt, emerges within a certain historical horizon. My reading here is indebted to the critical work of writers, scholars, and activists who locate new modalities from which to consider the longue durée of coloniality’s role in the production of knowledge. Yên Lê Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama (2017) have usefully summarized the function of transpacific framework through the concept of entanglement. “Transpacific entanglements” include, they write, “historical and ongoing settler logics of invasion, removal, and seizure continuously articulate[d] with other forms of appropriation and subjugation”  (175). Though Lê Espiritu, Lowe, and Yoneyama write explicitly on the context of the US settler-colonial logic and its historical and present impact on racial capitalism and the overseas US neo-colonial military-industrial complex that plays a crucial role for 11  I thank the editors for directing me to McKnight’s insightful discussion in Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (2011).

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transpacific critique, the concept of entanglement complicates the naturalization of a US American centrality within the transpacific framework. Giving theoretical coherence to the transpacific through the framework of critical phenomenology, my aim is not to rupture or break or even fully refuse the implicit space that the United States takes up but, rather, to speak to what is at stake in dwelling on its centrality when speaking on transpacific relations. While it is (as it must be) impossible to ignore the consequences of area studies and its afterlives, neither is it possible to leave their impact unaddressed. In just the last couple of years, forums for reassessing and adjusting the mission of area studies—usually Asian studies— have introduced an array of questions, both productive and reductive, to imagine “area” as a valid figure to cohere conversations across disciplines and ideologies. While interdisciplinarity, as it is imagined in today’s neoliberal university, has its merits, those who champion a reinvigoration of, for instance, Japanese studies seem to imagine a field that can overcome its figures of what Wynter terms “enchantment” while updating itself to the actualities that it for so long rebuffed. Instead, a transpacific phenomenology addresses precisely the experiences of refusal, rejection, and negation by thinking from within the position of being out of place—of the murmur, the parallactic manazashi that generates disorientation and re-directs, even misdirects, accepted arrangements. And yet, I insist, it allows us to arrive and lets things stay in place. Our disciplinary worlds can reform from displacement and disorientation; the transpacific offers a site of recovery. The question that remains, however, is what is at the ends of the force of its critique? By showing how we are stuck by attending histories, ideologies, and their discourses without pivoting our eyes and ears to their murmurs, we can open the possibility of a change in habit for critical inquiry. Without displacing our attentions, we risk the failure of understanding the possibilities of the murmurs we inherit. Without attending to that possibility, we are left simply wishing for the rebirth of enchanting, violent objects that ought to remain behind us.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Durham: Duke University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bachner, Andrea. 2017. Violent Media, Chinese Fantasies: Salvador Elizondo’s ‘Execution by Shooting in China.’ Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3 (2): 17–33.

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Caruth, Cathy. 2016 [1996]. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Castellanos, Rosario. 2001 [1954]. Balún-Canán, ed. Dora Sales. Madrid: Catedra. ———. 2010 [1973]. Mujer que sabe latín… Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Chandler, Nahum. 2012. A Persistent Parallax: On the Writings of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois on Japan and China, 1936–1937. CR: The New Centennial Review 12 (1): 291–316. Chow, Rey. 2006. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham: Duke University Press. Cortés, Enrique. 1980. Relaciones entre México y Japón durante el Porfiriato. Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores. Gabrakova, Dennitza. 2015. Queering Shame and the Wound of Ethnicity. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 48 (1): 99–114. Husserl, Edmund. 2017 [1913]. Ideas. Eastford: Martino Fine Books. Jones, Ann Rosalind. 1981. Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of ‘L’Ecriture Feminine. Feminist Studies 7 (2): 247–263. Kim, Junyoung Verónica. 2017. Asia-Latin America as Method: The Global South Project and the Dislocation of the West. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3 (2): 97–117. King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Lê Espiritu, Yen, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa Yoneyama. 2017. Transpacific Entanglements. In Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy Schlund-Vials and Viet Thanh Nguyen, 174–189. New York: Fordham University Press. Lee, Chonghwa. 1998. Tsubuyaki no seiji shiso— ̄ motomerareru manazashi, soshite himerareta mono e no. Tokyo: Seidosha. Lee, Chonghwa, Rebecca Jennison, and Brett de Bary. 2015. Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lee-DiStefano, Debbie, and Zelideth Maria Rivas, eds. 2016. Imagining Asia in the Americas. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lorde, Audre. 2007 [1984]. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–114. Berkeley: Crossing Press. McKnight, Anne. 2011. Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mendoza, Andrea. 2017. Nonencounter as Relation: Cannibals and Poison Women in the Consumption of Difference. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3 (2): 118–143. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Rich, Adrienne. 1972. When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision. College English 34 (1): 18–30. Sakai, Naoki. 2001. “The Dislocation of the West,” in “Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation”. In Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation, ed. Naoki Sakai and Yukiko Hanawa, 71–91. Ithaca: Cornell University. Shih, Shumei. 2019. Racializing Area Studies, Defetishizing China. positions: asia critique 27 (1): 33–65. Torres Rodríguez, Laura. 2019. Orientaciones Transpacíficas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ukai, Satoshi. 2001. The Future of an Affect: The Historicity of Shame. Trans. Sabu Kohso. In Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation, ed. Naoki Sakai and Yukiko Hanawa, 3–36. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Walker, Gavin, and Naoki Sakai. 2019. The End of Area. positions: asia critique 27 (1): 1–31. Weiss, Gail, Gayle Salamon, and Ann V. Murphy. 2019. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1987. On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond. Cultural Critique 7: 207–244. Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific. American Quarterly 68 (3): 471–482.

CHAPTER 3

Decolonial Notes on How to Do Research on International Migrations in the World-System Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau and Gennaro Avallone

Introduction Migration, as a social phenomenon, has always existed in the history of mankind. In fact, because of the natural impulse of human beings to move toward new territories, our species spread all across the world (Jones and Eric 2011). Every population movement, however, has been unique, not only because of the historical moment in which it occurred but also because the places of origin, transit, and destination, as well as each

Y. Molinero-Gerbeau (*) University Institute on Migration Studies (IUEM), Comillas University, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] G. Avallone Department of Politics and Social Studies, University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_3

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driving force, have been specific to each migration. The heterogeneous amalgamation of factors that influence migration processes is complex. Migration must be examined in its context if we are to holistically understand its social and political implications (Massey et al. 1998). Migration studies have traditionally oscillated between, on the one hand, specific contextual research based on the principle that each migration is unique and, on the other, the construction of macro-theories that provide common theoretical tools with which to approach these analyses (King 2012). This chapter is part of the second effort. Starting with a critique of hegemonic theoretical models, particularly the push-and-pull approach, and combining Abdelmalek Sayad’s and Frantz Fanon’s with Wallerstein’s structuralism, we intend to offer a framework for carrying out migratory studies from a decolonial perspective. According to Sayad (2004), hegemonic theories have approached migration from the point of view of immigration states that were generally colonial powers conforming to the core of the capitalist world-system in the so-called postcolonial world. Thus, by using the categories created by these states to analyze migration, researchers have tended to reproduce a vision that, masked by scientism, has only reaffirmed the hierarchical world order. The very category of immigrant, for instance, and the naturalization of an undefined temporariness linked to permanent visa renewal are elements that show the language of core states permeating research and defining its methodological tools (Raimondi 2016). Based on Wallerstein’s (2000) assertion that the structure organizing international relations from the sixteenth century to the present has been shaped by global capitalism, we seek to identify its links with migration and migration studies to propose an explanatory framework severing this relationship of dependence. The chapter is organized as follows. First, we briefly review the historical link between global capitalism and migration. Second, we reveal the way social sciences have traditionally approached research on international migration, noting how categories and studies have functioned to reproduce the world-system and the centrality of the state. Third, we highlight postcolonial and decolonial theories, such as those exposed by Sayad and Fanon, to deconstruct the capitalist hegemonic perspective. Fourth, we present a theoretical framework to liberate migrations (Avallone 2018) from the state-centric epistemology of the core of the world-system. Finally, we outline the main conclusions of this chapter.

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Historical Capitalism and Migrations The capitalist system is much more than an economic, social, and political model. It is, as the structuralist theories of Wallerstein, Arrighi, and Braudel have pointed out, a global system that has governed international relations from the sixteenth century to the present (Arrighi and Moore 2001). This transnational dimension was identified by Fernand Braudel (1996), who argued that the capitalist model of accumulation transcended the framework of states and formed what he called a world-economy. However, its expansion over time into former colonies and, more recently, into the former Soviet bloc at the end of the twentieth century, has shown how it is more like a world-system (Wallerstein 2004). The global dimension of capitalism is inherent to its function as it is a system whose logic of infinite accumulation of capital requires constant geographical expansion (Harvey 1975). This is because the sources of surplus value tend to be exhausted over time, implying that new production of techniques, populations, territories, and raw materials have to be appropriated to maintain the cycles of accumulation (Moore 2015). If capitalism is a world-system, then the behaviors of the multiplicity of actors it comprises, such as states, companies, markets, international organizations, and individuals, play a structural role in its functioning (Šubrt 2017). That is, as capitalist logic is the very source of power, actors interact to maintain or improve their role in the system, which implies occupying a good position in global chains (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). As such, international movements are always strictly related to the world-system, exhibiting three possible types of action. First, some movements may be produced to guarantee the continuity of the processes of accumulation. For instance, the colonial race was a systemic movement to expand the core’s surplus-value accumulation by dominating those areas belonging to the external arena (whose principal economic activities were still not related to the world-system). Second, other movements are collateral effects of the initial movements. They are related to the world-system but not directly produced to guarantee accumulation. Migration is one example: the core’s domination in the periphery implies dependence; therefore, societies belonging to these areas, by remaining in the lowest positions in the system, suffer from inequality and insecurity, leading some parts of the population to migrate to the core. Third, counter-system movements may exist, where actors transnationally unite against capitalism, such as the anti-globalization movement. These

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three international movements are different in nature but related to the world-system, meaning that they all play a structural role in shaping global capitalism (Molinero-Gerbeau 2019). Within this structure, the very constitution of the world-system and the movements of its actors have historically changed. Arrighi and Moore (2001) define historical phases of accumulation, marking a periodic outline of the great systemic movements experienced by global capitalism. For instance, the cycle of British domination of the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century was characterized by industrialization at the productive level and by the colonial conquest of the system’s periphery at the territorial level. In today’s neoliberalism, the structural adjustment plans imposed on the periphery (Cooper 2002) and the establishment of a global market are two of the most characteristic systemic movements oriented toward cumulative expansion (Moore 2014). These movements have had a remarkable impact on human communities, either by displacing and dispossessing populations to organize new productive enclaves (Araghi 2009) or by promoting mobility to ensure the availability of cheap labor (Moore 2015). As migrations are a transnational phenomenon, they fulfill a systemic function, with a large part of them directly driven or conditioned by the world-system’s structure. This can be seen through significant historical migrations. Molinero-Gerbeau (2017), for instance, pointed out how some of the mass migrations during the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial periods were all connected with the world-system structure. During the colonial period, the massive movement of slaves, which is, of course, a type of forced migration, in Africa and Asia sought to provide unpaid labor to colonial productive enclaves—a central source of accumulation in that period. The industrial period experienced a metabolic rift, and industrialization in core countries proletarianized rural labor, which was displaced to work in factories located in and around cities (Clark and Foster 2009). In the post-industrial period, migrants from the global periphery are recruited (in some states) through temporary migration programs aimed at providing cheap labor for sectors lacking workforce, such as agriculture (Molinero-Gerbeau and Avallone 2016). These cases are clear and highly representative of how global capitalism, historically and currently, stands as an explanatory structural framework for understanding international migrations. Today, a large part of the migration debate led by institutions such as the International Organization of Migration revolves around the control of who moves from the core to

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the periphery. This is a systemic discussion whose objective is to control and limit the free mobility of people circumscribing it to the needs of the world-system (Adamson and Tsourapas 2019). Temporary migration programs, such as Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (Yoshida 2020) and New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme (Prochazkova 2013), show how core states deliberately articulate tools to limit entry to only those workers required by certain productive sectors (Molinero-­ Gerbeau 2020). This suggests that migratory controls aim to block free mobility, limiting migration to the productive needs of the world-system. Migration is not considered a human right by states and international organizations; thus, people are not allowed to freely move across the globe (Oberman 2019). Migrations are primarily and essentially limited by migratory laws whose migratory utilitarianism logic only responds to labor needs or the needs to maintain accumulation cycles of the world-system. Although capitalism is the structural frame behind these types of migrations, the migration debate in academia has tended to be depoliticized (Pécoud 2015), as though to ensure a greater degree of scientism. Migration analyses tend to examine economic variables or legal aspects, while the grounds for migration, or the structural logics driving mobility, are too often naturalized. However, some authors, such as Sayad (2004), mention the importance of understanding the functioning of the world-­ system for a holistic comprehension of migration processes. The structuralist paradigm is usually mentioned as one of the main analytical perspectives in works that compile relevant theoretical frameworks for migration (Massey et al. 1998). However, beyond some specific efforts (Jones and Eric 2011; Barber and Lem 2018), it has usually occupied a marginal place in the discipline. Migration analysis from a world-system perspective requires an understanding of structural and historical macro-processes with a decisive influence on international migrations. In short, it allows us to understand the historical link between capitalism and migration, breaking with those frameworks that, by naturalizing the structure, prevent a holistic understanding of this phenomenon. This new understanding is not intended to indicate that all research on migration should be structural. Rather, it aims to show that by knowing the context, research can be conducted from more emancipatory positions, breaking with the epistemological implicit consensus produced by core states. Transgressing these assumptions may help to liberate migrations from the capitalist optic and produce migrant-­ centered analysis instead of the currently dominant core-state-centered

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ones. It must be pointed out that the structuralist framework does not deny individual agency and migration as a social movement but, as indicated by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013), implies knowing the rules and limits of action within which individuals migrate.

How Migrations Have Been Studied in the Social Sciences Hegemonic paradigms in migration studies have tended to naturalize the structure of the world-system and its effects (Sayad 2004). Among them, the hydraulic model (push-pull) and liberal theories (interdependence model) stand out. Other theoretical proposals that have emerged as a critique of these perspectives, such as transnationalism and the new mobilities paradigm, have also had a notable impact on the discipline. The hydraulic model includes some of the most widespread theories in migration studies, such as the neoclassical economic approach (Todaro 1969), the new economics of migration (Stark 1984), and the segmented labor market theory (Piore 1977). These perspectives dominated the discipline for decades (Massey et al. 1998) and were characterized by postulates based on economism that understood migrations as flows. The central axis of these studies consisted of observing the phenomenon from the perspective of immigration societies to understand beneficial methods of regulating and managing migration. This economicistic approach led to the emergence of theories whose emphasis on certain social aspects of migration was intended to broaden the scope of the hydraulic model. They significantly impacted the discipline, to the extent that they could also be considered hegemonic (Massey et al. 1998), as well-known theories such as the social capital theory (Loury 1977) and the cumulative causation theory (Massey 1990) were adopted by a large part of the research community. Both theories are part of the liberal paradigm, as, in line with theories of interdependence in international relations (Keohane and Nye 1977), they focus on elucidating how migrations generated interconnections between the territories of origin and destination, becoming an autonomous phenomenon out of state control. Despite highlighting the fact that international migrations were more complex than simply flows of people driven by economic interests, liberal perspectives, such as push-pull models, naturalized capitalism and its inherent inequality by

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assuming that flows from the periphery to the core were the outcome of rational acts driven by individuals or groups. Focusing on social factors and giving greater weight to individual autonomy within these processes, the transnational paradigm emerged in the 1990s to point out how migrants generated social fields between their territories of origin and destination (Glick Schiller et al. 1992). Despite its innovative character and the significant support that it received from the academic community, the authors of the paradigm deliberately positioned themselves against the world-system perspective, accusing it of overshadowing the importance of states in international migration processes. Interestingly, other international relations authors accused Wallerstein (2000) of the opposite, that is, of giving too much importance to states, indicating that these critiques were more ideological than theoretical. The naturalization of the global capitalist structure was evident in transnationalism; therefore, their perspective did not consider at any point that the world-system’s configuration could affect migrations. The new mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006) seemed to solve this problem by exposing a critical framework in which the world-system structure is the main factor behind the states’ behavior in controlling population movements. By incorporating elements such as the unequal distribution of power shaping core-periphery dynamics into its theoretical framework, this paradigm was the initial step toward understanding the link between capitalism and migrations from an international and historical perspective. However, as other researchers have noted (Kalir 2013), we believe that this paradigm reproduced some of the discipline’s epistemological problems, such as adopting the flows’ perspective (denying the individual autonomy of migrants) and reifying the role of the state. As can be seen, the main paradigms of migration studies have naturalized the structure of the world-system, adopting perspectives that are either functional to the interests of the core states or ignore capitalism as the main driving force behind population movements. Furthermore, perspectives that have incorporated this framework, such as the new mobilities paradigm, have not managed to overcome epistemological problems involved in adopting analytical categories that were originally produced by immigration states. Our epistemological proposal rejects these assumptions in favor of the framework set out in the second section of this chapter and incorporating the main elements of decolonial thought, discussed below. The aim is to

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liberate migrations (Avallone 2018) from the restrictive framework in which they have traditionally been analyzed.

Liberating Migrations: Decolonial Thought Migration studies are driven by a core-state-centric approach that privileges the host society’s point of view, determining a hierarchy of interests and questions marginalizing migrants, who should be the center of attention. This produces a condition similar to the colonial one, where the colonial power’s interests are central, including knowledge production, as this maximizes power to control political, economic, and symbolic resources. Therefore, reproducing state thought, which is also the thought of the formerly colonizing states, implies reproducing a colonial view of migrants. Colonization prolongs its presence in immigration since its effects “for the most parts, outlived the cause that has generated them” (Sayad 2004, 296–297). This is true not only for migration toward colonizing countries, particularly France or the United Kingdom, as Sayad and other scholars have shown (Bouamama and Tevanian 2014; Gilroy 1993; Grosfoguel 2003; Webb et al. 2020). It is also true in the case of contemporary transpacific migration, influenced by colonial heritage and imaginary, such as, for example, the case of Chinese migration to the American continent studied by Lee (2018), because “cultural constructions of Chineseness imbedded Chinese migrants with racial difference, designating Asians as a yellow race, which also constructed a racial opposition to whiteness” (10). From an epistemological point of view, this type of relationship reproduces the centrality of the ruling society’s perspective. In other words, migrations are observed from the position of the stronger society within the international division of labor and power in the world-system. This constitutes an ethnocentric position, as it privileges some societies over others and some human beings over others, contributing to reducing knowledge to questions defined by immigration states and society. Social conditions, lives, and relations of migrants do not have priority in public and scientific debates, as their presence in the immigration context is analyzed by subordinating studies to problems and interests of the host society. An epistemological relation of the colonial type is thus posed, in which research is conducted “through the imperial eyes” (Tuhiwai 1999, pp. 42–57). This is similar to colonizer and explorer perspectives, who looked for the indigenous “other” through their objective and

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neutral observation, which they assumed as the only true one, ignoring societies’ definitions of themselves. As Chandra Mohanty (1988) has recognized in the case of white Euro-American feminism toward non-­Western women, the object of study, including migration, may be constructed through a Western perspective and, in a more comprehensive sense, through the dominant perspective of the world-system’s core. Thus, the heterogeneity of subjects is reduced to the condition of a monolithic object through dominant representations and power relations. In this sense, the white eye is the dominant one that is proposed as universal, general, and neutral, characterized by being the manifestation of a reason that is placed beyond any place, time, and space (Mignolo 2010). In this critical epistemological framework, Sayad’s (2004) analysis proposed a critique of universal reason and its imperialism (Bourdieu 2005), choosing to avoid starting with general and abstract questions, such as integration, which benefit states located in the core in a position of superior force. The focus, then, is to study the concrete and specific level of migrants’ lives, building an inverse methodological movement, going from the particular to the universal. This methodological orientation can also be found in Fanon, who likewise rejects the abstract universal, as noted by Grosfoguel (2009). Sayad’s and Fanon’s approaches converge in their questioning of the imperialism of the universal by refusing to perceive migration processes and racial relations from the core state’s perspective, which embodies the universal, general, and objective. Their proposal, on the contrary, starts from the concrete, specific, and particular, recognizing the centrality of subjects and histories that form this material reality. This epistemological perspective suggests that questioning the universal means questioning state thought founded on the universal, even if it is a partiality that becomes a totality building a hierarchy of perspectives and placing the universal at the top and the particular at the bottom. The critique of the universal implies a critique of epistemological hierarchies, as it rejects the idea that the observation of social reality is possible without restrictions to place or geopolitical and body-politics of knowledge. However, all knowledge is localized, though “Eurocentric epistemology carefully hides … its own geo-historical and biographical locations in the historical experience of social sciences” (Mignolo 2010, 10–11).1 Recognizing this could help situate knowledge (including one’s own), 1  Original text: “la epistemología eurocentrada esconde (…) cuidadosamente (…) sus propias ubicaciones geo-históricas y biográficas.”

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thus favoring a reflexive practice that can contribute to transcending epistemological and methodological assumptions naturalized in social research. This follows participant objectification that allows ethnologists to observe beliefs and rites of others “making himself the master and possessor of his own rites and beliefs” (Bourdieu 1990, 292). Recognizing that each investigation is developed from a specific position allows one to question both the supposed objectivity of the view and the observer/observed relationship in migration research. This is fundamental if we concede that society is divided into two parts asymmetrically located by universal thought. Sayad and Fanon studied this division, choosing to place themselves, although in different positions, on the side of those who have historically been externally observed. According to Sayad, this means that they have been located in the “no-area,” which incorporates those who do not belong to the nation, the non-nationals, while for Fanon it is the “non-being area” containing those who are part of subordinate humanity. This is the non-white people area, represented by those who have had to ask themselves whether they were men after colonial conquest (Fanon 1986). The separation between nationals and non-nationals in state-thought has similar effects to the separation between whites and non-whites identified by Fanon as a characteristic of modern colonial societies, where “it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence” (Fanon 1967, 28). The state, likewise, brings the immigrant into existence. Both separations—that produced by the state and that produced by racist colonial social structures— are constitutive of modernity and the power relations that define relations with the interiorized others, constructed as those who do not belong or belong in a subordinate way, as they are located outside the national order (as non-nationals) or outside the order of being (as non-whites). This context questions the possibility of applying analytical objectivity, as knowledge production reproduces categories that are inherited by a social world (the world-system) based on a hierarchical division functional to the core’s accumulation. The separation between populations has methodological consequences, as it does not merely obey geographical criteria but defines epistemological geopolitics that constructs different subjects and social realities. This cultural, political, and epistemological separation produces the body-politics of, on the one hand, the legitimate, dominant, and central zone and, on the other, the non-legitimate, dominated, and marginal zone. Body-politics are linked to concrete ways of thinking and being thought, knowing that the hierarchy between areas and their

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relative body-politics produce a hierarchy in the knowledge elaborated within them. The “area of being” is the subject with cogito and logos, while the “area of non-being” is the object of the thought of others. On the epistemological level, this translates into a coloniality of knowledge and gazes (who is looking at whom?) and in a hierarchy of questions and interests of observation (why look at others?), where the dominant part observes, to reproduce its interests and categories, while the dominated part, which is in the “no zone,” is observed. The construction of the world-system is based on a hierarchical separation between “us” and the “others,” whose final objective is ensuring the continuity of core-oriented accumulation processes, based on the coloniality of power, that is “the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the most important dimensions of global power” (Quijano 2000, 533). This affects the epistemological level, as belonging to the national order of core states or “zone of being” poses legitimate questions. In contrast, if one thinks from the “zone of non-being,” non-legitimate questions are posed, as they are not legitimized by political, social, and epistemological power relations. Social and intellectual hierarchies are thus correlated, since the former organize the latter, characterizing social sciences that follow tradition distinguishing between noble and ignoble objects of study (Sayad 1990). Migration studies are developed within this intellectual hierarchical structure, as they refer to an ignoble, inferior, and vulgar object. This is an expression of the “no zone” and, therefore, will always be suspected of reproducing common sense and the current social and epistemic hierarchies by “doing a colonizer’s work or an immigration-society’s work” (Sayad 1990, 21).2 From a decolonial perspective, this means that a neutral way of observation does not exist. Observation always depends on a specific perspective and, therefore, on a historical, social, and academic position in the relations of the world-system, as is evident through statistical data concerning migrations, an expression of the so-called “scientific objectivity and neutrality.” This can be verified with data considered objective, such as the nationality of origin of migrants, which does not describe socio-historical specificities of socio-territorial contexts from which migrants move or hide

2

 Original text: “faire un travail de colonisateurr ou un travail-de société d’immigration.”

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or specifics of the location, such as rural, urban, metropolitan, core, and peripheral areas: Much of the data, and even data that might be described as scientific, or produced and used by science, does not escape the logic of the discourse invoked to justify and legitimize the phenomenon or, on the contrary, to condemn it and to denounce its illegitimacy. (Sayad 2004, 303)

Fanon (1986) has been an explicit protagonist of this epistemological perspective, assuming an approach that recognizes this impossibility: “in this work, I have made it a point to convey the misery of the Black man. Physically and affectively. I have not wished to be objective. Besides, that would be dishonest: it is not possible for me to be objective” (86). His epistemological proposal does not coincide with a radical skepticism or an absolute subjectivism but assumes that knowledge is produced from a certain perspective. This, to him, means transforming the geopolitics and the body-politics of knowledge “beyond the coloniality of power, knowledge and being” (Grosfoguel 2009, 360).3 In the case of migrants, this perspective is found in their otherness, which produces a gap between their construction by the state and the concrete, their physically present bodies, thus becoming “without realizing it, the true deconstructors of the Western epistemological and political subject” (Raimondi 2016, 44).4 This proposal changes the relationship between the observed and the observer coherent in the perspective of Tuhiwai (1999), who explored the critical practices of ethnocentrism by pursuing the objective of decolonizing research methodologies. If we take the case of the Maori people and invert their traditional role from the object of research to researchers, we affirm their knowledge as valid and question the knowledge produced by exogenously applying Western classifications and generalizations. This case questions the coloniality of knowledge, identifying the Eurocentric and Western-centric construction of a part of humanity that places its historical-cultural specificity as a superior and universal reference pattern and is transformed by this knowledge colonizing device into the normal form of the human being and society. It converts “the other forms of being, the other forms of organization of  Original text: “más allá de la colonialidad del poder, del saber y del ser.”  Original text: “a sua insaputa, come il vero decostruttore del soggetto epistemologico e politico occidentale.” 3 4

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society, the other forms of knowledge (…) into lacking, archaic, primitive, traditional, pre-modern forms” (Lander 2000, 10).5 Breaking with these ideas, other rules of knowledge production can be proposed, abandoning what Mignolo (2009, 322) and Maturana (1988) call objectivity without parentheses—“the separate existence of the enunciate and the statement, the subject and the object”6—and opening thought to objectivity in parentheses, that is, to the coexistence of different epistemologies and ontologies, going beyond epistemological hierarchies. This process of deconstruction allows criticism of categories produced by Eurocentric frameworks (or core-centric frameworks), recognizing them as words of state assumed as a reference in migration studies. In this sense, the concept of assimilation constitutes a paradigmatic example, referring to the idea that becoming a national of the immigration nation-state is an incontrovertible positive fact. This reflects that the partial and specific attributes recognized by the state express imperialism of the universal. Integration is another category that reflects the universalization of the partial: “a loaded notion” (Sayad 2004, 221) and a “discourse designed to produce a truth-effect” (Sayad 2004, 217). This is also active in the relationship between whites and non-whites studied by Fanon, where social science is confused with myth because it is a discourse that combines two conflicting principles of coherence: on the one hand, the self-proclaimed scientific-looking coherence that is officially asserted by multiple external signs of scientificity and by the production of pseudo-technical (or bureaucratic) arguments; on the other, a hidden coherence with a mythical basis. (Sayad 2004, 217)

Integration is comparable with the asymptotic curve of the exponential function, as each non-national individual has to chase after it, but the closer they get, the more national people and institutions tell them it is insufficient. This metaphor highlights the incomplete trend that influences the migrant subject who lives the very impossibility of reaching the goal of integration. This same situation is also experienced by the former colonized, as Fanon notes: subjects defined, like migrants, by denial, as 5  Original text: “las otras formas de ser, las otras formas de organización de la sociedad, las otras formas del saber (…) en carentes, en arcaicas, primitivas, tradicionales, premodernas.” 6  Original text: “la existencia separada del enunciante y el enunciado, el sujeto y el objeto.”

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members of the non-being zone, as people who are always missing something, whose integration is an impossible outcome. Analyzing the conditions of migrants in host societies through core-state categories such as assimilation and integration predetermines the understanding of the phenomenon, as it orients research toward cognitive objectives that are those of the states and societies of immigration, obscuring migrants’ living conditions and life trajectories. State-thought and colonial heritage continue to reproduce the being/ non-being dichotomy, organizing the ways of researching and producing knowledge regarding migrations. They determine a reproduction of the epistemological approach that privileges categories and state words in the understanding of migrations, confirming that the discourse on the immigrant and immigration is an imposed discourse (Sayad 2006). Transcending state words and the concepts produced throughout colonial relations is a fundamental condition for liberating migration studies from issues and questions predetermined by the world-system’s power relations between peoples, geopolitical areas, and races. It is at this point that a “migrant-­ centered” approach becomes particularly relevant.

Decolonizing International Migration Studies As seen throughout this chapter, studies on migration have historically been constructed as state knowledge, beginning with the immigration state’s perspective, using and reproducing its categories, and imposing its questions. Thus, a modality of ethnocentric and colonial knowledge production has become hegemonic, founded on a set of geopolitical, racial, and epistemic hierarchies operational to the world-system’s way of functioning. The critique of the constitutive aspects of this type of knowledge, based on questioning the universal, the object-subject and researcher-researched relationship, and the categories predetermined by the state, must therefore propose an alternative model of migration research that moves from a critique of both core-state-centrism and coloniality of power and knowledge. The value of Sayad’s proposal lies in elaborating an epistemological framework on which all theories that break with state thought can be based, giving rise to a new sociology of migrations (Gil Araujo 2010). In our case, and in line with Fanon’s theories, we propose a migrant-centric approach in opposition to the ethnocentric-core-state approach that has permeated the hegemonic theories of migration studies.

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This epistemological alternative is based on the recognition of migration as a total social fact. This means both recognizing that who migrates acts “with one’s history, (…) with one’s tradition, ways of living, feeling, acting and thinking, with one’s language, one’s religion and all the other social, political and mental structures of one’s society” (Sayad 2004, 3) and emphasizing that “to talk about immigration is to talk about society as a whole (…) but under the condition of not choosing, in a deliberate way, to mutilate (…) a part of him(her)self, the part related to emigration” (Sayad 2006, 7).7 A migrant-centered approach must start from the category of “total social fact,” recognizing migration as a phenomenon that crosses multiple social dimensions, from relations and reference groups to departure and arrival societies. Migration is defined as a totality. Conversely, the ethnocentric-core-state approach is based on the biographical division of migrants, reducing the societies (of emigration and immigration) to mere entities interested in the benefits that migrants can bring, disregarding the interests and needs of the people who migrate because they can be divergent from those of core states. To interpret migrations as a total social fact means assuming that each migratory experience is a multiform process, internal to the same biography, that influences people who migrate and who do not migrate in their totality and not in a divided way. Every migration experience is a totality and its reduction is both a cutback of people and a lessening of knowledge, since a part of the phenomenon is erased. Parts coinciding with those of interest to the immigration state are privileged, determining a new version of ethnocentrism by knowing “only what we are interested in knowing” (Sayad 2008, 14–15). This definition allows the proposal of “an analytical and methodological postulate that leads to address both the conditions in which an immigrant lives, and the social conditions that produce him/her as an emigrant” (Gil Araujo 2010, 243).8 People who migrate move with their whole lives and the world of social relations in which they are involved, introducing changes in both the society of emigration and immigration. Thinking about migration as a total social fact means assuming an epistemological 7  Original text: “parler de l’immigration, c’est parler de la société en son entier (…) mais à condition qu’on ne prenne pas délibérément le parti de mutiler cet objet d’une partie de luimême, la partie relative à l’émigration.” 8  Original text: “Un postulado analítico y metodológico que lleva a tratar al mismo tiempo las condiciones en las cuales vive un (a) inmigrante, y las condiciones sociales que lo producen como emigrante.”

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perspective that does not divide individuals into parts (exclusively as immigrants or exclusively as emigrants) and functions (demographic contribution or economic resources). It questions, as well, the separation on which migration studies have been built. Epistemologically, applying a migrant-centered approach means transcending instrumental analyses that observe migration as a demographic or economic fact. Recognizing it as a total social experience implies considering that individuals migrate with specific traditions, ways of life, languages, and political, cultural, and mental structures. Migrating means carrying out an “epistemological itinerary” (Sayad 2006, 6) that “reveals an order (…) for all the questions that can be asked about the migratory phenomenon in its totality (emigration and immigration)” (Sayad 2004, 63–64). Contemporarily, recognizing migrations as a total social fact implies going beyond the separation between emigration and immigration, studying socio-spatial mobility through the concept of migrations (emigration and immigration) and, therefore, of migrants (emigrants and immigrants). As such, the fictitious separation is overcome from the epistemological perspective, and the hierarchy between the knowledge produced on emigrations and the knowledge produced on immigration is avoided. The proposed migrant-centered approach recognizes the autonomy of migrations, unlike core-state-centered frameworks that base their studies only on some structural factors. These frameworks reproduce a passive image of migrants, assuming that they form an available workforce, without recognizing their agency, projects, and organizational capacities (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). As Moulier Boutang (2000) highlights, mobility cannot be reduced to a mere movement from one state to another but “must be seen as a collective behavior of escape, active and subjective rejection to exploitation, underdevelopment, and submission” (68),9 which are constitutive elements of the world-system’s functioning. In this sense, it should also be noted that Sayad’s approach not only places the migrants’ agency at the center of the analysis but also gives fundamental importance to the entire migratory itinerary. According to an interpretation of Sayad’s theory (Avallone 2018), recognizing the autonomy of migration means seeing it as a movement of people who have and

9  Original text: “va vista come un comportamento collettivo di fuga, di rifiuto attivo e soggettivo di un livello dato di sfruttamento, di sottosviluppo e di assoggettamento.”

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express interests, reasons, and ways of thinking that do not coincide with the immigration states’ political and economic interests. The ethnocentric-core-state approach is exclusively based on supposedly objective factors without recognizing the choices and, above all, the network of social and family relationships, feelings, expectations, and individual desires that can enable and influence migration. It should be noted that in the migrant-centered approach, the subjectivation of migrants does not imply assuming the methodological individualism perspective. This is an expression of a “methodological prejudice that consists of silencing or minimizing the part that the objective structures, that is, the relations between the forces that confront each other, assume in all social relations” (Sayad 2008, 101).10 Rather, it means identifying that migration also expresses an autonomy, in tension with the structures that condition them. For the migrant-centered approach, autonomy means that migrations do not adapt to the state’s view but rather exceed it, producing different ways of understanding, recognizing, and defining human spatial mobility. At the epistemological level, unlike other theoretical approaches that have conceded a certain autonomy to the migratory experience, the migrant-­ centered approach identifies the autonomy of the migration study object, whose questions and interests are guided by the migrant subjects and not by state thought. Sayad’s epistemological approach, therefore, begins with the need to overcome the scholastic division between subject and object, as well as with a different way of interpreting the structure-agency relationship, avoiding that the former defines migrations in a hegemonic way. The central point is not to deny the power and the conditioning factors determined by states in the configuration of migrations but to highlight the need of not applying state categories to analyze a phenomenon that cannot be explained by their vision and interests.

Conclusion The naturalization of state-thought (i.e., the core state’s thought) and state policies based on the separation between nationals and non-nationals reproduces the classification schemes applied by state structures automatically and unquestionably. The world divided between nationals and 10  Original text: “prejuicio de método que consiste en el hecho de acallar o minimizar la parte que las estructuras objetivas, es decir las relaciones entre las fuerzas que se confrontan, asumen en todas las relaciones sociales.”

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non-nationals is a world of borders, active both in the political life of states and inter-state relations and in the realm of symbolic representations and cognitive structures. In this context, borders act concretely, as they are reproduced daily, verified by a part of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers through the combined action of military and police structures, as well as in the objectified mental structures. The division of the world into states and borders, and of populations into nationals and non-nationals, is rarely questioned. It is strengthened through the continuous invention of rhetoric and ideologies, such as those that appeal to elements like common values or national interest. If a non-­ nationalist view is assumed, it is possible to recognize that these issues are political constructions for the benefit of specific economic, political, and social interests. These generally coincide with the dominant interests of the world-system’s core and therefore do not have a natural character. In particular, it is possible to understand the relationship between migrants and immigration societies and states only if we take into account the asymmetric hierarchies between geographical areas constructed by historical capitalism. Their relative geopolitical and geo-economic relations determine the different positions that each state (and, therefore, their populations) occupies in the international division of labor of the world-system. This position marks both their hierarchical status in global governance and that of their migrants, who will carry this symbolic weight in their places of destination: “the characteristics that establish immigration as a system include, first and foremost, the relations of domination that prevail at the international level” (Sayad 2004, 162). Power relations between states and economies are transmitted to actors of the migration process, reproducing the global hierarchies of power at the level of the logic of symbolic order (Sayad 2008), an expression of “the relationship between dominant and dominated, which is objectively inscribed in the relationship between countries of emigration and countries of immigration” (Sayad 2004, 126). The state thought and world-system power relations converge in the preservation of borders, a geographical, economic, and military construction that justifies war and the submission of certain territories to some forms of protectorate or imperialist/(neo)colonial governance. At the same time, it legitimizes police control and this proliferation of internal borders  – whether imaginary, symbolic, or a cover for economic and power struggles – and its corollary, the exacerbation

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of identification with particular localities, give rise to exclusionary practices, ‘identity closure’, and persecution, which, as seen, can easily lead to pogroms, even genocide. (Mbembe 2001, 87)

Questioning state and colonial thought changes the way scientific observation is organized and conducted without establishing a definitive indication on which methods should be used. A migrant-centered approach does not translate into a set of methods that exclude others but rather suggests the adoption of an epistemological view oriented to go beyond the ethnocentric-core-state approach. To transcend this approach and decolonize migration studies, researchers, also educated by state-­ thought (Raimondi 2016), have to reflect on the categories they use and their origin. Migrations, as well as borders, states, and international policies to control mobility, are political facts. They are the result of political decisions and power relations between states and people who migrate. This means that they are social constructs, and therefore, their categorization obeys historical-political factors that respond to the interests of the involved actors. Once the dichotomy between migrants and the state is revealed, which vision the approaches are based on must be questioned, leaving it to the researcher to decide which is more appropriate for a scientific analysis of this reality. We propose a migrant-centered approach, as it denatures the state and the structure of the world-system, pointing to their existence as exclusively political, like their practices, words, and borders. Based on this artificiality and the fact that state actions are an expression of internal (toward the society it administers) and international (in relation to the global capitalist structure and other states) power relations, taking a position on the side of migrants allows for deconstruction of power structures and therefore leads toward emancipatory research, in line with Fanon’s (1986) work. Core states, on the one hand, tend to discipline, select, and filter migrants continuously in order to influence and control their mobility, while, on the other hand, turning them into an analytical category that is functional to their interests. Dismantling their epistemology is the first step to both unveiling their arbitrary project and revealing the path to “liberate migrations.”

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———. 2008. Estado, nación e inmigración. El orden nacional ante el desafío de la inmigración. Apuntes de Investigación del CECYP 13: 101–116. Schiller, Glick, Linda Basch Nina, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1992. Towards a Transnational Perspective in Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645: 1–24. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2): 207–226. Stark, Oded. 1984. Migration Decision Making: A Review Article. Journal of Development Economics 14: 251–259. Šubrt, Jiri. 2017. Systems, Structures, and Functions. In The Perspective of Historical Sociology, ed. Jiri Šubrt, 117–154. Bingley: Emerald. Todaro, Michael P. 1969. A Model of Labour Migration and Urban Unemployment in Less-developing Countries. American Economic Review 59: 138–148. Tuhiwai, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. World-Systems Analysis. In The Essential Wallerstein, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein, 129–148. New York: The New Press. ———. 2004. The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy: Production, Surplus Value, and Polarization. In World-Systems Analysis. An Introduction, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein, 23–41. Durham: Duke University Press. Webb, Jack, Westmaas Roderick, Maria del Pilar, Kaladeen, and Tantam William. 2020. Memory, Migration and (De)colonization in the Caribbean and Beyond. London: University of London Press. Yoshida, Mai. 2020. The Indebted and Silent Worker: Paternalistic Labor Management in Foreign Labor Policy in Japan. June: Critical Sociology.

CHAPTER 4

Ocean Narratives: Fluxes of Commodities Across the Pacific in the Contemporary Age Antonio Ortega Santos

Introduction. Decolonial Studies: New Approaches from the Global South The central proposal of this chapter is based on examination of the processes of marine extractivism in the Pacific Area, with special focus on cases in Mexico and China with their respective socio-environmental interactions and material flows in historical and current perspectives. This focus is developed in considering how capitalist modernity has generated a commodification of natural goods on a global scale, which also affects marine ecosystems. For this reason, the epistemology hereby presented is based on decolonial studies as a tool for understanding the impact of territorial colonization along with the history in Pacific territories. Observing the impact of consumption of nature and the changes in living standards (territorial human extractivism) becomes useful in proposing new forms of non-extractivist large-scale territorial sustainability for the future.

A. O. Santos (*) University of Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_4

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Apart from offering new theoretical approaches, the main and central epistemology in this chapter comes from decolonial studies (Castro-­ Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007, 13), introduced as an element of reflection about the postcolonial age, denouncing the perverse mechanism by which, despite the factual creation of independent nation-states in Latin America, real decolonization has still not been achieved. Suggesting reflections about environmental (in)equity and environmental racism in historical perspective among other negative externalities of capitalism becomes essential paying attention to the paradigm of epistemologies of the South (Santos and Meneses 2014; Santos 2009) for those authors who have traditionally written about colonialism—in this case, focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean. Analysis of socio-environmental disputes means considering their impact on corporalities. This was an element proposed in the introductory chapter of El giro decolonial (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007). It suggests considerations regarding how coloniality has not yet been eradicated even after the official departure of colonial regimes.1 The modern colonial world-system is considered as a “structure paradigm” in which capitalism is developed while inserting patriarchal, state-, North- and Christian-centered elements. From this approach, it is necessary to rationalize hierarchies as the logical result of Eurocentrism (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007, 4). The European—Northern, I would say here—hegemonic paradigm of science has been constituted as universal. It omits, makes invisible, trivializes, and/or silences any “epistemic otherness.” This forced and oppressive silence was translated as imperial hegemony, identifying territorial knowledge simply as peripheral due to its exclusive universal dominant paradigm (Castro-Gómez in Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007, 83). Arturo Escobar’s (2014) proposal presents a series of epistemological challenges that cross our conceptual view of capitalist modernity. Modernization theory places us in a methodological certainty that assumes the benefits of capital, science, and technology. This is so especially from post-structuralist baggage in which the sures (Souths) were “invented,” 1  Coloniality could be understood as the result of unequal, racial and social appropriation of lands, bodies, and knowledges along the modern or contemporary age, driven to increase the ecological unbalance and debt from the North to the South, as result of a looting economy promoted by imperial forces to reinforce the world economy system with “cheap nature.”

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shaping reality as a strategy of cultural and social domination. Escobar (2014) establishes that it is necessary to question the practices of knowledge production and reproducing that involve the ideas of development (32). Facing the mirror of modernity, with its prism of ecocide-biocide civilizations, the decolonial approach emerges as a new research program in which post-capitalist and post-extractivist civilizations are an ethical imperative for a new social and political imaginary. The promise of decolonization includes the need to de-prioritize Europe’s needs, going beyond them in order to reconfigure a counter-hegemonic episteme that we could call a Pluriverse (Kothari et al. 2019). The institutional dimension of common pool resources—CPR—led to an in-depth exploration of the behaviors of human groups (Ostrom 1990, Ostrom and Schlager 1996, Ostrom et  al. 2000) in their relations with commodities from the perspective of economic exchanges in civilizational capitalism—that is, examination of the flows of demands of raw materials and energy. The imposition of a colonial system involved an integrated practice of intense appropriation throughout the nineteenth century that privatized resources, destructed CPR, and made consuetudinary customs disappear (Ortega Santos 2002, 2012, 2014, 2015). At this point of reflection, the power of capitalism and the impact of coloniality must be reviewed within the hierarchical classification produced by the dominant scientific episteme (Escobar 2016, 112). According to Santos (2010; Santos and Meneses 2014), modernity can still show alternatives for a new common future. However, these must be designed down-up, from the local ecology of the CPR, although suffering from territorial tensions due to the presence of colonial, political, or territorial power. The coloniality of territories (Ortega Santos and Olivieri 2020) has brought a “historical narrative” in which indigenous communities become subjected to the imprint of colonial modernity—which, in the best case, leads to non-existence, extermination, or exoticization. Besides working with ideas from decolonial studies, the first approach must be guided by measuring the impact of consumption using quantitative methodologies. Material and Energy Flow Accounting can provide us with such tools. Evaluating the impact of material flows can indicate the level of global inequality in Pacific areas, building up new socioecological transition models that follow the current scheme of natural resources extraction, at least at the local level (Scheidel et al. 2017; Temper et al. 2018; Camisani 2018). They are driven by changes in social metabolism, namely “the manner in which human societies organize their growing

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exchanges of energy and materials with the environment” (Martinez-Alier et al. 2010, 153). The focus is on the exchange between society and forms of energy, materials, and information in a territorial and spatial matrix across several scales, from local to global. Three types of metabolisms are presented and considered as moments in the development of humanity from a socioecological perspective: cinegetic metabolism, organic or agrarian metabolism, and industrial metabolism. Each type defines a social and ecological transmutation, becoming a key for understanding our contemporary situation. This chapter suggests how by comparing Mexico (Baja California Sur) with China, paying attention to the flow of sea commodities within a decolonial paradigm, we can evaluate the situation and bring forward visions of alternative modernity. This proposal offers elements of a truly sustainable society, especially by rethinking processes of transformation, circulation, and consumption, while potentially suppressing mechanisms of social inequality. As Temper et al. (2018) indicate, environmental inequity is being discussed primarily in its manifestations within South and Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and the Balkans, and less within African countries, China, East Asia, and Russia. Many of these societies, nowadays industrial economies, are in need of new resources, altering the level of energy and material exchanges within their environments (Fischer-­ Kowalsky et al. 2011). These new “commodity borders”—well exemplified in Asian territories and not just within nation-state borders—are suffering intense processes of unequal materials distribution and, as a result, conflicts involving a fair ecological distribution (Spiric 2017).

From Baja California Sur to a Global Economy: Terrestrial/Ocean Extractivism Baja California Sur is situated between latitudes 23°N and 32°N, where the great desert regions of the northern hemisphere are located. It has an area of 73,677  km2, representing 3.7% of the total of Mexico. It is the state with the longest coastline, measuring 2230 km (22% of the nation’s total). It includes three islands in the Pacific Ocean and more than a hundred islands and islets in the Gulf of California. Baja California Sur occupies the southern part of a little over half of the second-largest peninsula in the world, measuring 690 km in length, 43 km at its narrowest part, and 227 km at its widest. Its climate is mostly subtropical with some parts

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being tropical, with very intense cold waters of the Californian oceanic current bathing the coasts of the Pacific. During summer, temperatures may rise to 50 °C in the desert areas, and the annual rainfall ranges between 32 and 650  mm/year, although 80% of the territory does not reach 150 mm/year and only 5% has an average rainfall of over 350 mm/year. As a result of this climate, Baja California Sur hosts desert landscapes, which includes 187 oases, islets of water and vitality in a sea of aridity (Arriaga et  al. 1997). Environmental constriction—annual rainfall and aridity among others—was the original goal for a group of scientists from the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste (CIBNOR; Center for Biological Research of the Northwest) (Maya et al. 1997) in locating and studying the Baja California Sur oases network, noted above, resulting in an inventory that showed that 93% (171) are in Baja California Sur, 48% are defined as typical oases with surface water, and 52% are atypical, with seasonal streams (Arriaga et al. 1997). Territorial Colonialism: Oasis as European Agroecosystem During the Spanish colonial conquest, Baja California Sur suffered, due to the mentioned environmental constrictions, a slow and difficult incorporation into the Crown territories, especially for the extinction of original peoples in the forthcoming decades and economic, social, and political integration (Cariño Olvera 2007; Arriaga et  al. 1997). It was a hostile landscape for the violence of the Crown Army and the results of the Conquest—original peoples who were the habitants who precluded the imperial occupation and settlement for seventeen decades. This period allowed the existence of a hybrid continuity of biocultural forms of life, which has become the object of exceptional ethnographic works carried out by the Jesuits since 1697 (Engelhardt 1908). Pericues and the Guaycuras (the original peoples from the desert, has been classified as hunter-collectors up to the eighteenth century until now), and they were biocultural communities characterized by a nature-environment symbiosis, attended to the only extractive activity that was in place: the fishing of pearl oysters (Cariño Olvera and Monteforte 1999; Cariño Olvera 2001). Exploring the Baja California Sur Coasts from Continental Mexico was the main way in which the Crown drew the lines of its territory. Three ships sailed from the coast of New Galicia and reached California on May 3, 1523. Around 350 soldiers and settlers established the first urban centers in the area. However, receiving supplies from the continent as well

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as establishing relations with original peoples was riddled with problems and in many instances was plainly unviable. This led to the eventual collapse of this first settlement. The Ulloa expedition of 1539, initiated after this abandonment, made the demarcation of the coasts possible and gave access to more reliable information regarding the definitive size of the peninsula (de Mora et al. 1774; Venegas 1757; Del Rio 1984; Vernon 2002). Exploring Baja California Sur, which required many attempts over the following decades (Crosby 1994; Mathes 1965, 1970; Del Barco 1980), was the main purpose of the Jesuits colonists who landed in the territory in 1697, as well as the starting point of an accelerated and intense process of transformation of the Sonora Desert lands. It is to be described as the first colonial episode within the territory, and let to a rapid reconfiguration of its lands, wisdoms, and peoples. European agro-ecosystems were settled around the water spots (ojos de agua-aguajes) encountered at the phreatic layer. This eco-systemic “Europeanization,” oriented toward satisfying the food and production needs of the new settlers, both the Jesuits and soldiers of the Spanish Crown, was the original intention of the Jesuits’ territorial colonization in Baja California Sur. Jesuit travelers in their memoirs describe the original landscape and the European anthropization of the landscapes, accomplished by incorporating farming activities and ignoring environmental constraints (Mathes 1965, 1970; Clavijero 1975). They introduced a whole new range of crops of Mediterranean origin (Rouston 2012) such as date palms (Aschmann 1957), figs, olives, and other plants, which created a new agrarian landscape in the South Californian desert. If we look into these processes from the perspective of the coloniality of territories, original peoples suffered an intense genocide; nomadic populations were ejected from their territories and the “europeanization of the Baja California Agricultural Croplands with the arrival and extension of mediterranean crops as olives, orange trees, vines, etc. The original peoples alternatively racialized within their own territories or were forcibly integrated/assimilated in the first step, which led to their later extinction; these circumstances ended up nevertheless with the total abandonment of farmlands and their fall into oblivion after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. The first stage of this process was, as mentioned above, the anthropization of the landscape. In the context of the second wave of colonization, the original ethnic inhabitants (Guaycura, Pericu, and Cochimi) began to disappear from the deserts or turned into farm laborers, thus providing the workforce necessary for these new agro-ecosystems. It was not a successful

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strategy. Changing the orientation of agriculture toward productive markets, however, did not lead to increasing yields for the original habitants. Oases were reconfigured as enclaves for New Europe’s field around the world, resulting from the insertion of the enormous quantity of Mediterranean crops that merged with, co-habited, or superimposed the existing biotopes in these oases and deserts (Dunmire 2004; Rouston 2012). After Mexico seceded from Spain as a result of its war of independence, the South Californian deserts and oases suffered several and different waves of territorial colonization, from agricultural, livestock, and extractive activities. In the mid-nineteenth century, the main outcome was the change made upon lands based on their oriented hydric availability for agriculture, which led to the abandonment of livestock activities (especially cattle) on the desert plains. The production of meat, leather, and cheese was transformed into a secondary activity. The rationale was that planting crops had a higher return than livestock as the result of the limited trade for national and international centers of distribution. These “new farmers” (rancheros) who arrived from Europe (especially, from Spain) were the main actors in a new biocultural management of landscape throughout the century, and they continue to be so until now. Rancheros, in an isolated situation and with severe constrains for economic growth, put down roots in the desert, originally living from extensive cattle-­ farming, although during the nineteenth century they intensified their dependence on other livestock farming, especially goats, increasing the production of cheese, meat, and milk for local markets. Around the middle of the twentieth century, a new project of regional development began to take shape in the Vizcaino Valley (Central Area of Baja California Peninsula). It involved the industrial farming of crops intended for the market, like cotton and maize, and it was supported by the rise of the Green Revolution, as well as mass tourism that emerged at the same time in the area of Los Cabos, in the southernmost point of the Peninsula. These new extractivist activities meant, however, the loss of local and territorial sovereignty as the motor of their economy.

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Oceans-Sea Extractivism: Whale Shark and Turtles as Commodities in the Transpacific Economy Since the occupation of the territories of Baja California Sur, an intense process of territorial and marine colonization was implemented, which led to the transformation of agricultural land and upscaling the levels of extraction of marine resources. After studying the conversion of agricultural systems in the first part of this chapter, I approach two examples that explain the conversion of living beings into commodities, that is, the extractive appropriation destined for international trade, in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Throughout the twentieth century, the transformation of the economy in South California was rapid. It involved abandoning the previous commitment to intensive agriculture and contributed to an economy focused on the extraction of fishing resources for the supply of a new global agro-food system, along with the intensification of a model of mass tourism. Both cases reveal a strong level of territorial coloniality and the insertion of its economy in biological flows of globalization (Ortega Santos and Olivieri 2020). Shark fishing began in the Gulf of California at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century (Graciela 2003). The product was mainly destined for trade: in 1898, the first documented exchange from the city of La Paz to China was reported, and by 1902 exports went to companies based in London, San Francisco, and New York (SaldañaRuiz et al. 2017). Shark fishing is officially considered to have started in the late 1920s in the city of Guaymas, Sonora, and later in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, in the 1930s (Castillo et al. 1996). Considered, in Mexico, as a mainly coastal fishery, shark fishing in the Gulf of California increased in the 1940s due to a high international demand (mainly from the United States) during World War II for vitamin A, found in shark livers (Castillo et al. 1996). According to Saldaña-Ruiz et al. (2017), shark landings in the Gulf of California peaked in 1942. During the next year, several plants that processed shark livers were opened in the cities of Guaymas, Sonora; Mazatlan, Sinaloa; and San Blas, Nayarit (Ferreira 1958 in Saldaña-Ruiz et al. 2017). Between 1947 and 1950, the demand for shark livers decreased considerably, as vitamin A was produced synthetically at a much lower cost. Consequently, the volume of shark production decreased due to the low profitability of the activity. Between those years, landings declined to less than 1% when compared with the volumes registered in 1942

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(Saldaña-­Ruiz et al. 2017). However, from 1954 to 1970, shark fishery experienced a new impulse after the increase in world demand for both shark (Erikson and Clarke 2015) fins and their dried, salted, or fresh meat (Saldaña-Ruiz et  al. 2017). This growth was consolidated in the 1960s with the upsurge of domestic demand for shark meat (Castillo et al. 1996). Between 1979 and 1980, shark landings in the Gulf of California had exponential growth, peaking at about 18,000 tons. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of artisanal fishermen and overexploitation of the resource increased. This trend stopped in 1993 when shark fishing permits were suspended in an attempt to control fishing efforts and to investigate the status of exploited species (Saldaña-­Ruiz et al. 2017). The main uses of the resources included the consumption of fresh or salted and dried meat as a substitute for cod as well as the use of their skin to make leather goods; their teeth as ornaments and weapons or for rituals; their liver and fins for consumption purposes; and their cartilaginous skeleton, since some people attribute healing properties to it. According to the Anuarios Estadísticos de Pesca y Acuacultura (Fisheries and Aquaculture Statistical Yearbooks), from 1980 to 2017 the production of shark and dogfish (sharks up to 1.5 m in length) in the states of Baja California Sur, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Nayarit varied significantly. During the 1980s, the production of shark (10,028 tons) was close to that of dogfish (8574 tons). Over the years, however, the production of dogfish decreased considerably compared to that of shark.2 The most recent data indicate that for 2017 dogfish production (4622 tons) represented only 23% of the production of shark (20,508 tons) in the same region. The volume of shark and dogfish production during 2017 represented 59% of the national production. Mexico is the sixth-largest producer of shark fishery products in the world (Saldaña-Ruiz et al. 2017). According to the most recent data available, of the 350 shark species registered around the world, approximately 100 live in Mexican seas, and of those, around 40 species are of great commercial importance (included in the commercial exchange of luxury food between America and China, FAO 2020). The most outstanding species are the hammerhead (S. lewini), the horned shark (S. mokarran), the silky shark (C. limbatus), the flying shark (C. falciformis), and the bironche dogfish (Rhizovae). 2  Up to the 2000s, the volume of shark production in the Gulf of California was a total of 21,107 tons, while the production of dogfish only reached 2441 tons, that is, in comparison, only 20% of the shark production (Domínguez and Tiburcio 2020).

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Sea turtles in the Gulf of California have been used by traditional societies since ancient times, for the consumption of their meat and eggs and for the use of their bones, scales, and shells to produce medicines, musical instruments, and jewelry, and even as idols of veneration (Early 2014; Tiburcio-Pintos 2016). Numerous stories accounting the employment of sea turtles highlight their comprehensive use and how they were converted from a subsistence resource for local people to a commercial-oriented riparian fishery (Tiburcio-Pintos 2016). The problem with this kind of fishery arose because of the decline in crocodile productions around 1960 and the discovery that the skin of the olive ridley sea turtle (L. olivacea) had characteristics profitable for the fur industry. These turtles became almost extinct at the end of the twentieth century as a result of intensive and exhaustive exploitation during the 1960s and 1970s. Turtles were originally hunted with a harpoon that had a steel arrowhead. The hunt was usually carried out at night supported by flashlights installed in the bow of rowing boats, later replaced by outboard motorboats. The fishermen threw their harpoon toward the bioluminescent wake that the turtles created when the water moved. Once the turtle was harpooned, it was brought to the panga with a line that was tied to the tip of the harpoon. The hunt continued until twenty turtles were captured (Marquez-Millán 1996; Luque and Robles 2006). At the end of the 1950s, harpoons were replaced by gill-nets, and by the 1970s they were practically discarded. The nets and outboard motorboats made fishery more efficient, allowed covering longer distances, and could carry more catchers in less time (Domínguez and Tiburcio 2020). From 1959 to 1968, the national capture of sea turtles increased from 500 tons to 14,330 tons of fresh produce. This capture was sustained mainly by two species: the olive ridley sea turtle and, to a lesser extent, the black sea turtle (C. agassizii) (Marquez-Millán et al. 1982). At the beginning of the twentieth century, commercial fishery for sea turtle began in Baja California Sur (Agler 1913; Averett 1920; Craig 1926), particularly in Bahía de Los Angeles, one of the main fishing regions during the 1960s and early 1970s (Caldwell and Caldwell 1962, Caldwell 1963). With the participation of cooperatives, fishing trips lasted from one night to two weeks, with the longest being the trip to Isla Angel de la Guarda or Bahía San Rafael. After being captured and counted, the turtles remained in a dark storehouse, before being transported by truck to the north of the state. Black turtles were commonly shipped from the Bahía Los Angeles to Ensenada, Tijuana, and San Diego (Caldwell 1963; O’Donnell 1974).

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Caldwell (1963) wrote: “only in Bahía de los Angeles I saw more than 500 turtles land in a period of 3 weeks in the summer of 1962 and, considering the fishing effort (landed) a similar number per week, in winter” (149). Soon, the fishery collapsed: by 1982 only eleven tons of turtles would be caught, representing a 96% drop in just two decades (Marquez-Millán et al. 1982; Olguín 1990). Despite the downfall, many fishermen continued to hunt them for their own consumption and to sell them to buyers until the state’s ban in 1990 (DOF 1990). Between 1965 and 1982, Mexico contributed more than half of the global total of sea turtle production, and Baja California Sur contributed more than half of the national catch (Marquez-Millán et al. 1982). The municipality of Los Cabos was another intensive fishing region. The “La Pescadora” fishing cooperative, located in La Ribera municipality and which operated in the 1960s, was a victim of the times. These fishermen used only the turtle’s skin for commercial purposes. Sometimes the meat and liver was given to the community as gifts, but in general, the “leftovers” were piled up, incinerated, and “purine” was made to sell as a food supplement for livestock. It is estimated that 300 to 500 turtles arrived daily, mainly olive ridley (Tiburcio-­Pintos 2016). Between 1967 and 1986, the first measures were established to regulate the fishery where anarchy and opportunism reigned. One of them was to stabilize the catch at 100,000 turtles per year. Despite this, uncontrolled exploitation continued, mainly due to poor surveillance. Hence, in 1977 a special franchise system was established during the closed season to reduce smuggling and illegal fishing. The data available in the Sinaloa Fisheries Delegation mention that the maximum catches in Mazatlan were recorded in 1967 and 1968 (340,000 and 300,000 olive ridley turtles, respectively). The decline in official inventories was maintained. For example, in 1977 though the quota established was 21,000 turtles, 108,000 catches were registered (Briseño 2006). The hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricate) was exploited mainly for its shell. It was the target of intensive hunting for its artisanal use throughout the world (Groombridge and Luxmoore 1989). The exploitation of the leatherback turtle (D. coriacea) was minimal, due to its large size that makes it difficult to maneuver them aboard smaller vessels. However, it was captured in Los Cabos region for its fat and was sent to Ensenada. In 1988, twelve tons of leatherback turtles were caught in the Pacific and the Atlantic (Cifuentes et al. 1990). Lastly, the loggerhead turtle (C. caretta) is not as economically or culturally important as the black or olive ridley. This species was frequently captured for meat consumption in the region,

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especially in the Baja California Peninsula where its main feeding areas are found (Nicholls 2003). In Mexico, the maximum production of sea turtles reached 14,574 tons in 1968, which meant a capture of more than 375,000 specimens (mainly olive ridley turtles). More than half of this production came from the Gulf of California. Despite the efforts to regularize the fishery, illegal exploitation and smuggling continued. For the period from 1965 to 1990, the olive ridley sea turtle represented more than 90% of the total legal and illegal capture, followed by the prieta (3%) the laud (2%), and the caguama (10%) from Baja California Sur and the white, lora, and hawksbill from the Atlantic (5% together) (Marquez-Millán 1996). This intensive and exhaustive exploitation practice was the one that had the greatest impact on the population of sea turtles in the more than 6000 years of recorded historical relationship between humans and this animal, both in the Gulf of California and in the rest of the economy. Due to the continuous reduction of the resource, as of 1980, the number of permits had to be restricted, with the idea that by 1992 the capture would have to be completely suspended throughout the country. However, the Federal Executive considered that it would be more convenient to declare a total ban as of June 1, 1990. The last authorized capture, from June 1989 to May 1990, was 23,000 olive ridley turtles. The importance of the use of sea turtles to date is latent in the coastal communities of the Gulf of California. It continues to be a popular dish with the local population, although it is marketed illegally. The evidence from the sea turtle fishery in the Gulf of California is no different than what is happening with other resources exploited today. The condition of the current commercial fisheries is also risky, and this not only affects the biological capacity of endangered species but also damages coastal fishing, an economic activity that triggers regional development (Domínguez and Tiburcio 2020). The trafficking of marine species between China and México has been very intense throughout history. There are multiple cases of legal and illegal export of species destined for human consumption between the two countries. Despite the contraction in the consumption of turtles for edible use, as recently as in 2020, illegal shipments of more than 20,000 turtles were retained by the Secretary of Environment and Nature (SEMARNAT) at different times of the year. Marine animals, which are often used in traditional Chinese recipes, have been in great demand. A particularly sought-­after luxury in recent years has been the bladder of the Mexican totoaba fish. It is an endangered fish species autochthonous and only available within the Gulf of California, and it is highly prized for its fat-filled pouch, used to help regulate

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buoyancy. This bag, or swim bladder, is a coveted delicacy in China, where it is dried and used to make a soup said to have medicinal qualities. Bladders can be sold for up to 20,000 dollars per kilogram in China (such a high price is due to the fact that the autochthonous Chinese totoaba has been hunted to extinction), while in Mexico bladders are worth between 7000–14,000 dollars per kilogram. Similarly, the case of “finning”—shark fin trafficking— to China from Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica has already been calculated to be in between twenty-six and seventy-three million hunted sharks, with China being the final destination of 75% of the total extraction.

Pacific Sea Consumption of Commodities: An Overview from China The model proposed by Mao Zedong (Man Must Conquer Nature) implicitly carried a productivist logic affecting commodities as a whole (land, water, seas, etc.). These resources were converted into units of future production maximization thanks to a commitment to maximizing agriculturalization of the available useful lands or sea level consumption. In the case of agriculture, the result, in agronomic and environmental keys, could not be more predictably disastrous: the loss of fertilization levels, destruction-reduction of aquifers, absence of secondary forest cover as a supporting mantle of biodiversity—understood as associated avifauna, agro-food uses, and loss of germplasm when venturing on spices aimed at supplying consumption, which is why monoclonal crops (cereals, rice, etc.) spread. As Shapiro indicates (2001, 2005), the impact of the integral environmental cycle was assumed as an official slogan of the political system: • Encircle the rivers, build land (weihe zaodi) • Encircle the lakes, build farmland (weihu zaotian) • Destroy forest, open wastelands (huilin kaihuang) • On flatlands, build terraces (pingyuan zao titian) After Richard Nixon visited China in what represented a huge turn in global geopolitics, the slogan “prepare for war” was replaced by “seize revolution, promote production, promote war preparation” (Zhang and Li 1998). It meant the rejection of the idea of “war on nature,” while a new environmentalist creed was embraced with the presence of China at the United Nations Conference in Stockholm (1972). It also meant turning a guilty gaze on the environmental consequences of development. We

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now not only attribute it to the capitalist model but can also recognize the environmental impact of the socialist model with the promotion of principles such as “they who pollute, pay” by the State Council (Xie 1999). Rapid economic growth has been taking place in China over several decades with very important environmental consequences inside the very borders of China and beyond. As a result of this increased level of development, the degree of consumption is being expanded as well. Seafood intake in China is having dire consequences on marine resources around the world. The country leads the luxury seafood market (Fabinyi 2012), extracted from tropical marine regions of Asia-Pacific (especially concentrated in bêche-de-mer and live reef food fish), which causes an increasing demand on ecosystems and the degradation of the livelihood of these regions. Shark fin is one of these luxury seafood products, and when marine resources decline around China, the exploitation is shifted to distant locations. The range of studies about seafood and wildlife consumption in China, reported from conservation agencies, associate it with traditional Chinese medicine. As per FAO statistics (2008) on fisheries in China, capture fisheries and aquaculture production may be too high. “Food fish supply” showed an increase overall, from 3,234,837 tons in 1961 to 35,364,494 tons in 2007 (FAOSTAT 2010). According to the FAO’s latest report “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020,” also referred to as “SOFIA 2020,” per capita food fish consumption grew from 9 kilograms (live weight equivalent) in 1961 to 20.5 kilograms in 2018, equating to around 1.5% growth each year. At the same time, since 1961, the average annual rise in global food fish consumption of 3.1% has outpaced the population growth of 1.6% and exceeded the consumption escalation of all other animal protein foods (like beef, poultry, and milk), which increased by 2.1% per annum. From the perspective of conservation and management, the initiative of integrating both items into Chinese luxury consumption is in its first stages. Market demand from China overwhelms local regulations, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and media campaigns are two of the most established conservation interventions. But as Fabanyi identifies (2012), seafood consumption in China has been changing in the last decades. Until the mid-­1990s shark fin was consumed mostly in Southern provinces and in Hong-Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. However, from the 1990s, the expansion of the Chinese economy, among other reasons, led to more people consuming luxury seafood. Southern cuisine has been since the Qing period (1644–1912) a key element for the establishment of economic centers in the country, which

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have been aided with the increasing of Hong Kong economy, and augmented the “conspicuous consumption” of luxury foods. From the midtwentieth century, wild food has been increasingly considered as “unpolluted,” “precious,” and “special,” being conceived as bu foods,3 tonic foods, and sexual stimulators. But luxury foods (shark fin or turtle) are not integrated into everyday meals. Its social consumption is not available to everyone; indeed luxury consumption denotes a “new rich” status. Five species of sea turtles are present in China’s seas: loggerheads, green turtles (C. mydas), leatherbacks (D. coriacea), hawksbill (E. imbricata), and olive ridleys, all of them present in the list of Critically Endangered Species in China. According to Liang et al. (1990), the population of sea turtles in South China Seas was estimated between 16,800 and 46,300 in the 1980s. From the annual yield of sea turtles harvested directly by fishermen in the south of China from 1959 to 1988, over 31,800 turtles were estimated, with an exponential population decrease (especially concentrated in leatherback, hawksbill, and olive ridley turtles), and an unquestionable overexploitation. More recent data published by Kin-Fung et al. (2007) suggest however that the sea turtle population is not large, and indeed faces relevant threats. The first is direct harvesting, due to the assaults toward eggs and nesting turtles, especially usual in Gangkou and the Xisha Archipelago, or direct consumption for meat in beaches as it occurred in Taiwan in the early 1970s. Nowadays, direct harvesting no longer exists in protected nesting sites, although the extent of the damage to the sea turtle population is unknown. China accounted for about 15% of total global captures in 2018, more than the total captures of the second- and third-ranked countries combined. The top seven capture producers (China, Indonesia, Peru, India, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, and Vietnam) accounted for almost 50% of total global capture production. In 2018, China reported about 2.26 million tonnes from its “distant-water fishery” but provided details on species and fishing area only for those catches marketed in China (about 40% of the total for distant-water catches). In the absence of more complete information, FAO consider 1.34 tonnes, not included in the database consider above with the concept “marine fishes not elsewhere included” in Major Fishing Area 61, the Northwest Pacific, possibly overstating the catches occurring in this area. China has 3  The Chinese word bu (sometimes transliterated as pu) means “strengthening supplementing, patching up” (Anderson 1988, 235).

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also been the main exporter of fish and fish products since 2002, and since 2011 the third major importing country in terms of value. China’s imports have increased in recent years partly as a result of the outsourcing of processing from other countries, but they also reflect China’s growing domestic consumption of species not produced locally. According to the latest available estimations for 2019, China’s exports declined by 7% compared with 2018 (USD 20 billion versus USD 21.6 billion), possibly impacted by trade disputes between China and the United States of America. For a long time, consumers demand in China has been considered as a driving force for the overexploitation and trade of endangered sea and wildlife products. In recent years, and for many decades, due to the increased living standards in China, the magnitude of this phenomenon has expanded. As a result, shark and turtle populations around the world are threatened by both targeted and incidental catches, which in turn are derived from culturally rooted perceptions of class and health. China has now fully emerged in global seafood trade through distant-water fishing, sourcing of fish meat, and aquaculture production for both domestic consumption and export (Hanson et al. 2011). China is a huge destination for large productions of shark fin, which is considered a natural resource and not counted within the total extraction quantities. However, from 2003, the decline in the shark fin trade contradicts the expectations of an increase in demand due to the expansion of the Chinese economy. After China entered the World Trade Organization, regulation changes in economic fluxes caused modifications in seafood trade relations between Hong Kong and China, for example. The global trade of shark fin has been suffering alterations in the last decades: the top-ten suppliers for Hong Kong (as one of the most relevant consuming markets) are located in Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, and Yemen. However, it is also supplied throughout many major tuna fishing distribution channels (e.g., Taiwan, Japan, and Spain). Recent media reports suggest that attitudes toward luxury and growing conservation among Chinese consumers are being responsible for a downturn in the luxury seafood markets. China’s slogan “getting rich is getting glorious” during the 1980s caused the continuous expansion of shark fin, as enjoying prosperity was considered a major factor to consume. Seafood is strongly connected with social expectations and a luxury-modernity capitalist lifestyle. But from 2012, international environmental organizations report a 70% decline in shark fin import in Hong Kong—related either to conservation concerns or the Chinese government’s ongoing campaign against conspicuous consumption (FAO 2020). As a result, the expanding globalization of commerce and trade is now suffering because of the current

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environmental regulations (such as the CITES), with new mandatory monitoring systems universally implemented. And it does not apply just to China’s dried seafood market but to other commodities as well.

Conclusions The extraction of commodities—seafood in its several dimensions—has been one of the main results of colonial appropriation of lands and oceans in the contemporary age within the transpacific. From the perspective of Baja California Sur, we can identify the impact of the colonial system, which left an intense ecological footprint in the territory, visible as the anthropization-­Europeanization of farmlands (oases) and a radical conception of their seas as “an extractive-world economy” output. This perception has been continued until nowadays with the management of sea goods such as turtle and sharks. Similarly, an overview of China’s relation with its seas may provide an equal impact on commodities extraction. Both are, then, scenarios for the depletion of natural resources and the exhaustion of marine ecosystems in order to facilitate human consumption or, in the case of China, both luxury consumption and the supply of goods associated with practices of Chinese traditional medicine. Oceans, seas, turtles, sharks, and all living beings became objects of commercial exchange at a local or global level, with the transpacific being the territory to be conquered. Human and non-human beings turn into places of globalization, subjects without rights that became merchandised. Decolonial studies (Lander 2000) allow us to understand this historical continuity of the forms of alienation-looting of the territory. This lesson in decolonial environmental history is opening new lines of future research on the evaluation of transpacific marine social metabolism systems, once a more in-depth study of the extraction and trade processes of marine resources has been carried out. This, however, remains as another transpacific story yet to be written.

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CHAPTER 5

From IIRSA-COSIPLAN to the Belt and Road Initiative: Infrastructure for Extractivism in Latin America Helios Escalante-Moreno

Introduction1 The integration of Latin America in the world-system has been historically characterized, since the time of conquest and colonization, by the extraction of resources and raw materials directed toward the territories of the Global North: precious metals such as gold and silver, guano, and monoculture plantations (coffee, sugar, cattle, etc.), as Eduardo Galeano (2003) poetically portrayed in the classic “The Open Veins of Latin America.” It could be said that this pattern of accumulation has been maintained in a 1  A first version of  this text appeared in  the  journal HALAC  – Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña. 9 No. 1 (2019).

H. Escalante-Moreno (*) University of Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_5

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very similar way until today, based on the export of unprocessed or semi-­ processed natural resources, just as its territorial expressions have been similar, and the actors involved as well as the legal and political framework have evolved. The questioning of this model has been at the center of the most important social and economic debates in the continent’s recent history. It has also been a fundamental factor in processes as relevant as the Cuban Revolution, “Import substitution industrialization,”2 and various coups d’état. Since the nineteenth century, the United States has considered Latin America as its “backyard,” as expressed in the Monroe Doctrine, and has engaged in economic, political, and military intervention in the area. During the Cold War, the region was the scene of confrontation between the two major blocs, and the “war against communism” was used to suppress any protest movement. The relative decline of the United States’ hegemony and its interest in other areas of the world, such as the Middle East, as well as the political changes in Latin America over the past two decades (the so-called “progressive” governments), have led to a withdrawal of this power in some aspects. This has coincided with the rise of other emerging forces that have positioned themselves in the area, most notably Brazil and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The growing demand of these emerging economies for raw materials and energy has led to a “reprimarization” of Latin American economies, which are once again oriented toward the agro-export and mining pattern with a growing trans-­ Pacific component. In a scenario of progressive depletion of strategic resources such as fossil fuels and the revaluation of others such as lithium and rare earths, tensions over the Latin American territory are accentuated. An example of this is the Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) project, a set of road, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure projects that aims to facilitate territorial integration directed at exporting resources to central economies, with the Pacific area becoming increasingly important due to the influence of China. This chapter explores the history, geopolitical keys, and debates  The Import Substitution Industrialization model is a development project that was mainly driven in Latin American countries at different times from the 1930s to the 1970s. It was based on the growth of the industrial sector aimed at satisfying internal demand by stimulating the purchasing power of domestic consumers. The objective was to break with the model of export of raw materials/import of processed goods, which has been the characteristic of Latin America (Bonfanti 2015). 2

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surrounding this project, as well as its confluence with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), through a bibliographical review and critical analysis of official sources.

Description and History of the IIRSA-Cosiplan Project The IIRSA project was presented publicly in September 2000, during the meeting of South American presidents in Brasilia. At the request of the then Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) presented a document called “Action Plan for the Integration of South American Infrastructure” (Navarro 2015). This was an ambitious scheme of over 500 transport, energy, and communications infrastructure projects covering the twelve countries of South America, structured around nine Integration and Development Axes (IADAs). Its purpose was to “promote the integration and modernization of physical infrastructure under a regional conception of the South American space.”3 It is therefore an attempt to contribute to South American cohesion (not Latin American, as will be discussed below) through physical integration, in a complementary way to the political and economic incorporation processes (Ceceña et al. 2007). The planning proposed by the IDB is based on the above-mentioned IADAs, defined as “multinational swathes of territory where natural spaces, human settlements, productive areas and trade flows are concentrated” (IIRSA-COSIPLAN n.d.).4 For each IADA, the physical infrastructure requirements are identified in order to integrate the territory with the rest of the region, to plan investments, and to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. These IADAs make up commercial corridors with outlets on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (which is why they are known as bioceanic corridors,) which reorganize the South American territory, overlapping with state planning (Jiménez 2014). Each IADA has a different type of project portfolio, from highways to ports or energy plants, with a total of 562 projects and a total investment of almost 200 billion dollars. The above-mentioned Brasilia Communiqué, which came out of that meeting of presidents, emphasizes the commitment of South American  “Historia” - IIRSA-COSIPLAN: http://www.iirsa.org/Page/Detail?menuItemId=121   “Áreas de Acción”  IIRSA-COSIPLAN: http://www.iirsa.org/Page/ Detail?menuItemId=81 3 4

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governments to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), under the auspices of the IDB. In this context, infrastructure was presented as the material support of this model of integration and, by extension, of neoliberal development. However, later on, there was an evolution as a result of the political transformations in the region, passing on the control to the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). In the analysis of the project, I therefore distinguish these two phases. IIRSA Under the Auspices of the IDB and the FTAA The Brasilia Communiqué made clear the commitment of South American governments to the WTO and the FTAA, as well as the importance of the IDB in the financing and design of IIRSA. This institution was directly involved in the development of the project through INTAL (Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean), which is the Secretariat of the Technical Coordination Committee (CCT) of IIRSA. Officials from the Latin American Development Bank (CAF) and the Financial Fund for the Development of the River Plate Basin (Fonplata) participate in this same body. Although these financial bodies have maintained their relevance, and new ones have also appeared, it is important to briefly describe the process followed by the agreement for the FTAA. The failure of the United States in this matter marks a turning point in the economic hegemony of the North American power (Katz 2006; Ceceña et al. 2007). In the 1990s, two elements converged that opened a new cycle of economic globalization, that is, an acceleration in the flow of trade and financial exchanges around the world. On the one hand was the end of the Cold War that had divided the world into two blocs, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and on the other was the financialization of the economy as a way out of the economic crisis of the 1970s, replacing real productivity growth with speculative profits. In Latin America, there was a debt crisis in the 1980s, which forced the region to comply with the measures of major international economic bodies (IMF, World Bank, etc.) that imposed a neoliberal model that lasted until the following decade (Harvey 2007). In this context, the United States sought to deepen its influence by extending free trade areas in which it could take advantage of its industry vis-à-vis countries with weaker economies and also hinder other alternative integration processes such as the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the Andean Pact. This is how the

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North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came about in 1994, integrating the United States, Mexico, and Canada (Harvey 2007; Borón 2016). That same year, the Summit of the Americas was held (significantly in Miami), where the creation of a free trade area for the whole continent, the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), was proposed in a process of commerce integration that should culminate in 2005. However, the political turnaround in Latin America in the first decade of the 2000s impeded the completion of the process, which was staged in November 2005 during the IV Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata (Argentina) (Borón 2016). This summit revealed at least two different blocs: on the one hand the countries close to the United States and on the other Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela. After the failure of its proposal in Mar del Plata, the United States had to adjust its strategy and opt to proceed with bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), negotiated individually with like-minded governments (Morgenfeld 2012). The challenge to the formation of the FTAA stemmed from the search by the countries of the so-called “progressive bloc” for strategies of insertion into the world-system that would not subordinate their interests to those of the United States. The FTAA as it was conceived was interpreted by various sectors as a loss of the possibility of an autonomous development model and a sustainable industrial policy. It was expected to have a major impact on the economies of and employment in Argentina, Brazil, and the MERCOSUR as a whole, since the United States is not only an industrial power but also the region’s major agricultural competitor. The decision of the MERCOSUR and Venezuelan presidents to reject the FTAA made it possible to consider other forms of autonomous regional integration, which led to the creation of UNASUR in South America and CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States). IIRSA Under the Control of UNASUR Criticism of the IIRSA from different social sectors mainly questioned the role of international financial bodies in decision-making (IDB, CAF, FONPLATA), the lack of attention to environmental impacts, the lack of participation of affected populations, and the violation of their rights (Martínez and Houghton 2008; Jiménez  2015b), especially concerning indigenous populations. There have been complaints that in several cases IIRSA projects violated the International Labour Organization (ILO)

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Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples (Martínez and Houghton 2008). These criticisms were generally linked to the FTAA and the model of subordinate integration it represented. Within the search for new forms of regional integration, the experience of ALBA-TCP (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Treaty) stood out as a trade alternative to the FTAA, and UNASUR and CELAC, as instruments of regional governance (Nieto et  al. 2017), oddly enough emerged at the same meeting of presidents where the IIRSA project was presented. At the 2006 Presidents’ Summit in Cochabamba, a step prior to the formation of UNASUR, Evo Morales made explicit this criticism: “We must revise the IIRSA to take into account the concerns of the people who want to see roads in the framework of development poles and not highways through which containers pass for export in the midst of corridors of misery and increased foreign debt.”5 In the same line of challenging the IIRSA as a body that reproduces neoliberalism were organizations such as the Confederation of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), the Indigenous Confederation of Indigenous Organisations (CAOI), and the Continental Social Alliance, as well as numerous NGOs and popular peasant and trade union organizations (Jiménez 2015b). In its constitution in 2008, UNASUR placed the development of infrastructure for interconnection as one of its priorities. With this objective in mind, in 2009 it created the South American Council for Infrastructure and Planning (COSIPLAN) in Quito, which took over IIRSA’s project portfolio and its Agenda of Priority Integration Projects (API) and became IIRSA’s Technical Forum (Padula 2014; Zibechi 2015). Beyond the concerns, the continuity of the infrastructure development model is therefore clear, aimed at favoring a form of capital accumulation based on the export of raw materials. In order to understand the commitment to this model of the “progressive” governments that have led the shift to the left on the continent in the past decade, it is useful to recall the notions of “neo-­ extractivism” and the “Consensus of Commodities.” 5  “Debemos revisar el IIRSA para tomar en cuenta las preocupaciones de la gente que quiere ver carreteras en el marco de polos de desarrollo y no autopistas por las que pasan contenedores para la exportación en medio de corredores de miseria y un incremento del endeudamiento externo.” The English translation is mine.Quoted in: http://fobomade.org. bo/2017/08/09/cuestionamientos-a-iirsa-desde-el-vivir-bien-y-politicas-nacionales/ (Accessed December 7, 2020)

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According to authors such as Eduardo Gudynas and Alberto Acosta (minister of energy and mines in Rafael Correa’s government in Ecuador and later one of his critics from the left), the governments that have emerged from popular processes in countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Kirchnerist Argentina maintained the fundamental characteristics of the extractivist pattern in Latin America in terms of the mode of subordinate international insertion, productive specialization, and social and environmental impacts. What has changed is the role of the state in such processes, which “captures (or tries to capture) a greater proportion of the surplus generated by the extractive sectors” (Gudynas 2009), when it does not directly promote these sectors through public companies. On the other hand, progressive governments have generally used part of these revenues to finance different social plans aimed at the most impoverished sectors, thus establishing a link between extractive activities such as mining and hydrocarbons and government assistance plans (Gudynas 2009; Acosta 2011). In addition to the role of the state, what distinguishes this neo-­ extractivism, which tried to take advantage of high commodity prices to carry out a productive reprimarization (Bolinaga and Slipak 2015) is the fate of the commodities, with an increasing influence on the Latin American economy of emerging countries, China in particular. This influence goes beyond the purchase of raw materials and extends to direct intervention in the financing and execution of extractive projects, as well as related infrastructure (Svampa and Slipak 2015; Bonilla and Milet 2015). Later on, I will expand on the growing importance of China. As regards IIRSA/COSIPLAN, the presence of financial entities such as the China Development Bank and the New BRICS Development Bank became increasingly common in the meetings of the Working Group on Financing Mechanisms (Molina 2015); thus, from the beginning it has had a marked trans-Pacific character. The other important aspect that is maintained in COSIPLAN is Brazil’s leading role as a regional power, an issue that will also merit a section of analysis. I will now anticipate two key issues. In speaking about the financial aspect, the place occupied by the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), Brazil’s main financial agent, stands out. Moreover, involvement in these infrastructure plans has also been an instrument for the internationalization of large Brazilian civil engineering and construction companies (Cerdas 2015). It can be said that the BNDES has displaced the IDB as the main financier of the works, which has

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implications for the debt orientation of South American countries and intra-­regional political relations (Jiménez 2015a).

Brazil as a Regional Power Brazil has become a dominant country within Latin America, capable of disputing spaces of hegemony with both the United States and China (Bernal-Meza 2015). It is one of the few Latin American countries that seem to have been making the transition from a peripheral to a central position, reflected in its location within the BRICS group. Several factors come together, such as its natural and physical conditions (size, population, availability of natural resources) but also the internal and political conditions that lead it to propose a hegemonic project. According to various authors, the internal conditions for this situation have been slowly maturing since the 1930s, with the Getúlio Vargas regime and its process of industrialization, which promoted the formation of an industrial bourgeoisie and weakened the agro-export oligarchy in the so-called national-development model (Zibechi 2012; Bernal-Meza 2015). Seven decades later, under Lula da Silva’s government, that process seemed to have reached a situation of no return; however from 2014, as I will show, there has been a regression in the country’s upward trend. The general tendency, however, has been the expansion and strengthening of the dominant elites, the adoption of a strategy to make the country a global power, the solid alliance between the internationalized Brazilian bourgeoisie and the state apparatus (which includes the armed forces and state managers), and the maturity achieved by capital accumulation in Brazil. All this means that its ruling elites may have promoted hegemony in the country and the region by taking advantage of the relative decline of the United States, expressed in territories such as the Amazon, the other South American countries, and West Africa (Zibechi 2012). Between 1968 and 1973, Brazil maintained an impressive growth rate (10% per year), emerging as a South American regional power by displacing Argentina, which acted as a counterweight. More recently, between 2002 and 2010, Brazil’s growth rate was 4.1% per year, which enabled it to cancel all its obligations to international financing organizations and reduce its external debt to below 40% of GDP (Mouron et  al., 2016; Fraga and Moreno 2015). These greater margins for maneuver were correlated to the expansion of Brazilian investments in South America, by companies such as Odebrecht, Andrade Gutierrez, Vale, Petrobras, InBev,

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Gerdau, JBS, and Itaú. This allowed Brazil to promote the creation of multilateral regional organizations, such as UNASUR and the South American Defence Council, as well as to sustain the financing granted through BNDES to infrastructure and development cooperation projects at the regional level (Mouron et al. 2016). From 2013 the trend seems to have changed. In addition to the negative growth of the economy from 2014 onward, the shares of the main Brazilian companies have fallen due to their poor performance and scandalous cases of corruption, the most significant of which is that of Odebrecht. This lack of funds led to a slowdown in domestic spending through cuts in consumer credit, increases in the unemployment rate, and great social unrest. Thus, given the complicated internal situation aggravated by the political crisis (Dilma Rouseff’s dismissal), international projection became a secondary priority. Since the formation of Michel Temer’ government in 2016, Brazil’s foreign policy has radically transformed. It has abandoned the strategy of participating in multilateral forums, giving priority to bilateral relations and favoring the attraction of foreign investment over its own development (Pereira and Meneghetti 2017). In April 2018, Brazil left UNASUR along with Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Paraguay (Paraguassu and Desantis 2018), leaving the future of this organization in doubt, while at the same time it has moved closer to the Organization of American States, with greater influence from the United States (Pinheiro 2018), and to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Actis 2018). Jair Bolsonaro’s government has led to a deepening of the model of reprimarization (Aruguete 2019) and greater closeness to the United States at the expense of the commitment to regional integration. However, the presence in his government of military officials who continue the nationalist tradition and who are more inclined to reach an understanding with China and Russia has given rise to tension within the government bloc. The future of strategic alliances both within and outside the region is therefore a complex scenario, as is the formation of PROSUR (Forum for the Progress and Development of South America), which is still unstable, as an organization to replace UNASUR. The Brazilian School of Geopolitics and Sub-imperialism The particularities of Brazil as a country, such as its size, location, and history of national configuration, were used as elements to legitimize a school of geopolitical thought of their own, whose classical authors include the

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militaries Mario Trasvassos and Golbery do Couto e Silva and the academic Everardo Backheuser, between the 1930s and 1970s. For Trasvassos, Brazil faced a geographical and geopolitical dichotomy: establishing a solid defensive maritime power on the Atlantic coast and strengthening continental power to the west, that is, toward the Andes and the Mar de la Plata, in the west and east of Brazil (Romero et  al. 2012). General Couto e Silva theorized particularly on the country’s alignment with the United States, defending Brazil’s role as the “gendarme” in the subcontinent against the threat of communism in the framework of the Cold War, along the lines of the National Security Doctrine. Couto e Silva was head of the Civil House in three of the five presidencies between 1964 and 1981, with huge power during the years of military administration, and his influence has therefore been decisive in Brazil’s geopolitical orientation of Latin America (Fornillo 2015a, b). His proposal was, as mentioned, an alliance with the United States against communism, internal expansion toward the Amazon to occupy the “empty spaces” and external expansion toward the Pacific to fulfill Brazil’s “manifest destiny,” and, finally, control of the South Atlantic. He argued that Brazil should make a “loyal exchange” with the northern empire, which meant “negotiating a bilateral alliance” by giving up natural resources and geostrategic positions in exchange for “the resources necessary for us to participate in the security of the South Atlantic,” which he considered to be a “Brazilian monopoly,”  (Zibechi 2012: 49–50) thus positing a similar role for the South Atlantic to that played by the Caribbean in US expansion (Romero et al. 2012; Zibechi 2012; Fornillo 2015a, b). This expansionist policy resulted in the attempt to invade Uruguay in the early 1970s, the participation in Hugo Banzer’s coup d’état in Bolivia in 1971, and the signing of the Itaipu Treaty with Paraguay in 1973, for the construction of the largest hydroelectric plant in Latin America, on the Paraná River. This has allowed authors such as Ruy Marini to speak of sub-­ imperialism in the case of Brazil, a particular form of relationship in which, being subordinated to a major hegemonic power (in this case the United States), it maintains imperialist features in the capture of value-added chains and on the military and political plane, although in the latter sense its role as the sub-continental “gendarme” has been displaced by Colombia (Marini 1977; Katz 2016).

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The Concepts of South America and Latin America As Raúl Zibechi (2012) recalls, the concept of “Latin America” was born in the nineteenth century and had a strong political connotation; it was used as a counterpoint to the US imperialist project. In recent years, however, we have witnessed a gradual shift in the geographical/cultural/political notion, which places the concept of South or South America at the center stage. As a geopolitical space, it was conceived by the military strategists linked to the Brazilian dictatorship (1964–1985), such as the aforementioned Couto e Silva. Under the Lula government, South America became “a new space of geopolitical affirmation”  (Zibechi 2012: 224) that coincided with the United States’ hegemonic crisis. This change of direction leaves aside the anti-imperialist character that the concept of Latin America had generated. The result is to conceive of South America as the space in which the large Brazilian companies financed by BNDES and supported by Brasilia are expanding, in order to turn Brazil into a regional and global power, while accepting US hegemony in Central America and the Caribbean, with the continent being divided between the two powers (Zibechi 2015; Katz 2016). It is significant, then, that the IIRSA project refers at all times to “South America,” in keeping with this conception.

China and Latin America From 1978, with the economic, political, and social reforms promoted by President Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death, China began a period of economic growth based on a huge development in industrial productivity accompanied by increasing trade openness and the creation in 1980 of exclusive economic zones in the east of the country. These zones received huge flows of capital from large global multinationals, due to low labor costs. The Chinese government made it a condition for multinationals to set up joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and to gradually transfer technology to large locally owned companies (Slipak 2014b). Labor productivity increases above wages for more than thirty years, together with large trade surpluses, have enabled China to maintain high rates of accumulation. This meant that its power also extended to the financial sphere. In addition to consolidating itself as the main creditor of the US Federal Reserve, it was able to promote an aggressive investment policy in different regions of the world thanks to its high domestic savings rates and even

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to be a lender to many countries in Africa and Latin America (Gutierrez and Cesarin 2015). China’s growing importance in the global economy not only resulted in its GDP becoming the second largest in the world from 2011 onward—after that of the United States—and in its transformation into the world’s leading exporter and the second-largest importer of manufactured goods but also in the growth of its large transnational companies, which are mainly state-owned. On the geopolitical plane, there has been a significant expansion of China’s diplomatic activity, which has increased its presence in international forums and organizations of different kinds and promoted bilateral cooperation with a growing number of countries and regions. According to its own rhetoric, it is pursuing a strategy of “peaceful rise” in the global hierarchy, which has also been called “soft power.” At the same time, toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, China has the second largest military budget and occupies a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (Slipak 2014a, b). Despite academic debate regarding China’s true role in the international scene today, there is broad agreement on linking the decline of the United States and the rise of China, which has been accompanied by a huge demand for natural resources of all kinds for its industry and domestic consumption (Svampa and Slipak 2015; Barzola y Baroni 2018). An example of the way China is taking advantage of the space left by the United States in Latin America lies in the scenario provided by the Trans-­ Pacific Partnership (TPP). In January 2017, upon taking office, US president Donald Trump signed the withdrawal of the United States from this trade agreement, which had as one of its objectives containing the Chinese economy in its area of influence. In March of the same year, a meeting was held in Viña del Mar (Chile) where China attended as a guest country, interested in the new agreements that might come up. It should be noted that the three Latin American countries that participate in this agreement (Peru, Chile, and Mexico) are also those that make, along with Colombia, the Pacific Alliance, of which China is an observer country (Reyes 2018). This agreement is therefore one of the most important efforts to formalize a trans-Pacific trade space. Since the 2008 crisis, Latin American countries have adapted their export pattern to China’s needs for primary goods, while China has moved to strengthen its presence in the region (Svampa and Slipak 2015; CEPAL 2016). In this regard, it is participating in the financial circuit in order to consolidate the management of its assets (the purchase of ICBC Bank in

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Argentina is an example) and is investing in infrastructure and complementary services (ocean and river ports, railways, and corridors that facilitate exports). Chinese investment has soared: since 2010, the Eastern Eximbank and the China Development Bank have signed credit lines with twelve Latin American countries for more than sixty development and infrastructure projects (Fornillo 2016). In 2015, the flow of financing from China to Latin America doubled to twenty-nine billion dollars, with Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador being the main recipients, and with the aforementioned change in trend toward infrastructure projects (EFE 2006; Hernández 2018). In 2000, China was not in a privileged position as an export destination or origin of imports from the countries of the Latin American region. By 2012, however, China represented, in almost all cases, one of the three main suppliers of the countries in question. Since 2017 it has become the main destination for South American exports; in that year alone, they increased by 23%, while imports from China rose by 30% (Grabendorff 2018). The trend in recent years has also been the intensification of trade flows for the Southern Cone countries, including Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Colombia, and Argentina (Slipak 2014a). China has thus become Latin America’s most dynamic trading partner in order to assure itself of natural resources, open up new markets, and consolidate its geopolitical influence. According to analysts who recover the framework of dependency theory, this type of asymmetric exchange would reproduce the center-periphery scheme (Slipak 2014a, b) and would be a key factor in explaining the reprimarization of the region. Latin America supplies China with resources that are intensive in labor, energy, and environmental and primary profile costs; in 2015, oil, iron ore, copper ore, refined copper, and soya, and their derivatives, accounted for about 70% of China’s imports from Latin America (da Rocha and Bielschowsky 2018). In other words, South America “exports nature,” according to the terms in which the so-called unequal ecological exchange is analyzed, which puts the focus on the exchange of goods according to the unequal distribution of matter, energy, and socio-environmental impacts that it implies (Vega 2006; Svampa 2014). In fact, this reprimarization has had enormous social and environmental consequences in Latin American countries—expansion of monocultures, with the consequent deforestation and massive use of agrotoxics, a boom in open-cast mining, pollution, displacement of populations, and loss of biodiversity (Teubal 2008; Svampa 2013). In return, it receives manufactured products with

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increasingly higher added value and high and medium technological content, which also affects regional inter-industrial exchanges that had been promoted since the creation of MERCOSUR, particularly between Argentina and Brazil. China’s industry displaces Brazil not only in what is considered its neighboring market. It also does so in Brazil itself, in a sort of “reverse substitution” that harms attempts at regional linking of production chains (Fornillo 2016). In this way, the unequal terms of trade that have characterized Latin America’s economic history (exports of raw material-imports of value-added manufactured goods) are reproduced with China, leading some authors to speak of the shift from the “Washington Consensus” to the “Beijing Consensus” (Cesarin 2007; Svampa 2015; Svampa and Slipak 2015). China’s Direct Investments in Latin America In addition to the trade relations mentioned above, China’s economic influence in the region is clearly marked by foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in infrastructure. This has also enabled the Asian country’s financial institutions to penetrate Latin America, as will be seen in the case of IIRSA and the Belt and Road Initiative.  However, despite their importance, it is difficult to have precise data on the volume of these investments, because many of them are established indirectly. For example, according to a study by the Central Bank of Brazil, in 2016 80% of investments of Chinese origin that entered the country did so through third countries, mainly Luxembourg and the Netherlands (CEPAL 2020). An example of Latin America’s shift toward China to the detriment of the United States, in the field of infrastructure investment, can be found in Argentina’s energy exploitation. Following the nationalization of YPF shares held by Repsol, in 2012 the Argentine government of Cristina Kirchner negotiated with Chevron and other US companies the exploitation of the unconventional oil and gas field of Vaca Muerta in Patagonia. However, these investments did not yield the expected results, and the internal difficulties of the US energy sector led to a reduction in the agreed amounts. This led the Argentine government to look for other ways of financing the exploitation of these resources, including China, which until then had not been a preferential partner. Following President Mauricio Macri’s visit to China in May 2017, bilateral agreements were signed to finance two nuclear plants, railway lines, and hydroelectric dams, to the value of seventeen billion dollars (Fioriti 2017).

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Another example is the inter-oceanic canal in Nicaragua, which is similar to the Panama Canal in terms of its size and scope. In June 2014, the Nicaraguan government and the Chinese company HKND Group—a subsidiary of the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND)—signed the framework agreement for the “Great Interoceanic Canal” project. This involves the construction of an inter-­ oceanic canal on Nicaraguan territory, which is expected to connect the coast of the Caribbean Sea with that of the Pacific Ocean. This project is placed in the global context of maritime connections, with the construction of other similar large-scale works in various parts of the world:  in Turkey—with the Istanbul Canal project, Panama—in full expansion of its own with the third set of locks, and even Egypt—with the approval of the reform of the Suez Canal also in 2014 (Ruíz 2015). It is noteworthy that unlike what is happening in other territories, such as Africa, China is not participating in the process of land grabbing in Latin America but is acting as a trading partner rather than direct owner or co-owner through state-­ owned enterprises. In fact, in this area, this process is particularly being led by financial actors (GRAIN 2016).

The Belt and Road Initiative After the recession of 2007–2008, the Chinese economy had difficulties in maintaining its growth rate, which had not stopped falling in the decade of 2010 mainly due to the reduction of exports (although within these, as we have seen, the proportion toward Latin America had increased). The Chinese government attempted to compensate for this reduction in foreign income by promoting a stimulus package that included an urban and infrastructure investment plan, favoring domestic demand, as well as the massive creation of money by the state to maintain credit supply (Brenner 2019; Hart-Landsberg 2018). This strategy generated a housing excess in the form of a bubble, with the risk that defaults would affect financial capital and the consequent increase in debt, as well as a problem of overcapacity in certain industries. As Claudio Katz (2020 2) points out, “between 2011 and 2013 China broke all the world records for the use of cement to build cities that could not be occupied,” while there was also credit saturation, although state control over the economy prevented a flight of capital abroad. The way to maintain the growth rate in the face of this situation of over-accumulation was through expansion beyond China’s borders. In this sense, the Belt and Road Initiative appeared as a huge infrastructure

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investment plan to mobilize Chinese companies, through loans to the host countries that must subsequently be repaid and as a way of channeling the surpluses that the internal market cannot absorb (Katz 2020). Shortly after his election in 2013, President Xi Jinping, during a visit to Kazakhstan, proposed a new model of regional cooperation based on the construction of a “Silk Road Economic Belt,” and later in Indonesia he proposed the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and the construction of the “twenty-first Century Maritime Silk Road.” This set of proposals are officially termed as the One Belt One Road Initiative (OBOR) or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Huang 2016). The initial aim of this initiative was to connect China with more than seventy countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania, with a two-­ part approach. On the one hand, the “belt” recreates the old Silk Road and involves the construction of a new land bridge between Eurasia and China, developing economic corridors between different surrounding countries; on the other hand, the “road” is in fact a series of ports establishing a maritime trade route across several oceans inspired by ancient maritime trade routes on the coast of China (Meza 2018). The initiative is being shaped through a series of separate but related investments in large-­ scale gas and oil pipelines, roads, railways, and ports, as well as connected “economic corridors” (Hart-Landsberg 2018). The initial project directly involves sixty-five countries, covering 60% of the world’s energy reserves, 70% of the world’s population, and 55% of the world’s GDP. It is a multi-­ billion-­ dollar investment, with China contributing 1.4 billion dollars. According to Chinese government estimates, this project is expected to be completed in 2049, when the country celebrates hundred  years of the founding of the People’s Republic (Meza 2018). The financing of this initiative can be classified into four different channels, both national and multilateral, as shown in Table 5.1. The “Greening” of the BRI Since 2017, the Chinese government announced an effort to “greening” the project, according to the term used by different authors (Yang and Yang 2019; Boer 2019), in an attempt to counter the criticism of its apparent lack of environmental concern. In 2019, this intention took shape at the 2nd Belt and Road Initiative Summit in Beijing, where President Xi Jinping announced a New “Green” Silk Road (GREFI 2019; Elkind 2019).

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Table 5.1  Financing channels of BRI Policy banks: Established in 1994 State-owned banks

Sovereign wealth funds: also known as sovereign investment funds (state-owned).

International financing institutions

China Development Bank (CDB) Export-Import Bank of China (Exim) Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) China Construction Bank (CCB) Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) Bank of China (BOC) China Investment Corporation (CIC) China Life Insurance Company China National Social Security Fund (SSF) – The Silk Road Fund (SRF)—A 40-billion-dollar multilateral investment fund created to facilitate the BRI and is directed by the Shanghai Gold Exchange. The World Bank Group Asian Development Bank (ADB)—A multilateral development bank with sixty-seven national shareholders and has already taken part in projects through the BRI. Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) New Development Bank (NDB)—Created by Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa, it aims to facilitate investment between and among the partners.

Own elaboration based on https://www.beltandroad.news/data

There are however doubts about the extent to which this implies that the investments are really sustainable. Different studies on the environmental impacts of these infrastructures indicate that many of them are inherent to their construction, for example, when they cross areas of great biodiversity, where they can increase the mortality of fauna, the fragmentation of their ecosystems, pollution (chemicals, noise, light), and the spread of invasive species.  Other impacts are related to the opening of roads to gain access to remote regions (e.g. illegal logging, poaching and fires in tropical forests) (Ascensão et al. 2018). A report from WWF about the overlapping between the BRI terrestrial corridors and important areas for biodiversity shows that the corridors overlap with about 265 threatened species, including 39 critically endangered and 81 endangered species. Furthermore, the corridors also overlap with 1739 Important Bird Areas or Key Biodiversity Areas and 46 biodiversity hotspots or Global 200 eco-regions (WWF 2017). The WWF report makes several recommendations to improve the sustainability of the project, of a general nature. Among them, it refers to the concept of “ecological civilization”

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developed by former Chinese president Hu Jintao in 2007, a unique approach to “sustainable development.” This is a concept that has changed over the years but serves as a framework for the ecological model advocated by the Chinese government, which is based more on state regulations than on market mechanisms (Goron 2018). BRI in Latin America As noted, the main purpose of the BRI is to connect and interlink Eurasia, creating an integrated economic space. However, although far from the original focus of the project, the Latin American region is of major interest to China as it is one of the most important reserves of raw materials and a consumer market of approximately 600 million people. At the summit of the Belt and Road Initiative Forum held in Beijing in 2017, leaders and representatives of several Latin American and Caribbean countries participated as guests, which is interpreted as a sign of China’s interest in having the continent become part of the initiative (Rodríguez-Bausero 2018). This summit gave continuity to previous areas of agreement, especially that developed with the China-CELAC Forum (established in 2014), which resulted in the Cooperation Plan 2015–2019, and the Forum on China-Latin America Infrastructure Cooperation, which has the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and the China International Contractors Association as participants (Rodríguez-Bausero 2018; GREFI 2019). Interest in integrating Latin America into the Belt and Road Initiative coincides in time with the decline of UNASUR, after the above-­mentioned withdrawal of half of its members and the formation of PROSUR (Sáez and Rivas 2019; Schapire 2019). This has led to a paralysis in the joint IIRSA-COSIPLAN planning, although many of the projects have continued to operate independently. At the aforementioned 2017 Silk Road Summit, Argentine president Mauricio Macri proposed linking IIRSA with BRI as a way of promoting connectivity. This thinking has become stronger over time, and following the difficulties of the institutions linked to IIRSA, it seems clear that their future depends on this link, which has had an impact on deepening its trans-Pacific nature. The projects that would be assumed as a priority within the framework of the BRI are in fact those of a bioceanic nature (GREFI 2019). Apart from this, there is currently little clarity regarding the elements that could be contemplated within the BRI in Latin America, which would mainly consist of maritime corridors and infrastructure investment with an

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Table 5.2  South American countries that have signed an MoU with the BRI and relevant projects Country

Date of MoU

Some relevant projects included in the BRI umbrella

Peru

April 2019

Ecuador

December 2018

Bolivia

June 2018

Inter-oceanic railroad with Brazil and Bolivia Construction of a mega port in Chancay and another in Ilo, as well as being the second largest foreign investor in the mining sector Reconstruction of the Manta airport Highway between Quinindé and Las Golondrinas (between the provinces of Esmeraldas and Imbabura) Two bridges in Canuto and Pimpiguasí (Manabí province) Seven hydroelectric plants Copper mines of Panantza-San Carlos and Mirador Roads such as El Sillar highway from Santa Cruz to Cochabamba, Rurrenabaque to Riberalta in the Amazon, and El Espino to Boyuibe in the Chaco Mutún steel plant Joint exploitation of lithium in the southern salt flats of the country La Cabrera thermoelectric plant El Vigía power plant Santiago’s Américo Vespucio Oriente highway Binational Agua Negra tunnel Train Valparaiso Santiago

Venezuela December 2017 Chile November 2018

Own elaboration based on www.beltroad-­initiative.com/ and dialogochino.net/data

investment of between 170 and 260 billion dollars over the next decade. The commitment to the BRI in Latin America has resulted in the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with several countries. Table  5.2 lists the countries that have signed MoUs, including projects that appear to be confirmed within the BRI portfolio.

Conclusions: IIRSA-COSIPLAN, BRI, Extractivism, and the Uncertainties of Regional Integration in Latin America In this chapter, I have briefly reviewed some of the main geopolitical dynamics of a historical nature in Latin America, specifically in the South American sphere, which are linked to the emergence and evolution of the

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IIRSA-COSIPLAN project. This project seems to have maintained its fundamental features despite the institutional changes experienced since its formulation, which seems to be related to the continuity of the dynamics of accumulation based on the extraction and export of raw materials. What has changed mainly are the actors involved, both institutional and financial, and the discourses with which it has been legitimized. The exhaustion, or at least the paralysis, of the regional integration project embodied by UNASUR, which guided the last phase of IIRSA-­ COSIPLAN, has found continuity at the confluence with the Belt and Road Initiative and has deepened its trans-Pacific dimension. The debate continues as to whether this change of direction implies a deepening of the model of dependency and unequal exchange, changing only the actors involved. In addition to the geopolitical and socio-environmental elements mentioned above, it is worth highlighting how the plans for large infrastructure corridors, such as IIRSA-COSIPLAN and the Belt and Road Initiative, promote a certain form of territorial governance with profound implications for the areas affected, beyond the specific environmental damage. Brazilian geographer Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalves indicates that by replacing the concept of region with that of axes, as the core of government action, priority is given to flows over the territory inhabited by peoples and nations. These projects, in turn, generate different dynamics of supra-state planning and decision-making with their own bureaucratic instances (far from the decision-making of the populations), as well as promote territorial fragmentation based on the spatial disarticulation of the productive chains. In this way, the specialization of large areas is accentuated, as Hildyard says (2017), according to the international or regional division of labor (areas of extraction or processing of raw materials, or assembly areas). The fundamental question is whether a greater rapprochement and cooperation with emerging powers such as China will change the model of dependence historically established in Latin America, creating opportunities for new forms of internal development and international relations. However, everything seems to indicate that the dynamics of extraction and export of natural resources will intensify, changing their area of destination and, depending on the countries, the orientation of the income obtained from this extractive activity (social measures, internal investment, etc.). A more profound discussion is therefore open on the social and ecological implications of a conception of territory at the service of extraction, as well as the hegemonic narrative of “development” that

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subordinates and leaves out multiple forms of life (such as those of peasant and indigenous populations) that do not fit into it. In the current scenario of civilizational crisis in its multiple expressions (ecological, climatic, energy, etc.) it is necessary to challenge this concept of development based on the intensive consumption of resources, as well as the dialogue with the knowledge of the forms of life that remain outside of it.

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CHAPTER 6

The Feminization of Extractive Violence: A Comparative Study from Colombia and Indonesia Raúl Holz and Paulina J. Pavez

Introduction One of the key concerns of decolonial literature has been the study of the continuous Euro-centered capital expansion over diverse social and natural worlds. Extractive capital, linked to resources such as oil, gas, minerals, and the agroindustry, all of them incorporated into global commodity circuits, has been a fundamental element of this process. The territories today known as Colombia and Indonesia have integrated into the capitalist world-system as a result of the appropriation of nature and the export of natural resources since their colonial beginnings. This origin mark has

R. Holz (*) University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. J. Pavez University of Chile, Santiago, RM, Chile © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_6

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remained until today. The Colombian and Indonesian productive matrices are still strongly grounded in multiple extractive projects, such as mining, hydrocarbon, forest industry, and agroindustry. Furthermore, dependence on natural resources-intensive exports in these two countries increased with the commodity price boom that lasted from about 2002 to 2013 (Ocampo 2017; Wihardja 2016). In Colombia and Indonesia, the arrival of extractive capital on lands formerly owned and cultivated under customary tenure brought a rapid and radical transformation of both the environment and the social and economic structure of local communities. This process is illustrated, for example, by large-scale oil palm plantations in Indonesia and mining enclaves in Colombia (Göbel and Ulloa 2014; Svampa 2019; Sañudo et al. 2016; Valencia-Hernández et  al. 2017; Komnas Perempuan 2019). Research carried out on extractive industries’ impact shows that violence is a recurring pattern that accompanies this type of productive activity (Blanco Vizarreta and Dongo Román 2019; Gudynas 2019; Komnas Perempuan 2019; World Rainforest Movement 2013; United Nations 2019). In this regard, extractive capital corresponds to a pattern of capital accumulation, characterized by “non-economic” mechanisms of value extraction, including violence and political and legal coercion. The defense of territories and ways of life against the expansion of extractive projects on resource frontiers, in Abya Yala and Indonesia,1 rests mainly on indigenous and rural communities (Tilley 2020; Svampa 2019). In recent years, attention is being paid on examining extractive industries from a gender perspective. Empirical studies in Indonesia and Colombia show differentiated problems for women, such as unequal access to land, precarious work, and exclusion from decision-making spaces, and sexual violence (Julia and White 2012; Bermúdez et al. 2011; Li 2015; Elmhirst et al. 2015; Großmann et al. 2017; Ulloa 2016; Haug 2017; de Vos and Delabreb 2018). In what follows we aim to show that extractive capital corresponds to a systematic organization of violence that acquires distinctive features when impacting racialized women. Studying the violence inflicted on women requires a framework that can account for the multiple layers of oppression. We propose a perspective from 1  Instead of Latin America, different indigenous organizations, communities, and political actors from all over the continent have adopted the name of Abya Yala to refer to the continental territory. In the language of the Kuna, Yala means “mature land,” “living land,” or “flowering land.”

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decolonial feminisms from Abya Yala that includes, among others, the works of Cabnal (2010), Cumes (2012), Curiel (2007), Espinosa-Miñoso (2009, 2016, 2014, Espinosa-Miñoso et  al. 2014), Lugones (2008), Rivera Cusicanqui (2004), and Segato (2011, 2015). These authors do not necessarily adhere in explicit terms to a decolonial or feminist framework, the same intellectual current, or a political movement, but they share a central criticism of capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal institutions, premises, and practices that have historically favored men.2 Our perspective also responds to two additional concerns: our territorial proximity, which makes us part of the colonial history of Latin America/Abya Yala, and language, which facilitates access to most of the documents written in Spanish. This does not neglect the existence of intellectual production from indigenous women in Indonesia, but our distance and lack of knowledge of Indonesian and other local languages impeded a deeper investigation and articulation similar to insights coming from Abya Yala.3 Our argument proceeds as follows. First, we present our approach based on insights from decolonial feminisms from Abya Yala. We then briefly discuss the promises and limits of trans-pacific exchange before examining three types of violence in three successive sections, namely, physical, economic, and epistemic, and conclude with a reflection on the possibilities and limits of our proposed framework to examine the impact of extractive capital on racialized women in and beyond Colombia and Indonesia.

2  For instance, in an interview Cabnal asserts: “I do not call myself decolonial. I tell you: I am a territorial community feminist, because I go beyond colonial times. If I stay as decolonial, I stay in the 527 years around here. And I’m going back, to millenary ways too” (Cabnal 2018; our translation). “Yo no me nombro decolonial. Les cuento: soy feminista comunitaria territorial, porque voy más allá del tiempo colonial. Si me quedo como decolonial, me quedo en los 527 años por acá. Y estoy yendo atrás, a formas milenarias también.” 3  An example is Tuhiwai Smith’s (2012) proposal to decolonize research methodologies; or Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill (2013) who engages Native feminist theories to excavate the deep connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy in the United States and many other Western countries. We can also see or other interesting experiences such as the Isyarat Feminisme Dekolonial (Gesture of Decolonial Feminism) seminar, recently held by intellectuals and feminist activists from Indonesia (Taufik 2020; Pengelola Etalase Pemikiran Perempuan 2020).

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Advancing Ideas from Decolonial Feminisms to Examine Extractive Violence Against Racialized Women We understand decolonial feminisms as an open and diverse space for dialogue that is in continuous review but which maintains a common objective of questioning and opposing a patriarchal, heteronormative, and racial ordering of life. It allows us to examine extractive violence from the juncture of coloniality and patriarchy. This entails conferring to the category of gender a theoretical and epistemic status, capable of illuminating multiple aspects of the new colonial order when impacting the lives of communities (Segato 2011). Decolonial feminists’ perspectives allow us to overcome two limitations. On the one hand, Eurocentric feminist epistemology, whose universalistic and civilizatory project reproduces the patriarchal and colonial order, establishes a monolithic Latin-American Other. Eurocentric feminism has subsumed, without distinction, non-white, indigenous, and Black women’s subjectivities, experiences, knowledges, and resistances (Segato 2011, 2015; Lugones 2008; Cabnal 2010; Curiel 2007). Moreover, this original colonial violence has been justified, forgotten, and invisiblized through an ideological procedure of impunity (Espinosa-Miñoso 2009). On the other hand, the discursive practices of the feminists of the South, “white/mestiza, bourgeoise,” who establishing a distance with Eurocentric feminist perspectives reproduce the colonial matrix of privilege and constitute racialized women, as the “local Other” (Espinosa-Miñoso 2009, 47). We highlight three additional points from decolonial feminisms that are crucial for our purpose: (a) to conceive women’s body as an extension of territories and a crucial site of the contradiction of capital accumulation; (b) to emphasize the political and theoretical connection of the authors; and (c) to consider the colonization of modes of production that further weakens the positions of women compared to men. To understand the body as an extension of territory is to recognize its interconnectedness and interdependence: not only are human beings a part of nature but non-­ human nature is inextricably entangled with social relations. By highlighting the body-territory nexus we also make a methodological and ontological claim—on the former, that human relations should not be examined separately from ecological relations, and on the latter, to move beyond the Euro-centered Cartesian dualism. This allows us to examine the violence with which extractive capital invades, dispossess, and loots

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territories and bodies, by expropriating them of their sovereignty and life. The predatory occupation of the territories expands to the “female and feminized bodies” that inhabit and resist in these territories, to such a level that the plundering consequences only seek “to leave remains” (Segato 2011, 3). Communitarian feminists,4 such as Lorena Cabnal (2010, 23), have advanced the concept of body-territory to emphasize that “Historical and oppressive violence exist so much for my first body territory, as well as for my historical territory, the land.”5 To advance capital’s control over people and territories, oppression and threats have been built upon bodies, which in this process become disputed territories. As a consequence, in order to save the water or the land, women’s bodies must also be saved (Cabnal 2018). Understanding body as a continuum of territory allows us to question the incessant resetting of boundaries between human and non-human nature that comes with the advance of extractive projects. A second central point in our understanding of decolonial feminisms highlights the political commitment of most, if not all, authors mentioned. This is important for it emphasizes that decolonial feminisms are not just an intellectual achievement but also a political effort. It is also a preventive reminder to avoid some sort of “academic colonialism” (Zapata 2018, 63) and to stress the experience of oppression and resistance of indigenous women (Cumes 2012). As such, experience is not separable from theory and the two should be considered as political actions (Alcoff and Gray 1993). It is also a reminder not to consider women as mere victims but as porters of struggle experiences. From these experiences, women have elaborated their own interpretations and theories (Curiel 2007, 2009). The importance of the political project also implies a rejection of the priority of epistemic decolonization over political concerns. This means that the “decolonization of knowledge” has a limited scope without a transformative political action linked to the concrete material backwardness of racialized populations. Finally, following Quijano (2000), our third point stresses the extension of the colonial critique beyond cognitive perspectives to modes of production, but from decolonial feminist insights. To do so, we propose 4  It is a strand of feminism self-defined as a sociopolitical movement centered on the need to build community. Their existence is acknowledged, for instance, by the Aymara intellectual Julieta Paredes (2013) in her book Hilando fino desde el feminismo comunitario. 5  “Las violencias históricas y opresivas existen tanto para mi primer territorio cuerpo, como también para mi territorio histórico, la tierra” (Cabnal 2010, 23; our translation).

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to examine two points or moments of separation when extractive capital expands over non-capitalized territories, namely, the separation of production from reproduction and the exploitation (of wage-labor) from dispossession. On the one hand, the separation of production from reproduction has long been emphasized within feminist discourse concerned with the sexual division of labor for understanding the relationship between the capitalist market and community, between commodity production and unpaid reproductive work, and between patriarchy and capitalism. On the other hand, indigenous dispossession goes back to colonial times. Racialized women are located, we argue, at the interstices of this process.

Trans-pacific Exchange: Promises and Limits of a Decolonial Feminist Approach The Indonesian context is quite different from that of Abya Yala, and Colombia in particular. We argue, however, that our decolonial feminist framework is broad enough to look at the tension between specificity and generality. As we have already stressed, decolonial feminisms are not based on an ordered and coherent theoretical corpus but rather offer an overarching common conceptual lens that allows us to look at similarities and differences. It is a vantage point for the trans-pacific exchange to give gender a theoretical and epistemic status to critique Eurocentric feminist interpretations and privileged Southern feminist voices from the meeting point of coloniality and patriarchy. We understand it as a useful entrance, which allows us to place any specific case in a broader comparative framework. We argue that to look at the body-territory continuum the modes of production and the scholar-activist nexus from a decolonial feminist lens are also relevant for specific cases beyond Abya Yala but should always be treated as an empirical question. Our understanding of the body as a continuum of the territory is an important lens to explore capitalist accumulation and the subsumption of new territories. It helps to examine how these new enclosures materialize over the realms of social reproduction and the bodies of women. We find the idea of a separation point where production separates from reproduction and exploitation from dispossession useful to our attempt to understand how extractive capital’s violence operates on indigenous women. The third point that emphasizes the political link of scholars, indigenous women’s experience, and the political

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dimension of theory and experience is also wide enough to articulate context with more general patterns. Feminist scholars and activists (Espinosa-­ Miñoso et al. 2014; Curiel 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; Cabnal 2010) in Abya Yala have underlined the importance of not imposing their understanding on the subjects but highlighting similarities and differences and weaving concepts from practice. A decolonial perspective opens possibilities to understand political subjects from multiple identities among indigenous peoples. The purpose of our approach is to highlight an understanding of extractive violence by introducing decolonial feminists’ perspectives to deal with old problems while facilitating trans-oceanic collaboration between researchers. It also highlights the importance of non-Western knowledge systems in communities of origin, born of ties to non-human nature. We encourage readers to take our perspective not as a set of closed formulations but as a proposal of how to examine extractive violence on indigenous women that allows for the multiplication of questions. Some of the concepts might work better than others to connect context-sensitivity with broader political, social, and economic developments linked to extractive capital. Furthermore, we propose a perspective that allows for contradictions and nuances within the experiences and voices of indigenous women. In this way, our theoretical framework opens possibilities to understand the situation of indigenous women who are faced with extractive capital both in Abya Yala and in Indonesia. There is no epistemic closure, and how extractive capital penetrates new territory is a question that needs to be answered, not assumed. Coercion, consent, and processes of resistance could be situated in our wider frame depending on the empirical evidence. Decolonial feminists’ perspectives are both an examination of the systemic mechanisms of violence that underpin extractive-led development and a recognition of injustice for the people who bear the burden of the violence. This chapter sheds light on three of the most significant sites of violence of our times—against indigenous people, women, and nature.

Physical Violence as Violence on the Body-Territory If they touch our earth they touch our blood, if they touch our blood they touch our earth (Escuela Mujer y Minería 2016). A slogan from women of the Xinka people

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In this section, we explore the impact that extractive violence inflicts on female and feminized bodies as territory (Segato 2011). We propose to understand physical violence against women from the unity and interconnection of the body-territory (Cabnal 2010, 2015; Dorronsoro 2013). This implies expanding the conceptual scope of violence against women proposed by multilateral organizations, such as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (1993) and the Convention Belem do Pará (OEA 1994). Both define the violence against women as physical, psychological, and sexual and are legal references, global in the case of the former and regional in the case of the latter. The notion of body-territory seeks to overcome the epistemic regime of dichotomous and hierarchical differentiation imposed during Western colonization for the organization of human and non-human nature. From this fragmentation, Lugones asserts (2008), the categories of race and gender are derived. Furthermore, this binarism is also a subsidiary of the categories of civilization and barbarism, which continue to be fundamental to justify the occupation and expropriation of the territories and bodies that inhabit them (Lander and Castro-Gómez 2000; Lander 2014; Lugones 2008; Espinosa-Miñoso 2009). To examine the violence on the body-territory, we organize the debate by establishing two dimensions of analysis. On the one hand, we follow Segato (2013, 2016), who identifies “expressive violence” as a type of violence that is not instrumental but a means to express or communicate the domination and control of a subject, community, or institution over another. On the other hand, we examine a type of physical violence, which manifests itself as the damage and degradation of the territories-bodies that women inhabit (Blanco Vizarreta and Dongo Román 2019). Expressive violence, typical of colonial regimes (Segato 2013), refers to the materialization of a symbolic dimension of violence. This highlights that appropriation disputes are carried out in a “battlefield” that is body and territory.6 As we show below, from this perspective, the violence that accompanies extractive projects and subjugates indigenous women 6  As Segato (2016, p. 81) asserts, “it is the destruction of the enemy in the woman’s body and the feminine or feminized body is the very battlefield on which the insignia of victory are nailed.” The author continues to emphasize that “the physical and moral devastation of the town, tribe, community, neighborhood, locality, family, barriada or gang is signified and inscribed in the female body.” “la destrucción del enemigo en el cuerpo de la mujer, y el cuerpo femenino o feminizado es, como he afirmado en innumerables ocasiones, el propio campo de batalla en el que se clavan las insignias de la victoria y se significa en él, se inscribe

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through military or paramilitary occupations, as in the case of Colombia, or state-corporate occupations, as in the case of Indonesia, come under a new light. For instance, the “extractivist feminicides” (Timm Hidalgo 2018, 93) perpetrated against the Honduran leaders Berta Cáceres and Lesbia Yaneth Urquía, both of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), and Macarena Valdés, a Chilean activist murdered in Wallmapu,7 among other cases, represent forms of expressive violence. That is, crimes that can be understood as spectacular forms of punishment, which operate as forms of exercise of power and as the military arm of people’s dispossession and displacement. The same sense of exemplary punishment operates in sexual violence or the threat of it. Historically, sexual violence and threats of rape are part of the repertoire against women who oppose extractive projects (Global Witness 2018). Barón Romero (2013) has documented how sexual violence cases have increased in mining areas, especially through networks of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and forced prostitution. Such is the case, for instance, of the Bosconia in Colombia, where, in 2013, forty cases of child prostitution related to mining had been identified. In the Colombian mining context, Bermúdez Rico et al. (2011) identified an intensification of physical and sexual assaults on women. The increase in rape cases and the increase in the sex market in these areas are indicators of women’s social deterioration with the expansion of extractive projects and the appropriation of life. Similar cases have also been presented in other territories of Abya Yala. For example, a group of indigenous Maya Q’eqchi women from Guatemala has accused the Hudbay Minerals company of group sexual violations perpetrated by agents in charge of harassing indigenous communities and the repression of anti-mining activists. These events have been decisive in displacing indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories (Pineda and Moncada 2018). In the case of Indonesia, the literature we were able to review regarding the relationship between the emergence of oil palm monocultures and sexual violence and/or extractivist feminicides is less conclusive. More specifically, we were not able to confirm the extent of “expressive en él, la devastación física y moral del pueblo, tribu, comunidad, vecindario, localidad, familia barriada o pandilla en el cuerpo femenino” (Segato 2016, p. 81; our translation). 7  Wallmapu is the Mapudungun (Mapuche language) name given by some activists to the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people located in southern Chile and Argentina.

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violence” as in the case of Abya Yala. Indeed, it is reported that sexual violence is more recurrent in Abya Yala and Africa (Couillard and FPP 2016). However, the independent report of the National Commission on Violence Against Women, Komnas Perempuan of Indonesia, concludes in its section on “Environmental Damage and Impacts on Women” that extractive projects favored by state policies have led to natural resource conflicts where “women are directly or indirectly affected, including experiencing gender-based violence” (Komnas Perempuan 2019, 77). The same report informs about two other situations that suggest the feminization of physical violence in extractive contexts. In the first case, girls from families that rejected the construction of a power station in Seko were sexually assaulted by village officers who supported the power station’s construction. In the second case, the violence is linked to the state. It includes sexual harassment and mistreatment of women who are defending their lands, beliefs, or places of worship. The report illustrates these cases through trafficking in women that are handled slowly or not handled by the police and cases of police abuse. The various incidents registered in this report suggest that extractive projects in Indonesia, including palm oil, agribusiness, and energy, impose undue physical violence against women. In this vein, and similar to the case of Colombia, it could be the expression of an “armed branch” of extractive projects. The documents reviewed likely underestimate the real extent of extractive violence against women. For cases located in Africa, a non-governmental women’s organization shows that most women who suffer physical and sexual violence around plantations suffer in silence. Few women report rape or sexual harassment, fearing reprisals and further abuses by the authorities and company staff (RADD et al. 2019). In sum, evidence tends to support the existence of specific physical violence against women in the context of extractive projects. While in Abya Yala extractive sexual violence and feminicides are recurrent and can be read more directly as “expressive violence” and as the degradation of the territories-bodies that women inhabit, in the case of Indonesia, the evidence we could find relates more directly with the latter violence. In what follows we examine the economic violence that impacts women with the arrival of extractive capital.

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The Feminization of Economic Violence from Changing Labor-Land Relations In this section, we explore the economic violence inscribed in extractive capital’s relation of coloniality and patriarchy. We organize the discussion around two specific separations to look at the impact on racialized women and changing labor-land relations: the separation of production from reproduction and the separation of exploitation of wage-labor from dispossession. As we will see in the case of racialized women, both processes are entwined; they cannot be easily disentangled because they are unified, although unevenly and in dynamic ways. The evidence points to two fundamental shifts: first, the loss of women’s access to and control over land (Julia and White 2012; Elmhirst et  al. 2015; Haug 2017; de Vos and Delabreb 2018; Li 2015; Blanco Vizarreta and Dongo Román 2019), and second, the establishment of “new” forms of sexual division of labor (Julia and White 2012; Bissonnette 2012; Romero Epiayú and Barón Romero 2013; Barón Romero 2013; Blanco Vizarreta and Dongo Román 2019). These shifts undermine traditional forms of role redistribution and women’s time use (Carrasco and Domínguez 2003; Durán Heras and Rogero 2010). Regarding the loss of and access to control of land, in the case of Colombia, leaders and activists from different communities and territories asserted that the expansion of the mining industry has intensified the dispossession of lands and territories of ethnic communities (Afro-Colombian and indigenous) (Barón Romero 2013; Carvajal 2016; Ulloa 2016). These authors also show that compared to men, women, but also young people, boys, and girls, face a greater risk of being deprived of their wealth. Furthermore, women are in a disadvantaged position to resist and oppose companies’ threats and legal maneuvers, often fraudulent. In Indonesia, Julia and Ben White (2012) show that the expansion of corporate palm plantations and the contract farming system have weakened the position and livelihood of indigenous women in the community Hibun Dayak in the Sanggau District, West Kalimantan. The transfer of land tenure from the community to the state and the “head of the family” system, which determines that it is the man who can inherit and register agricultural parcels, has excluded women from hereditary transfer systems and the right to land ownership (Julia and White 2012). In terms of new forms of labor division, in La Guajira community of Colombia the coal mining industry has transformed women’s economic

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activities, mainly linked to agriculture. In interviews conducted by Romero Epiayú and Barón Romero (2013), women asserted that there are few employment opportunities for women in the areas of mining. The same research shows that the jobs offered tend to be characterized by “servitude” and lack of labor contracts and are poorly paid and seasonal. Impacted by coal mining, Wayuu women in the south of La Guajira have seen their traditional agricultural and artisan activities affected by the deterioration of the ecosystem. This has strongly impacted the time used to obtain artisanal raw materials for manufacture and the sale of agricultural and artisan products. As we will see for the case of Indonesia, Wayuu women’s workload has multiplied; apart from taking on the tasks of caring for the children, they now have to take on the agricultural work they previously shared with the community’s men. Together it means a more significant unpaid workload for women. The “new” forms of labor division in the palm industry in Indonesia, Bissonnette (2012) shows, are strictly based on gender; that is, women participate mainly in labor maintenance, while men do it in production or harvest. Bissonnette argues that maintenance tasks are undervalued, carried out without adequate security measures when using, for example, pesticides or fertilizers; moreover, labor rights, such as access to contracts, health care, pensions, and other benefits, are not guaranteed to women. Similarly, Li (2015) points out that women are considered merely as helpers of their husbands and do not receive remuneration for their work. Furthermore, Julia and Ben White (2012) observe that women assume a double workload by combining work on plantations and maintaining subsistence agriculture. However, if we include the reproductive and care work, the shift would rather be triple (Moser 1995). Julia and White (2012) conclude that these changes shift the distribution of time dedicated to paid and unpaid work. Before the irruption of the oil palm industry, some degrees of gender balances were preserved. All in all, the evidence reviewed tends to support the existence of similar colonial and patriarchal logics of extractive capital in Indonesia and Colombia. The loss of women’s access to and control over land and the establishment of new forms of sexual division of labor weaken women’s position compared to men. Women disproportionally absorb the costs of the reproduction of community life and contribute with their low or unpaid work to a greater accumulation of extractive capital. As a result, the endless drive toward the commodification of the extractive system is based directly on the appropriation of the territories’ resources: nature and paid

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labor power. However, it also depends on the reproductive and unpaid work of women, which sustains the maintenance of life in the territories under intervention. The cost of this unpaid work is both invisibilized and expropriated—conditions that perpetuate the economic violence against women. Ultimately, we could argue with Segato (2010) that the subsistence of the extractive system seems to fall on the bodies of women.

Epistemic Violence: The Destruction of Fundamental Knowledge for the Reproduction of Life We now move on to examine the epistemic violence suffered by racialized women in the face of extractivist projects. That is, the reduction, elimination, and replacement of racialized women’s knowledge by the dominating paradigms of knowledge. As we show below, most of these epistemic violences are directly linked to women’s role in the reproduction of life that is, in turn, connected to their activities and livelihoods. As we have seen previously, extractive capital transforms the systems of production and reproduction and imposes new roles on women. These transformations also include new constructions of identities and knowledge, as well as new economic dynamics and decision-making processes around daily activities, all associated with gender (Ulloa 2016; CENSAT Agua Viva and Amigos de la Tierra Colombia 2015). In some communities in Abya Yala, extractive activities transform territories and cultural practices that have historically been preserved by women, who identify with mother nature, because like the earth they also “produce” life (Caudillo – Félix 2012; World Conference of Indigenous Women 2013). In this sense, indigenous women are seen within their communities not only as main caretakers but also as custodians of traditional knowledge such as medicinal uses of plants, biological diversity, collective memory, and culture (Velásquez 2016; APWLD 2009). For instance, in Colombia, some extractive projects associated with mining have reduced, impeded, or eliminated access to sacred sites and medicinal plant resources typical of indigenous communities (Barón Romero 2013). In the context of the exploitation of the El Cerrejón mine, Carvajal (2016) highlights the testimony of a Wayuu female spiritual savant (sabedora espiritual in Spanish), member of the Wayuu women’s organization Sütsuin Jiyeyu Wayuu (Wayuu Women’s Force):

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I am a woman (…) a spiritual leader, but I no longer have land or dreams, my medicinal plants stopped talking, because I am a woman lost in my own culture (…) many patients come to me, but I no longer recognize the diseases (…) because I no longer have contact with our waters or our yujas that we use to grow our own food. (Carvajal 2016, 39)8

The epistemic violence also directly impacts women’s identity and role as protector of life: nature including humans. It has concrete body-­ territory manifestations, as expressed in somatic terms by indigenous women from the south of the Guajira, when asserting that “we are children of the land … and it is as if all that looting, the coal they are taking, removes a piece of human flesh from one of our children or ourselves” (as quoted in Romero Epiayú and Barón Romero 2013, 30).9 The epistemic violence is also expressed through the contamination resulting from extractive projects. The pollution of land, air, and water affects the biodiversity and agrobiodiversity and the exercise of food sovereignty (Carvajal 2016; Romero Epiayú and Barón Romero 2013; APWLD 2009; FIMI 2006). This is especially serious for women, who prepare the food for self-consumption and participate in the healing rituals through traditional medicine (FAO 2015). As guardians of native seeds, the negative impact of contamination on biodiversity impacts women’s ability to protect local knowledge and life (FIMI 2006; Carvajal 2016; Hernández Vidal 2019; APWLD 2009). As in the case of Colombia, Indonesia’s epistemic violence is best illustrated through women’s role in the reproduction of life. Indigenous women bear the burden of providing food and health care for their families and communities that are closely related to the management of the living environment (Komnas Perempuan 2019). For instance, in the West Kalimantan region, loss of the community’s adat forest (literally, customary forests) implied women’s inability to access wild rubber and other forest products used for food or as a source of revenue (Nnoko-Mewanu and HRW 2019). 8  “Soy mujer (…) sabedora espiritual, pero ya no tengo ni tierra ni sueño, mis plantas medicinales dejaron de hablar, porque soy una mujer perdida en mi propia cultura (…) aquí me llegan muchas pacientes, pero ya no reconozco las enfermedades (…) porque ya no tengo contacto con nuestras aguas ni nuestras yujas que utilizamos para cultivar nuestra propia comida…” (Carvajal 2016, p. 39; our translation). 9  “somos los hijos de la tierra … y es como si todo ese saqueo que le estén sacando el carbón, eso es como quitarle un pedazo de carne a un hijo nuestro o a uno mismo” (Romero Epiayú and Barón Romero 2013, p. 30; our translation).

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Based on the report by Nnoko-Mewanu and Human Rights Watch (2019) it is possible to recognize epistemic violence in the loss of identity due to forest degradation. This is asserted by community leaders in Bengkayang regency, West Kalimantan. For Iban women in Semunying Jaya village, the loss of the forest hampered traditional handicrafts that had an intergenerational meaning. In interviews, indigenous women noted that they used pandan leaves to make mats and leaves of different trees to weave ropes, which now are scarce. Another impact of epistemic violence on women relates to their function as agents of peace and spiritual healer. The loss of biodiversity has weakened women’s position in the communities, impacting their right to express their culture and opinion (Komnas Perempuan 2019). As we have seen, epistemic violence is best identified through racialized women’s key role in the reproduction of life: in food provision, as protector of seeds, traditional medicines, and several other roles connected with the transmission of ancestral knowledge about the health of the body-territory. These transfers are crucial to the continuity of the communities and their harmonious interaction with nature.

Concluding Remarks Does extractive capital have distinctive violent impacts on racialized women in Colombia and Indonesia? This study does not neglect or aim to reduce the impact of extractive violence suffered by men but highlights the differentiated impact on racialized women from the meeting point of patriarchy and the coloniality of gender. From decolonial feminisms, this chapter has offered one way to answer this question. We have argued three propositions based on gender as the theoretical and epistemic lens to examine the juncture of coloniality and patriarchy. First, to conceive women’s bodies as an extension of territories allowed us to examine the body-­ territory as a crucial site of physical violence. This is also an ontological counterpoint to the Euro-centered separation of human and non-human nature and, in this way, an insight into ontological violence. The second proposition was to emphasize the political and theoretical connection of authors and to stress the importance of women’s experiences as sites of knowledge production. For us, it was a permanent alert to avoid some sort of “academic colonialism.” Finally, to look at racialized women’s role when extractive capital separates production from reproduction and exploitation from dispossession allowed us to extend the decolonial

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critique to the changing modes of production that further weakens the positions of women compared to men. We showed that there is specific physical violence against racialized women in the context of extractive projects. Whereas in Abya Yala sexual violence and feminicides can be understood as expressive violence and the destruction of the territories-bodies that women inhabit, in Indonesia the evidence we could find support the latter violence. From the literature reviewed, we could also find evidence that backs the existence of differentiated economic violence through the loss of women’s access to and control over land and the establishment of new forms of sexual division of labor that weakens women’s position compared to men. The appropriation of the territories depends not only on the existing nature but also on the reproductive and unpaid work of women, which sustains the maintenance of life in the territories under intervention. The cost of this unpaid work is both invisibilized and expropriated. The epistemic violence was best illustrated through women’s role in the reproduction of life, nature including humans. Extractive projects transform the territories and cultural practices that have historically been mainly preserved by women. The loss of biodiversity, traditional medicines, and food sovereignty, for instance, impacts women’s identity, the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, and the survival of cultures and life. What became apparent as we proceeded to examine the physical, economic, and epistemic violence against racialized women was that these unfold in interconnected ways through relations of race and gender. Thus, although our classification allowed us to shed light on distinctive forms of violence against women, they are irreducible, and this overlapping tension persisted throughout our analysis. For instance, the economic violence that impacts women also reduces their role in cultural practices and the possibility to participate in communal decisions. Another point that should be emphasized is that although our examination of violence highlights specific patterns as feminization of extractive violence, all three forms of violence, in different ways, end up impacting the social and ecological relations of the entire community. As to the possibilities of trans-pacific exchange, the proposed decolonial feminists’ perspectives work as an entry point to explore the impact of extractive capital on racialized women in Colombia and Indonesia. They allowed us to unveil important systemic mechanisms of violence that underpin extractive projects and the differentiated burden of the violence on women. The framework helped us to shed light on three of the most

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significant sites of violence—against indigenous people, women, and nature. However, not understanding Indonesian hampered our possibilities of literature review and limited empirical evidence to English written accounts. This is a limitation that undermines partially our framework for the importance we give to situated experiences and voices by academic and activist women. To some extent this critique is also valid for Abya Yala, as we do not speak the various indigenous languages. However, most continental exchange among activists and academics is done in Spanish, which facilitated our review. Thus, though our insights into decolonial feminisms from Abya Yala may be a good lens, speaking the main language is important and should not be underestimated. Regarding the language barrier, a partial solution to deepen trans-­ pacific exchange is the consideration of English as a common tongue for scientific and activist conversations. Its enabling and conditioning relevance should not be underestimated, since exchange of decolonial feminist perspectives can be done through the bridge of this language. We are therefore faced with a delicate paradox: the language of the colonizer becomes one of the main enablers for exchange of the colonized. Looking ahead, our research agenda could be deepened in various dimensions. For instance, we did not examine the stealing of indigenous knowledge when looking at epistemic violence, nor did we study the importance of reproductive and sexual health in physical or epistemic violence. Both are important dimensions that should be further explored. As racialized women build their perspective in terms of alternatives and resistance in defense of their lives, their bodies, and their territories, the same goes for the consideration of alternative views when faced with extractive violence. The evidence reviewed suggests that a diversity of issues surrounding extractivism are shared in both regions. The challenge lies in creating new bridges for the exchange of decolonial feminist knowledges and experiences, with the purpose of discussing collaboratively about the modes of reproduction of the colonizing violence against racialized women and nature.

References Alcoff, Linda, and Laura Gray. 1993. Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (2): 260–290. Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. 2013. Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy. Feminist Formations 25 (1): 8–34. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2013.0006.

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Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD). 2009. Mining and Women in Asia: Experiences of Women Protecting Their Communities and Human Rights against Corporate Mining. Chiang Mai: Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development. Barón Romero, Dana. 2013. Impactos de la Minería en los Derechos de las Mujeres Rurales en Colombia. Cien Días. https://www.cinep.org.co/publicaciones/PDFS/20131101c.mineria_mujeres80.pdf. Accessed 28 Sept 2020. Bermúdez Rico, Rosa, Tatiana Rodríguez Maldonado, and Tatiana Roa Avendaño. 2011. Mujer y minería: ámbitos de análisis e impactos de la minería en la vida de las mujeres Enfoque de derechos y perspectiva de género. Cordaid y al Programa Mujeres y Violencias de la Fundación Synergia. http://www.indepaz. org.co/wp-­content/uploads/2013/04/Mujer_y_Mineria.pdf. Accessed 27 Sept 2020. Bissonnette, Jean-François. 2012. Envisioning Agribusiness: Land, Labour and Value in a Time of Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia. Doctoral dissertation., Toronto: University of Toronto, Graduate Department of Geography. Blanco Vizarreta, Cristina, and Mayra Dongo Román. 2019. Género e Industrias Extractivas en América Latina: Medidas Estatales Frente a Impactos Diferenciados en las Mujeres. Lima, Perú: Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (DAR). http://www.dar.org.pe/archivos/publicacion/207_generoeIIEE_vf.pdf. Accessed 07 Nov 2020. Cabnal, Lorena. 2010. Acercamiento a la Construcción de la propuesta de Pensamiento Epistémico de las Mujeres Indígenas Feministas Comunitarias de Abya Yala. In Feminismos Diversos: El Feminismo Comunitario, ed. ACSUR-Las Segovias, 11–25. Madrid: ACSUR Las Segovias. ———. 2015. De las opresiones a las emancipaciones: Mujeres indígenas en defensa del territorio cuerpo-tierra. Pueblos: Revista de Información y Debate (blog). February 6, 2015. http://www.revistapueblos.org/ blog/2015/02/06/de-­l as-­o presiones-­a -­l as-­e mancipaciones-­m ujeres-­ indigenas-­en-­defensa-­del-­territorio-­cuerpo-­tierra/. Accessed 02 Oct 2020. ———. 2018. Lorena Cabnal: Sanar y defender el territorio-cuerpo-tierra Avispa Media. https://avispa.org/lorena-­cabnal-­sanar-­y-­defender-­el-­territorio-­ cuerpo-­tierra/. Accessed 22 Sept 2020. Carrasco, Cristina, and Marius Domínguez. 2003. Género y Usos Del Tiempo: Nuevos Enfoques Metodológicos. Revista de Economía Crítica 1: 129–152. Carvajal, Laura. 2016. Extractivismo en América Latina: Impacto en la vida de las mujeres y propuesta de defensa del territorio. Bogotá, Colombia: FAU  – AL Fondo Acción Urgente – América Latina 2016. https://movimientom4.org/ wp-­content/docs/Extractivismo-­en-­Am%C3%A9rica-­Latina.-­Impacto-­en-­la-­ vida-­de-­las-­mujeres-­y-­propuestas-­de-­defensa-­del-­territorio.pdf. Accessed 27 Sept 2020.

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Lander, Edgardo. 2014. El Neoextractivismo Como Modelo de Desarrollo En América Latina y Sus Contradicciones. Heinrich Böll Stiftung. presented at the (Neo)Extractivismo y el Futuro de la Democracia en América Latina: Diagnóstico y Retos, Berlin, May 13. Lander, Edgardo, and Santiago Castro-Gómez, eds. 2000. La Colonialidad Del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales: Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. 1st ed. Buenos Aires: [Caracas, Venezuela]: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales-CLACSO; UNESCO, Unidad Regional de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas para América Latina y el Caribe. Li, Tania. 2015. Social Impacts of Oil Palm in Indonesia: A Gendered Perspective from West Kalimantan. Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). https://doi.org/10.17528/cifor/005579. Lugones, María. 2008. Colonialidad y género. Tabula Rasa 9: 73–101. Moser, Caroline O.N. 1995. Planificación de género y desarrollo. Lima: Flora Tristán ediciones. Nnoko-Mewanu, Juliana, and Human Rights Watch. 2019. “When We Lost the Forest, We Lost Everything”: Oil Palm Plantations and Rights Violations in Indonesia. New  York: Jakarta, Indonesia: Human Rights Watch; Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara. https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/23/ when-­w e-­l ost-­f orest-­w e-­l ost-­e verything/oil-­p alm-­p lantations-­a nd-­r ights-­ violations. Accessed 15 Oct 2020. Ocampo, José Antonio. 2017. Commodity-Led Development in Latin America. International Development Policy 9: 51–76. OEA (Organización de los Estados Americanos), Departamento de Derecho Internacional. 1994. Convención Interamericana Para Prevenir, Sancionar y Erradicar La Violencia Contra La Mujer (Convención de Belém Do Pará). Organización de los Estados Americanos (OEA). http://www.oas.org/ juridico/spanish/tratados/a-­61.html. Accessed 09 Oct 2020. Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO). 2015. Comida, territorio y memoria Situación alimentaria de los pueblos indígenas colombianos. Colombia: FAO. http://www.fao.org/3/a-­i4467s.pdf. Accessed 14 Oct 2020. Paredes, Julieta. 2013. Hilando fino desde el feminismo comunitario. 1a edición 2010, 1a edición en México 2013. México: Cooperativa El Rebozo. https:// sjlatinoamerica.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/paredes-­julieta-­hilando-­fino-­ desde-­el-­feminismo-­comunitario.pdf Komnas Perempuan. 2019. National Human Rights Institution Independent Report on 25 Years of Implementing the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA+25) in Indonesia Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). https://ngocsw. org/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2019/10/Komnas-­P erempuan-­I ndependent-­ Report-­BPFA25.pdf. Accessed 17 Aug 2020.

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Perempuan, Pengelola Etalase Pemikiran. 2020. Isyarat Feminisme Dekolonial. Indonesia: Cipta media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFr92-­LJa5I. Accessed 08 Nov 2020. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South. Duke University Press 1 (3): 533–580. Réseau des Acteurs du Développement Durable (RADD), Muyissi Environnment, Natural Resource Women Platform, and World Rainforest Movement (WRM). 2019. Breaking the Silence: Harassment, Sexual Violence and Abuse against Women in and around Industrial Oil Palm and Rubber Plantations. RADD – Cameroon Muyissi Environnment  – Gabon Natural Resource Women Platform  – Liberia Radio Culture  – Sierra Leone GRAIN World Rainforest Movement (WRM). Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2004. La Noción de “Derecho” o Las Paradojas de La Modernidad Postcolonial: Indígenas y Mujeres En Bolivia. Revista Aportes Andinos, Aportes sobre diversidad, diferencia e identidad, 11 (October). ———. 2010. Ch’ixinkax Utxiwa: Una Reflexión Sobre Prácticas Y Discursos Descolonizadores. Argentina: Tinta Limón Ediciones. Romero Epiayú, Jazmín, and Dana Barón Romero. 2013. Impacto de la explotación minera en las mujeres rurales: afectaciones al derecho a la tierra y el territorio en el sur de La Guajira, Colombia. Colombia: Sütsüin Jieyuu Wayúu – Fuerza de Mujeres Wayúu. Equipo de Tierras y Derecho al Territorio del Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular CINEP/PPP. http://www. oidhaco.org/uploaded/content/article/2091974838.pdf. Accessed 28 Sept 2020. Sañudo, María Fernanda, Aída Julieta Quiñones, Juan David Copete, Juan Ricardo Díaz, Nicolás Vargas, and Alirio Cáceres. 2016. Extractivismo, conflictos y defensa del territorio: el caso del corregimiento de La Toma (Cauca, Colombia). Desafíos 28 (2): 367–409. https://doi.org/10.12804/desafios28.2.2016.10. Segato, Rita Laura. 2010. Las estructuras elementales de la violencia. Argentina: Prometeo Libros. ———. 2011. Género y colonialidad: en busca de claves de lectura y de un vocabulario estratégico descolonial. In Feminismos y Poscolonialidad – Descolonizando El Feminismo Desde y en América Latina, 2nd ed., 17–48. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Godot. https://nucleodegenerounr.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/ bidaseca-­karina-­y-­vazquez-­laba-­vanesa-­comps-­feminismos-­y-­poscolonialidad-­ descolonizando-­el-­feminismo-­desde-­y-­en-­amc3a9rica-­latina.pdf. Accessed 13 July 2020. ———. 2015. La crítica de la colonialidad en ocho ensayos: y una antropología por demanda. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros. ———. 2016. La Guerra Contra Las Mujeres. Primera Edición. Madrid, España: Traficantes de Sueños.

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CHAPTER 7

China’s Lost Connection to the Global South: A Fanonian Reading of Yu Dafu and the Colonized Status of May Fourth Literature in the Japanese Empire Ashley Liu

Introduction China’s transition to modernity in the early twentieth century was inseparable from the culture of Imperial Japan, as Japan-educated Chinese students formed a vital part of the progressive intellectual circle—the so-called May Fourth youths—who led efforts of nation-building and modernization in Republican China. Whereas May Fourth literature is appreciated for its role in founding modern Chinese nationalism, the fundamental control of Imperial Japan over May Fourth discourse and China’s semicolonial status in the Japanese Empire blur the boundary between national

A. Liu (*) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_7

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and colonized literature. Due to the Chinese nationalistic revisionism that seeks to downplay the bonds between China’s nation-building project and Imperial Japan, May Fourth literature is seldom considered colonized literature that constituted an interconnected part of the wider intellectual and cultural environment of the Japanese Empire. China’s geopolitical status vis-à-vis Japan in the first three decades of the twentieth century is often described as “semicolonial” due to the informal nature of Japanese imperialism during this era. Peter Duus describes that Japanese imperialism in China did not become formal until the Manchurian Incident in 1931, when the Imperial Japanese Army launched a full invasion and occupation of Manchuria (1989, xi). During the informal phase of Japanese colonialism in China, Sino-Japanese relationship was defined by coercive trades that favored Japanese interests (Duus 1989, xiv–xxiv) and Japan’s tutelage of China (Dreyer 2016, 44–64). One of the most prominent features of Japanese tutelage is the education of Chinese youths in Japan, which started with the first group of Chinese students arriving in Tokyo in 1896 (Harrell 1992, 1). By 1905–1906, Chinese students in Tokyo are estimated to have reached as many as 20,000 (Harrell 1992, 2). Japan-educated Chinese intellectuals were crucial to the May Fourth Movement; examples include Yu Dafu, Liang Qichao, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Qian Xuantong, Guo Moruo, and Li Dazhao. Whereas the Sinophone literature of the parts of Asia that were under formal Japanese colonization is viewed through the lens of postcolonial studies, Imperial Japanese influence over May Fourth literature is often solely discussed in the context of Mainland China’s national awakening and rarely as a postcolonial topic of the Japanese Empire.1 This analytical tendency neglects Japan’s overwhelmingly unequal and imperialistic discursive control over May Fourth thinking. This chapter applies a postcolonial approach to Yu’s literature by connecting it to the colonized experience of the Global South, namely that of Frantz Fanon. 1  Recent publications that discuss the May Fourth Movement as predominately a mainland Chinese phenomenon include Touches of History: An Entry into “May Fourth” China by Pingyuan Chen and 1919 – the Year That Changed China: A New History of the New Culture Movement by Elisabeth Forster. The Birth of Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature: Revolutions in Language, History, and Culture by Yu Gao discusses Japanese influence on modern Chinese literature as a matter of neologism, translation, and assimilation, which presumes equality and downplays the crucial context of the Sino-Japanese colonial hierarchy. See Gao (2017, 91–121).

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Yu Dafu, a central May Fourth figure, wrote extensively about being Chinese in Japan; such racial experiences fundamentally affected the self-­ perception of the May Fourth generation. However, due to the established practice of reading May Fourth literature as national literature, the psychological violence of Japanese colonialism and racism in Yu’s literature is often read as an expression of Chinese nationalism rather than a portrayal of the colonized psyche. This chapter compares Fanon’s portrayal of the Antillean Black experience in the French Empire to the Chinese experience in the Japanese Empire. By doing so, I demonstrate the capacity of postcolonial studies to reach across the Pacific Ocean and include Latin America and China into an interconnected discourse of the subaltern. In both Yu’s and Fanon’s writings, the gaze of the colonial master is described as a mechanism of identity formation for the colonized subject; the power of this gaze is heightened in sexuality and romance.

The Gaze of the Colonial Master in Forming Chinese and Antillean Black Identities Imperial Japan was the anchor upon which Yu positioned his understanding of the Chinese nation and race; such is the context of his fictions set in Japan. His sensational 1921 short fiction “Sinking,”2 which secured his status as one of the most renowned writers of the May Fourth generation, concerns a Chinese youth’s sexual and emotional coming-of-age as a student in Japan. In “Sinking,” the anonymous protagonist learns the meaning of being Chinese and develops a modern Chinese identity through the humiliating gaze of the Japanese colonial master; this mirrors Yu’s own experience as described in his autobiographical essays. According to him, to truly understand what it means to be Chinese, one must face the humiliation associated with belonging to an inferior colonized race (i.e., Chinese). In “Snowy Night,”3 a non-fictional essay, Yu writes, For those descendants of the Yellow Emperor [i.e., Chinese] who live drunkenly and die dreamily in comfort and leisure, if one wants to teach them to understand the concept of “nation,” it is best to tell them to live in any country outside Chinese territories for a few years. The Indian race’s anti-British awareness and Korean race’s anti-Japanese awareness are due to 2 3

 沉沦 Chenlun.  雪夜 Xueye.

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their home countries becoming foreign. Educated upper middle class Japanese citizens’ treatment of Chinese international students is actually very welcoming; however, as these Japanese hide knives behind their smiles, how can us sensitive youths deeply troubled by “inferiority complexes” be as open-hearted as those politicians in power? As for the uneducated lower middle class—being, of course, the majority of citizens—of the Japanese race, they are frank and not polite; all of their attitudes, speeches, and actions directly scream “you inferior race and lowborns of a dying nation: why did you come to our Great Japanese Empire, who reign over you?” This is indeed the most effective, superb teacher to let Chinese people understand the concept of “nation.” (2013, loc 5392–5398)4

To him, the birth of one’s understanding of the Chinese nation hinges upon the encountering of the superior colonizer. Just as the May Fourth imagination of China through the lens of the Occident created the modern Chinese identity (Shih 2001, 128–148), seeing China through Imperial Japanese eyes was a fundamental factor in defining modern China. Joshua Fogel argues that “an awareness of the Japanese gaze played an important role” in the development of the Chinese national identity at the turn of the twentieth century. He describes that when Chinese students first arrived in Japan, they primarily identified with their provinces of origin; their self-identification as “Chinese” was due to the Japanese seeing them as a Chinese unity (Fogel 2005, 6). In the modern colonial world order, the colonizer and colonized discover new identities upon encountering the “Other,” which facilitates the positioning of oneself in the colonial hierarchy; such positioning is where one anchors one’s identity. For the colonized, national and racial identities originate from the inferior position assigned by interactions with the superior. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon emphasizes that the Black identity is relational to the white gaze. He observes that there is a fundamental difference between the self-identity of a white person and a Black person: “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation 4  只在小安逸里醉生梦死, 小圈子里夺利争权的黄帝之子孙, 若要教他领悟一下国家的观 念的, 最好是叫他到中国领土以外的无论哪一国去住上两三年。印度民族的晓得反英, 高丽 民族的晓得抗日, 就因为他们的祖国, 都变成了外国的缘故。有知识的中上流日本国民, 对 中国留学生, 原也在十分的笼络; 但笑里藏刀, 深感着“不及错觉”的我们这些神经过敏的青 年, 胸怀哪里能够坦白到像现在当局的那些政治家一样; 至于无知识的中下流——这一流当 然是国民中的最大多数——大和民种, 则老实不客气, 在态度上言语上举动上处处都直叫出 来在说:“你们这些劣等民族, 亡国贱种, 到我们这管理你们的大日本帝国来做什么!” 简直是 最有成绩的对于中国人使了解国家观念的高等教师了。English translation by me.

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to the white man” (Fanon 2008, 82–83). The unequal relationship between the colonizer and the colonized deprives the colonized of the right to have an independent identity; the colonized subject must change his/her identity as s/he comes into contact with the culture of the imperial center. Fanon articulates, The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question. (2008, 8)

In the chapter titled “The Negro and Language,” Fanon argues that going to France changes the very being of an Antillean Black person: “The black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation” (2008, 10). Such changes can take place even before the Black person sets foot on French soil; the mere imagination of France is enough to trigger a reconstitution of his/her personality: Even before he had gone away, one could tell from the almost aerial manner of his carriage that new forces had been set in motion. When he met a friend or an acquaintance, his greeting was no longer the wide sweep of the arm: With great reserve our “new man” bowed slightly. The habitually raucous voice hinted at a gentle inner stirring as of rustling breezes. For the Negro knows that over there in France there is a stereotype of him that will fasten on to him at the pier in Le Havre or Marseille. (Fanon 2008, 10)

As s/he comes back from France, the Antillean Black person acquires a new identity that condescends on the native culture: There is the newcomer, then. He no longer understands the dialect, he talks about the Opéra, which he may never have seen except from a distance, but above all he adopts a critical attitude toward his compatriots. Confronted with the most trivial occurrence, he becomes an oracle. He is the one who knows. (Fanon 2008, 13)

What is the reason behind such changes? To Fanon, Black people “discover” the meaning of being Black only upon encountering the white master; the Black identity is formed through the white gaze:

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As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others … And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. (2008, 82–83)

Just like how Yu learned the meaning of being Chinese through the Japanese gaze, Black people learn the meaning of blackness through the white gaze. This process of self-discovery through the gaze of the colonial master is foundational to both the Chinese and Antillean Black identities. Like Yu, Fanon documents instances of racial attack as key moments of identity formation. In the chapter “The Fact of Blackness,” he discusses his state of mind and reaction when being called a “Negro” by white people: “Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. “Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. (Fanon 2008, 84)

In these moments of being called out for his race, Fanon discovers the weight of the Black identity: I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships. (2008, 84–85)

This mirrors Yu’s claim above that the most effective way to teach Chinese people the meaning of being Chinese is to directly expose them to Japanese racism. In both cases, the gaze of the colonial master facilitates one’s identity formation in the colonial hierarchy. It is important to note that Sino-Japanese and Black-white colonial relationships are not identical; Japanese racial dominance over Chinese has never been as absolute and certain as white racial dominance over Black people. Despite its unequal relationship with China, the Imperial Japanese perception of China was “multilayered and complex, mingling contempt

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for China’s present with respect for its past”; hostility toward and discrimination against China were intertwined with “yearnings for solidarity with China.” Duus argues that Japan’s China policy could not avoid considering China’s “venerable cultural tradition, one to which the origins of Japanese civilization could be traced” (1989, xiii). Unlike the Black-white relationship, China and Japan’s shared cultural heritage determined that China was often perceived as a “natural ally” of Japan (Shimazu 1998, 92), though the alliance was not meant to be completely equal. Japanese feelings of cultural affinity and respect toward China were complicated and undermined by the colonial geopolitics of the twentieth century, but they were difficult to completely erase. The first three decades of the twentieth century were defined by a combination of Sino-Japanese tension and cooperation; the May Fourth generation’s ability to sit in the same classrooms as Japanese students and study alongside them testifies to the cooperative and respectful aspects of the Sino-Japanese relationship largely absent in the Black-white colonial relationship.

Romance and Sexuality in the Colonizer-Colonized Relationship The gaze of the colonial master acquires a special meaning when romance and sexuality are involved. All of Yu’s fictions set in Japan concern Chinese adolescents seeking a sense of belonging and identity. In these stories, Japan is not merely a backdrop or a static background to the story and character development; it fundamentally shapes the protagonists’ perceptions and relationships with the self and others. Another common theme that unites Yu’s fictions set in Japan is the male protagonists’ frustrated and tragic relationships with Japanese women. The comparability between the colonizer-colonized duo and man-woman duo is apparent; both duos define the self vis-à-vis each other in a hierarchy of power and control. The significance of Japanese women in shaping Chinese men’s identities is described by Yu in “Snowy Night”: It was in Japan where I started to clearly see the position of China in the global competition. It was in Japan where I understood modern science— whether metaphysics or immetaphysics—and its greatness and depth. It was in Japan where I knew China’s present and future fate and the hellish path that my 450 million fellow Chinese countrymen have to endure. The manifestation of international inequality and the insult and bullying toward races

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of weak nations is the most deeply felt and unforgettable in the gendered relationship between men and women and the moment when one is shot by the poisonous arrow of Eros.5 (2013, loc 5399–5402)

In this passage, Yu describes the importance of Japan in his understanding of modern Westernized ideas such as the nation and science. This enlightenment comes at an expense: Yu finds that belonging to a race and nation considered “backward” in the Westernized modern world is a hellish existence. What he has revealed here is the ugly truth of Westernized modernity that haunts the world even today. When the non-Western subject discovers the marvels of Western modernity and science, s/he also faces the soul-crushing reality that such marvels condemn him/her to a position of hopeless inferiority and marginality tied to the entirety of his/ her so-called “race” and “nation”; despite Western civilization’s apparent championing of individual freedom, the non-Western subject finds that much of his/her life is beyond individual control. Yu’s own signature twist to this discourse of the global subaltern is his view on how romance and sexuality interact with the colonized experience. Yu goes on to explain why the sexual and romantic dynamics between Chinese men and Japanese women occupy such a central place in the colonized experience: When you take a leisurely walk alone in the early spring with gentle wind and warm sunlight—or an autumn evening when the sky is high and air is chilled—you can always run into some [Japanese] girls from good families who are around your age. Over there, they pick flowers, sing tunes, put their feet in water, and climb hills. If you talk with them, they always engage appropriately. All of you talk, laugh, lay on the grass, and nibble on snacks you brought. It is like being in a dream or drunkenness. Without knowing, a whole day flies by like an arrow. In such encounters, sometimes you fall from the peak of happiness to the bottom of the depth of hopelessness. These innocent young girls and their beautiful qualities of absolute submissiveness to men were cultivated by their fathers and brothers. When they hear the two characters that describe a weak nation—shina—how can they maintain their usual countenance and warmth toward others? In our eastern 5  是在日本, 我开始看清了我们中国在世界竞争场里所处的地位; 是在日本, 我开始明白了 近代科学——不问是形而上或形而下——的伟大与湛深; 是在日本, 我早就觉悟到了今后中 国的运命, 与夫四万万五千万同胞不得不受的炼狱的历程。而国际地位不平等的反应, 弱国 民族所受的侮辱或欺凌, 感觉得最深切而亦最难忍受的地方, 是在男女两性, 正中了爱神毒 箭的一刹那。English translation by me.

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neighbor Japan, when people, especially young girls, utter this word shina or shinajin, what kind of mixed effect of insult, hopelessness, sad rage, and suppressed pain occurs in the brain of the listener? This absolutely cannot be imagined by my fellow countrymen who have not been to Japan. (Yu 2013, loc 5418)6

A keyword to understand this passage is shina. Shina is the derogatory Japanese term for China used in the early and mid-twentieth century; it was officially recognized as derogatory and abolished in Japan after World War II. Shinajin is literally “person/people of shina,” meaning Chinese people. Before the modern era, the Chinese Empire had tremendous cultural influence over Japan and was considered—both in China and in Japan—to be the center of civilization. The Chinese way to address itself is zhongguo, pronounced chu ̄goku in Japanese, which literally means “the central state.” Premodern Japan’s acknowledgment of China as chu ̄goku reflects its acceptance of the Sinocentric world order that held China as the imperial center and source of civilization. By the turn of the twentieth century, the cultural and political dynamics of East Asia drastically shifted, and Japan was the new imperial center and source of modern civilization. In the first half of the twentieth century, Japan stopped addressing China as chu ̄goku due to its Sinocentric connotations and adopted the word shina. Prior to Imperial Japan’s reappropriation of this Sinographic compound 支那 (pronounced zhina in Chinese and shina in Japanese) in the modern era, zhina/shina was a designation for China in Sanskrit texts translated into Chinese (cina in Sanskrit). Other than Sanskrit, old languages of the Eurasian continent also designate China with words that approximate the two syllables of cina; examples include chı ̄nı ̄ in Middle Persian, sina in Latin, and thina in ancient Greek. These are the origins of ways to address China in modern European languages. Whereas zhongguo/chu ̄goku was the designation for China within the Sinographic 6  你若于风和日暖的春初, 或天高气爽的秋晚, 去闲行独步, 总能遇到些年龄相并的良家少 女, 在那里采花, 唱曲, 涉水, 登高。你若和她们去攀谈, 她们总一例地来酬应; 大家谈着, 笑 着, 草地上躺着, 吃吃带来的糖果之类, 像在梦里, 也像在醉后, 不知不觉,一日的光阴, 会箭 也似的飞度过去。而当这样的一度会合之后, 有时或竟在会合的当中, 从欢乐的绝顶, 你每 会立时掉入到绝望的深渊底里去。这些无邪的少女, 这些绝对服从男子的丽质, 她们原都是 受过父兄的熏陶的, 一听到了弱国的支那两字, 哪里还能够维持她们的常态, 保留她们的人 对人的好感呢?支那或支那人的这一个名词, 在东邻的日本民族, 尤其是妙年少女的口里被 说出的时候, 听取者的脑里心里, 会起怎么样的一种被侮辱, 绝望, 悲愤, 隐痛的混合作用, 是 没有到过日本的中国同胞, 绝对地想象不出来的。English translation by me.

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cultural sphere, which encompassed civilizations such as Japan and Korea who adopted Sinocentric views, zhina/shina refers to a way to address China outside the Sinocentric world. By adopting shina, Japan signaled its will to abandon Sinocentrism; this change in diction asserted that the era of Chinese supremacy was over and Japan was the new leader of Asia. Moreover, as Japan increasingly felt the need to distinguish itself from China and the Orient, shina acquired connotations of Oriental backwardness. According to Stefan Tanaka, shina “emerged as a word that signified China as a troubled place mired in its past, in contrast to Japan, a modern Asian nation” (1993, 4). Despite these political and cultural implications, not all Japanese used shina in a derogatory manner; many considered it as a normal way to address China in the modern era. However, to educated Chinese such as Yu who understood the political and cultural implications of decentering China, shina was an unbearable insult that signaled the master-slave relationship between Imperial Japan and semicolonial China; the uttering of this word in a romantic or sexual context erases all possibilities of a fulfilling relationship with Japanese women desperately craved by Yu and his melancholic Chinese male protagonists. To Yu, the sharp contrast between Japanese women’s treatment of Japanese men and Chinese men is frustrating on more than one level. The nationalistic and racial humiliation associated with the word shina is intertwined with a shame of a gendered and sexualized nature. What he perceives as the “absolute submissiveness to men” of Japanese women, which he considers as their “beautiful qualities,” disappears in front of a Chinese man due to the weakness of China as a nation and race. Yu points to the contrast between Japanese women’s “absolute submissiveness” to Japanese men and their belittling attitude toward Chinese men as what triggers the feelings of humiliation and rage in a Chinese man. This jealousy of Japanese men’s possession of Japanese women’s respect and affection is a common theme in Yu’s fictions. To Yu, Chinese men’s inferior racial status is an insurmountable barrier that bars Chinese men from romantic fulfillment and claiming their masculinity. The perceived inferiority of China is a direct assault on the Chinese man’s ability to maintain his masculinity, as he is unable to be treated with the kind of “absolute submissiveness to men” enjoyed by Japanese men. The gender hierarchy of the Sino-Japanese patriarchy that dictates women’s subordination to men is disrupted by the colonial dynamics of the early twentieth century, where the relationship between Japan and its

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(semi)colonies was akin to that between parent and child (Weiner 1995, 453). The Chinese man’s patriarchal dominance over the Japanese woman is nullified by Japan’s colonial parental dominance over China. In the Sino-Japanese Confucianist social hierarchy, the child’s subordination to the parent is as paramount as the woman’s subordination to the man; the conflict between women-to-men subordination and child-to-parent subordination produces a profound crisis of identity and demasculinization in the Chinese man as he struggles between asserting his masculine dominance and submitting to the “master race.” Yu’s status as a student of Imperial Japan further exacerbates the situation since he was there to learn from and be guided by Japan; as the teacher, Japan was akin to his parent (in Confucianism, teachers are often likened to parents). The sophistication of Yu’s views on race and nation is reflected in his treatment of the Japanese characters in his fictions. Although anti-Chinese racism is an explicit issue in his fictions set in Japan, he does not address it by vilifying Japanese characters or highlighting malicious racist attacks. In fact, in his fictions, it is rare to find a Japanese character acting in a malevolent way; rather, the Japanese characters, especially female characters, in his fictions are filled with innocence, gentleness, goodwill, and sympathy toward the Chinese protagonists. Despite his apparent frustration over the power dynamics between Chinese and Japanese, his fictions do not portray Japanese men or women as villains. Rather, in his stories, it is the Chinese protagonist’s own twisted inferiority complex triggered by the fear of Japanese superiority that forms the real barrier between the Chinese man and Japanese woman. This plot construction points to his emphasis on the psychological effect of racism and colonialism on the colonized subject that is independent of the particular action of any individual. Rather, the psychological abuse permeates the entire culture and leaks through even innocent interactions with harmless intentions. As he describes in “Snowy Night” as quoted above, what hurts the most is not a mean-spirited Japanese person deliberately throwing racial insults; it is a gentle, young Japanese girl innocently uttering the word shina with no intention of maleficence. The tragedy of the latter scenario lies in the inescapability of racial oppression: psychological violence happens even when no party means harm. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon dedicates two chapters to the manifestation of the colonizer-colonized relationship in romance and sexuality: “The Women of Color and the White Man” and “The Man of Color and the White Woman.” According to him, the Antillean Black person’s

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pursuit of love and sex is tainted by the internalization of anti-Black racism and a pathological desire for whiteness that betrays self-hatred. Like Yu, Fanon documents a process in which the colonized subject suffers from an intense inferiority complex in his/her desire for the colonizer; also like Yu, Fanon puts more emphasis on the colonized subject’s own twisted psyche than particular malicious actions of the colonizer. Both authors’ treatments of love and sexuality indicate a mutual understanding that the colonized subject cannot escape from the insidious psychological effects of racism and colonialism even in areas of life that are primarily characterized by affection and acceptance, namely attraction, courtship, sex, dating, and marriage; when the colonizer turns from an abuser to a lover, the colonized subject’s internal psychology takes the role of the colonizer and becomes the abuser to enforce the oppressive racial hierarchy. Fanon claims that the Black man’s pursuit of white women is motivated by his desire to prove that he is equal to white men (2008, 47). This burning but unattainable wish for equality can only be partially realized through being loved and accepted by the colonizer. Fanon expresses that the Black man’s desire for white women is rooted in his wish to be white. He states, Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now—and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged— who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine. (Fanon 2008, 45)

Fanon stresses that he is not referring to white people’s need to be convinced of the Black man’s equality; it is the Black man who needs that conviction, as “it is in the roots of his soul, as complicated as that of any European, that the doubt [regarding whether or not black and white men can be equal] persists” (2008, 47). Fanon depicts a deep-seated fear of not being able to achieve true equality with white people on a fundamental level: “A few years ago I knew a Negro medical student. He had an agonizing [emphasis in original] conviction that he was not taken at his true worth—not on the university level, he explained, but as a human being”

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(43). This fear of not having one’s worth as a human being recognized by white people instills a pathological desire to become white in Antillean Black people. As skin color is the all-encompassing indicator of one’s worth, it is the object of obsession. Fanon points out that among Antillean Black women, skin color is the sole factor of consideration when searching for a mate: “It is always essential to avoid falling back into the pit of niggerhood, and every woman in the Antilles, whether in a casual flirtation or in a serious affair, is determined to select the least black of the men” (33). In the French empire, human worth hinges on skin color, a characteristic that cannot be changed; in such an environment, the pursuit of equality is all but a fantasy. Fanon describes a shocking scene where a Black woman attempts to achieve equality with her white lover by pouring ink on him (31). This scene is a powerful symbol for the absurd futility of dreaming of equality in a world where equality requires nothing less than becoming the opposite color. After she fails to “blacken” him, she turns her attention to “whitening” herself: “So, since she could no longer try to blacken, to negrify the world, she was going to try, in her own body and in her own mind, to bleach it” (31). Yu’s “Sinking” contains a scene that embodies the all-consuming inequality between the colonizer and the colonized that poisons one’s pursuit of love and acceptance. In a Japanese brothel, the Chinese male protagonist finds himself in the company of an attractive Japanese woman. Her innocent question about his country of origin turns into psychological devastation for him: His embarrassment was apparently making the waitress a little impatient, for she asked, “Where are you from?” At this, his pallid face reddened again; he stammered and stammered but couldn’t give a forthright answer. He was once again standing on the guillotine, for the Japanese look down upon Chinese just as we look down upon pigs and dogs. They call us Shinajin, “Chinamen,” a term more derogatory than “knave” in Chinese. And now he had to confess before this pretty young girl that he was a Shinajin. “O China, my China, why don’t you grow strong!” His body was trembling convulsively and tears were again about to roll down. (Yu 2007, 51–52)

The psychological and physical trauma caused by this innocent question (“Where are you from?”) is rooted in the complex colonial relationship between China and Japan, which does not only occur in the form of

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the Japanese colonizer reigning over the Chinese colonized. Even in a brothel where the man usually asserts absolute control over the woman, a simple reference to his country of origin is enough to upset the power relation. The word choice between chu ̄goku and shina puts the protagonist in an aggravating position of wavering between a representation that subjugates himself to a humiliating position in the colonial hierarchy and one that potentially alienates him from the established discourse of the imperial center, from whom he seeks recognition and a sense of belonging. Tormented, he concedes that he is indeed a shinajin. The protagonist’s lack of ability to reject the label of shina or shinajin is tied to his fear of rejection from the culture of the imperial center; he does not dare to act in a way that disrupts the social norm of Japan lest he would be called out for his non-Japanese identity. Unlike the case of Black people in the French empire, the difference in physical features between Chinese and Japanese is not enough for one’s ethnicity to be instantly visible. If a Chinese person obeys the customs of Japan and does not draw attention to him/herself, s/he can momentarily escape the lowly status of a shinajin—at least until s/he dares to speak or assert any individuality. The anxiety concerning being identified as Chinese is a common theme in Yu’s fictions set in Japan. In “Sinking,” the protagonist’s desire for the affection of Japanese women is tangled with his fear of emerging from anonymity and being identified as Chinese. The following passage describes his encounter with a few female students and the psychological torment the encounter causes: His breathing quickened, for girl students were a rare sight in this rural area. As the two girls tried to get by, the three Japanese boys accosted them: “Where are you going?” Coquettishly the two girls answered, “Don’t know, don’t know.” The three students all laughed, pleased with themselves. He alone hurried back to his inn, as if he had done the accosting. Once in his room, he dropped his satchel on the tatami floor and lay down for a rest (the Japanese sit as well as sleep on the tatami). His heart was still beating wildly. Placing one hand underneath his head and another on his chest, he cursed himself: You coward fellow, you are too coward! If you are so shy, what’s there for you to regret? If you now regret your cowardice, why didn’t you summon up enough courage to talk to the girls? Oh coward, coward! Suddenly he remembered their eyes, their bright and lively eyes. They had really seemed to register a note of happy surprise on seeing him. Second thoughts on the matter, however, prompted him to cry out:

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“Oh, you fool! Even if they seemed interested, what are they to you? Isn’t it quite clear that their ogling was intended for the three Japanese? Oh, the girls must have known! They must have known that I am a shinajin;7 otherwise why didn’t they even look at me once? Revenge! Revenge! l must seek revenge against their insult.” (Yu 2007, 35)

In his mind, his Chinese identity, when discovered, renders him less romantically and sexually desirable than the Japanese man. His silence is rooted in the recognition that as soon as he is identified as Chinese, he will no longer be perceived as an equal. Whereas the Black-white relationship is defined by stark physical contrast, the physical resemblance between Chinese and Japanese enables a state of surface-level similarity and cohesion. However, this condition of mimesis is broken upon utterance, which enforces the silence of the Chinese subject. Like those in Black Skin, White Masks, he exists in a world where equality in love—a fundamental human need—is unattainable.

Across the Pacific: Connecting Yu Dafu and Frantz Fanon in Postcolonial Studies Connecting Yu’s literature to Fanonian discourse opens the possibility of bringing May Fourth literature into postcolonial studies. The fact that many central figures of the May Fourth generation were educated in Japan begs the question about Japan’s role in the formation of modern Chinese thinking. As we have seen in the case of Yu, the colonial and racial hierarchy of Imperial Japan fundamentally contributed to the construction of the modern Chinese identity. To say that Japan played a significant role in creating the modern Chinese identity is an understatement. Similar to how the Black identity is formed upon meeting the gaze of the white colonizer, the Japanese gaze gave birth to the modern Chinese identity. Considering the unerasable mark that Japanese colonialism and racism left on the May Fourth generation, the perspective of the colonized is essential to May Fourth and Republican Chinese literature. Whereas May Fourth literature has been conventionally studied as national literature, the unearthing of Imperial Japan’s legacy in Chinese thinking has necessitated

7  The original translation uses the English word “Chinaman” to translate shinajin. I removed “Chinaman” to avoid implying that these two are interchangeable concepts.

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the re-examination of May Fourth literature as colonized literature of the Japanese Empire and its inclusion in postcolonial studies. Michael Egan’s interpretation of “Sinking” presents an example of how May Fourth studies can benefit from Fanonian and postcolonial perspectives. Egan argues that the modernity of “Sinking” is seated in its usage of irony; he defines irony as a narrative dynamic where “the objective situation is exactly the reverse of what the participant thinks it is” (1997, 315). To him, the protagonist of “Sinking” is unreliable in his understanding of the story world. Egan stresses that the protagonist’s suffering is not attributable to anti-Chinese racism and his perception of racism is delusional. Egan claims, This contradiction between the narrator’s view of the hero and the hero’s view of himself is again brought out in a scene that treats the relationship of the protagonist with women. He is drinking alone in an inn, and he feels himself deserted by the hostess. He begins the following diatribe against women in general, and the hostess in particular: “Bastards! Pigs! How dare you bully me like this? Revenge! Revenge! I’ll revenge myself on you! Can there be any truehearted girl in the world? You faithless waitress, how dare you desert me like this? Oh, let it be, let it be, for from now on I shall care nothing about women, absolutely nothing.” He composes a poem and falls into a drunken sleep. Yet when he wakes up he finds that the hostess has not deserted him, indeed, she has shut the window to close out a draft, and covered him with her own quilt. She is unfailingly friendly, courteous, and sympathetic to him. This helps to emphasize to the reader just how inaccurate the hero’s perceptions really are. (1997, 314)

Here, Egan refers to the scene where the protagonist visits a Japanese brothel as quoted above. He points out that although the protagonist feels humiliated due to his identity as a shinajin and suspects that the hostess will desert him because of it, the reader eventually finds out that he is treated by her with warmth and courtesy. To Egan, this is evidence that the protagonist’s suffering “is his own fault and not the result of hatred or prejudice” (314). He argues that “Sinking” should be read as an ironic story in which the protagonist’s perception of the story world is contrary to the reality of the story world (310–315). While I agree that the protagonist is delusional, I disagree with Egan’s assessment that the protagonist’s psychological crisis is “not the result of hatred or prejudice.” In Fanon’s analysis of the colonized psyche, the Black Antillean often suffers from delusions regarding issues of race; the

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Black woman who tries to dye her white lover with ink is a prime example. Although the colonized subject has a distorted view of the world, their delusion and distortion are concretely rooted in and certainly caused by racial hatred and prejudice; the affected state of their mental capacity does not negate the validity of their accusations against racism, as it is precisely racism that put them in such a state of mind. As discussed above, I argue that Yu and Fanon share a mutual understanding that the colonized subject is haunted by racism even when interacting with people with no malicious intention. This inescapable and all-encompassing nature of the subject’s inferiority and persecution complexes, which exist regardless of external circumstances, is one of the most horrifying aspects of racism and colonialism. The condescension and hostility perceived by the protagonist regardless of the reality of the interactions reflect the psyche of the colonized subject as detailed in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Unlike Egan’s portrayal, the protagonist is not a symbol of irony who falsely blames all his woes on non-existent racism despite facts of the story world that point to the contrary; rather, he is a victim of the ubiquitous racism that has swallowed every corner of his mind and follows him like a shadow. The difference between my and Egan’s interpretations of this matter indicates that Fanonian discourse and postcolonial perspectives on race can expand our ability to understand Chinese literature of the early twentieth century, which was fundamentally situated in the colonial hierarchy of the Japanese Empire. Whereas Egan’s argumentation is based on narrative theories regarding the narrative distance between the narrator and protagonist, it ignores the brutal reality of the colonized experience that is essential to understanding Yu’s literature and central to postcolonial studies. As scholars of literature get caught up with high theories regarding “the death of the author,” we sometimes need reminders that literature can also embody the lived experiences of real human beings who put pieces of their tormented souls into their writings.

Conclusion Across the Pacific Ocean, the writings of Yu Dafu and Frantz Fanon unite in preserving an unforgettable page of global colonial history, though their paths never crossed. The commonality between Yu’s and Fanon’s writings reflects a connection between May Fourth literature and the Global South that has been lost until now. Since the early twentieth century, a common notion in East Asia holds that the “yellow race” is the only

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race of color that has the potential to be equal to the white race (Dikotter 2012, 360–361). This mentality has resulted in a perceived distinction between China and the Global South. China’s self-identification as a Western style independent nation—as opposed to a member of the global subaltern—has distracted scholars and the general public from the colonized experiences and perspectives that form the very foundation of modern Chinese thinking. Despite explicit indications that the modern Chinese identity is born out of the Japanese gaze, which firmly ties modern Chinese culture to that of the Global South, May Fourth literature is conventionally studied as the literature of an independent nation state rather than the colonized literature of the Japanese Empire that calls for the postcolonial lens. When we deconstruct the artificial barriers between China and the Global South, we can perhaps unearth a precious moment in history when a Black man in the French Empire and a Chinese man in the Japanese Empire looked up at the same sky and dreamt the same dream.

References Chen, Pingyuan. 2011. Touches of History: An Entry into “May Fourth” China. Trans. Michel Hockx et al. Leiden: Brill. Dikotter, Frank. 2012. The Discourse of Race in Twentieth-Century China. In Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, ed. Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel, 351–368. Leiden: Brill. Dreyer, June Teufel. 2016. Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun: Sino-­ Japanese Relations, Past and Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duus, Peter. 1989. Introduction. In The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, xi–xxix. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Egan, Michael. 1997. Yu Dafu and the Transition to Modern Chinese Literature. In Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman, 309–324. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto. Fogel, Joshua. 2005. Introduction. In The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State: Japan and China, ed. Joshua Fogel, 1–7. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Forster, Elisabeth. 2018. 1919 – The Year That Changed China: A New History of the New Culture Movement. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Gao, Yu. 2017. The Birth of Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature: Revolutions in Language, History, and Culture, translated by Guicang Li. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Harrell, Paula. 1992. Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2001. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shimazu, Naoko. 1998. Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919. London: Routledge. Tanaka, Stefan. 1993. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, Michael. 1995. Discourses of Race, Nation and Empire in Pre-1945 Japan. Ethnic and Racial Studies 18, no. 3 (July): 433–456. Yu, Dafu. 2007. Sinking. Trans. Joseph S. M. Lau and C. T. Hsia. In The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Joseph S.M.  Lau and Howard Goldblatt, 2nd ed., 31–55. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. Yu Dafu sanwen quanji. Harbin: Harbin chubanshe. Kindle.

CHAPTER 8

Worshipping Ancestors: A Decolonized Epistemology on Death Conceptions in Indigenous Okinawan and Mexican Worldviews Angélica Cabrera Torrecilla

Introduction1 Since the 1970s, diverse contributions to the improvement of the human condition have led to a longer life expectancy, helping to postpone existential finiteness until senescence. The crucial role that scientific and technological advances in health and cosmetics have played in this development has reinforced the idea of transience and finite existence as something 1  This chapter presents the  results of  the  postdoctoral research conducted in  2018 at  the  University of  the  Ryūkyūs as  a  Japan Foundation  fellow (long-term). I  gratefully acknowledge the full support that my advisor Professor Ikue Kina kindly gave me during my stay in Okinawa.

A. Cabrera Torrecilla (*) National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_8

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negative. From the 1990s, this particular perception has become dominant for the understanding of death (Lamb 2015; Mykytyn 2006; Kurzweil and Grossman 2004; Rose 2007). Concerning cultural gerontology, aging and anti-aging criticism, and posthumanism, philosophical reflections on death have been reinterpreted and transformed by an economic-­ technological hegemonic discourse inherited from a positivist stance so widely pervasive as to pass generally unremarked. … This mode of thought has philosophical, ethical, sociological, political and jurisprudential ramifications that may seem disparate [but that] they are built on a common epistemological foundation … both theoretically and historically. (Singer 2005, VIII)

Logical positivism is a narrow epistemological way to define the entire Western philosophical tradition (since historically it has been just one more contender among many [Lewis and Wigen 1997, 85]), but its foundations have dominated the main “forms of opinion” of the modern world in this respect.2 In this sense, it is undeniable that finitude is a human condition of the existential reality that we must face. However, it is equally true that the discourse on finitude, since the modern era, is usually reductionist because it revolves around a positivist approach driven, to a large extent, by an economic and techno-scientific perspective. It is notable that almost all contemporary definitions explicitly include a solipsistic and negative association with the notion of death. Focusing the issue solely on individual harm leads to an assumption of a “tragic human dimension” that tends to trigger unethical attitudes (namely, those that defend “what is good” or “what is right” for the human species from a positivist approach) that, ultimately and paradoxically, end up overwhelming the individual and societies. In other words, positivist devotion to pursuing the “benefit of humanity” paved the way for science to determine what constitutes it without reaching any consensus:

2  Michael Singer has pointed out how August Comte’s positivism emerged inspired by developments such as Enlightenment and the primacy of reason on social progress, knowledge, and ultimately moral, defining it as a scientific: “Positivist morality was to be socially oriented, and Comte recognized that promulgating it through society would require not only scientific exposition but also subjective inculcation. … As a science, it would rely on sociology’s determinations of what was good for society, and on this basis would determine what was right for human beings to do” (Singer 2005, IX–XII, my emphasis).

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[Thus] the fact that science engages in investigations that may have harmful effects … does not contradict the main point … This reflects possible disagreement on what constitutes the benefit of humanity, not on whether science should pursue the benefit of humanity. … The concept of ‘humanity’ is often applied rather narrowly in this context, and may in particular be constrained by nationality. (Singer 2005, 100–101)

This perception allows us to explain why the idea of death supposes a negative resonance. As a “consumed state,” death is perceived as a conflictual condition, just as aging and transience are portrayed as a “threatening process” from the point of view of “human benefit,” as mentioned before. Nevertheless, understanding death from this narrow but hegemonic vision eventually affects the biophysical and psychosocial aspects of the individual, as well as the relationship with their environment, be it the social or the natural one, in a very similar way to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos explains in Para Descolonizar Occidente: Más allá del Pensamiento Abismal (2010, 11–30). Taking distance from the notions of anti-aging, life extension technologies, and transhumanism, derived from the techno-economic hegemonic models around the world, the proposal contained in the next part of this chapter seeks to consider an alternative way of thinking about death. By conducting a diachronic-comparative study between Mexican and Okinawan indigenous cosmovisions, a decolonized epistemological conception on death is proposed. For this purpose, I analyze how the indigenous cultures of pre-Hispanic Mexico (before 1521) and the Old Ryūkyū (before 1609) perceived the idea of death and the spirits of the dead not from the medical perspective of finitude but from the healing perspective of transcendence.3 I also examine how this, together with the syncretism adopted and imposed by the colonizing countries, made way to the still-­ living belief systems regarding death and the afterlife and funerary 3  As regards indigenous cultures, in the words of Walter Mignolo: “[I am] not talking about blood but about memories and cultural and epistemic power differentials” (2015, 295). The following distinctions are made here: any reference to “Okinawa” should be understood as the current prefecture (since 1879). Old Ryūkyū, on the other hand, will refer to the pre-Modern Era. Between 1609 and 1879 the Ryūkyū Kingdom remained as a semiindependent state that was de facto under Japanese rule. In the Mexican case, “Mexico” will refer to the current country (since 1821) and “pre-Hispanic Mexico” to the pre-Columbian civilizations. Between 1521 and 1821, the Viceroyalty of New Spain was an integral territorial entity of the Spanish Empire.

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customs in Okinawa and Mexico. In recognizing this indigenous idea of death in their historicity from the contemporary extensions of rituals, the objective is to distinguish in the local not only past legacies but feasible epistemologies for a contemporary global understanding of death. Therefore, this proposal has potential ethical consequences. If we become aware of the constitutive nature of death through these case studies, we may tend to reify less commonly natural processes. These legacies of indigenous worldview, therefore, can offer an alternative solution to that “tragic human dimension” when facing death. Although at first it might seem that there is no relationship between pre-Hispanic Mexico and Old Ryūkyū,4 there is a precedent based on their indirect encounter through maritime exchanges. According to Alice Kehoe, not only is there substantial evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts but it has been presented by respected scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Gordon Ekholm, David H. Kelley, Paul Tolstoy, Carl Sauer, Daniel Gade, and Joseph Needham (2010, 205–206). There is a growing tendency for ethnographers, historians, geographers, and archeologists to reconsider the Asiatic-American indigenous cultural parallelism, especially that between Southeast Asia and Mesoamerica.5 The work of Gordon Ekholm established that “the most significant analogies to Asiatic patterns are to be found [in Mesoamerica]” 4  Kehoe affirms that “American archaeology has been strongly influenced by Manifest Destiny ideology with its racist picture of First Nations as bestial savages in a wilderness …. For several reasons –legitimating European colonization and the Monroe Doctrine (proscribing European intervention in American affairs), and testing hypotheses of societal evolution on allegedly independent data– orthodox American archaeology insists there were no contacts between the Americas and the rest of the world before Columbus’ 1492 voyage, with the very minor exception of brief Norse visits to northern Newfoundland, Labrador, and Baffin Island” (2010, 204–205). 5  A large number of academic books and articles regarding this subject can be consulted, such as: Sorenson, J. 2009. “A Complex of Ritual and Ideology shared by Mesoamerican and the Ancient Near East.” Sino-Platonic Papers 195: 1–137; Hristov, R., and Genovés, S. 1999. “Mesoamerican Evidence of pre-Columbian Transoceanic Contacts.” Ancient Mesoamerica 10: 207–213; Tolstoy, P. 1963. “Cultural Parallels between Southeast Asia and Mesoamerica in the Manufacture of Bark Cloth.” Transactions of the New  York Academy of Sciences: 646–662; Roullier, C, et al. 2013. “History of Sweet Potato in Oceania.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (6): 2205–2210. Kehoe, A. 2008. Controversies in Archeology. New  York: Routledge; Meggers, B. 1998. “Archeological Evidence for Transpacific Voyages from Asia since 6000 BP.” Estudios Atacameños, 15: 107–124; Jones, T. et al. (eds.). 2011. Polynesians in America: Pre-Columbian Contacts with the New World. New York: AltaMira Press.

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(1953, 72), being a precedent that would open the door to the following evidence of this cultural parallelism. Alice Kehoe analyzes similarity across data, such as the process of fabrics and paper using the inner bark of mulberry trees, calendrical symbolism, architecture and designs, legends, toys, and board games, and shared details both general and very specific between Mesoamerican cosmic serpents and Asian dragons (2016, 101, 170–171). Specifically, the Old Ryūkyū also had very prolific commerce with all the Southeast Asian and European spheres. The late fifteenth century in particular was a prosperous time with “an extensive trade network that stretched from India to Korea [China  and Japan]” (Smits  2000, 91), a network that also “had strong ties with Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Sumatra, Java, and other cultures in Asia Pacific” (Jack 2018, 100). The Viceroyalty of New Spain, for its part, was an important point of encounter between Asia and Europe (Padrón 2012, 39; Lee 2012, 49) because of its commercial and cultural exchange with China (circa 1573), Japan (1596), Philippines (1570), and Southeast Asia.6 These overseas commercial trade routes moved around different commodities, but it is worth mentioning one of the most significant: the sweet potato, a main staple for the Okinawan population, as it not only “altered the course of economic development in the island, ... [but it also] might serve to relieve or prevent famine conditions which so often affected country villages in times of crop failure” (Kerr 2000, 183). Sweet potatoes had their origin possibly between the south of Mexico and Venezuela. Spaniards took the plant to Europe in early 1500, then the Spanish “Manila-Acapulco” galleons introduced it via the Pacific to the Philippines about 1570 (Roullier et  al. 2013), and finally, Chinese traders took it to the China coast where Noguni Sokan brought it to Naha, the current capital city of the Okinawa Prefecture, about 1600.

6  In General History of the Deeds of the Castilians on the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea (1601) Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas points out: “[The] Indies of the West are all the Islands and Mainlands contained within the Demarcation of the Crown of Castile and León, to the Western end of this Demarcation […] from where toward the East, and New Spain, there is a large Gulf of an infinite number of large Islands, and small ones, and many pieces of Coasts, and Main Land, which are divided into the Maluccas, the Philippine Islands, the Coast of China, the Islands of the Lequios [or Ryukyu], and of the Japans, the Coast of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the Ladrones” (in Padrón 2012, 40; my emphasis). According to Padrón: “The substitution of “Indies” for “Islands” indicates [the] Spanish ambitions to conquer China or Cambodia” (2012, 40).

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As can be seen, the interaction that took place between Asia and the Americas across the Pacific includes continuous and extensive flows of not only goods but also people, ideas, culture, and worldviews. For Bill Ashcroft et al. “the history of such flows reveals that the multi-directional and transcultural nature of global culture is not a new phenomenon” (2007, VII). In this sense, Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen argue in The Myth of Continents (1997) that understanding the different world regions from a “Continental model” tends to reify geopolitical boundaries and make the complex nets of oceanic exchanges invisible.7 From those exchanges, however, my research does not find specific evidence of the transmission of rituals, traditions, and belief systems addressing the idea of death between pre-Hispanic Mexicans and Old Ryūkyūans.8 The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is not to take part in the nature of their particular transoceanic correspondences. The aim is to observe that, even recognizing the Okinawan and Mexican indigenous potential of entirely autonomous spiritual evolution regarding death cosmovision, an interesting parallelism could be defined between both on this subject. Before getting into this matter, it is important to note for comparative purposes of this study another central parallelism between Okinawa and Mexico. Both territories have never been geopolitically monolithic, as they are borderland areas. According to Chicano critic Gloria Anzaldúa: “The borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of unnatural boundary and it is in a constant state of transition” (in Kina 2013, 79). Perhaps this ontological perception of transitional constant state gave their people a distinctive sense of death. From a geopolitical focus, the two maintain a peripheral status as borders of old imperial countries (Japan in the Okinawan case and the United States in the Mexican one). Furthermore, both suffered a “double colonization process” (Japan–US and Spain–US, respectively9) with strong 7  Take, for example, how in the sixteenth century maps “often depicted [Pacific Ocean] as being quite narrow, thereby keeping the two continents [Asia and America] close together. … This tendency to convey the narrowness of the Pacific and the proximity of America to Asia was very much a part of the cartographic ideology of Spanish imperialism. … Far from separating America from Asia, [many maps] depict a geography in which, … Orient and Occident literally intermingle” (Padrón 2012, 29). 8  There is interesting evidence, however, between Hinduism and the Mesoamerican worldview. See Barthel, T. S. 1980. “Methods and Results of Indo-Mexican Studies. A Preliminary Report.” Indiana 6: 13–22. 9  Although the US colonization in both territories could be described as symbolical.

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implications for their cultures and collective imaginaries. These facts contributed to the development of a particular syncretism between indigenous idiosyncratic worldviews and colonialist forms and knowledge. Okinawa suffered colonization by the Satsuma Clan in 1609, then by the Meiji government in 1879, and finally—after the end of World War II—by the United States in 1945. Mexico, for its part, was colonized by the Crown from Spain in 1521 and then by the United States with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848 and later with the McLane-Ocampo Treaty in 1859. After the first “material colonization” suffered by both territories, its consolidation required a step perhaps more important than the first one, spiritual domination. Thus, the transformation of both societies was much more integral, for social and political purposes but also to consolidate a particular belief system. Both the pre-Hispanic Mexicans and the Old Ryūkyūans, however, had a highly developed culture with values and beliefs deeply ingrained in their societies long before the colonial processes. Therefore, the ideologies imposed by the ruling empires could not be assimilated in a “genuine way,” which is why not only did it take a long time for the implementation of new beliefs but also many of their teachings were incorporated with the previous ones, giving a process of syncretism. Specifically, and almost in general terms, the native indigenous belief system in the case of postcolonial Mexico underwent a significant progression of acculturation over time toward Catholicism. However, the process was not received passively by the native communities, as they elaborated a reinterpretation of the imposed symbols, whether by association, confusion, or resistance.10 In the territory of the Old Ryūkyū, on the contrary, Buddhism and Confucianism were the two most important religious doctrines among the ruling classes,11 which, nonetheless, did not have a widespread impact among the villagers beyond the formal assimilation of rites (which should not be confused with the significance of the cult). In overall terms, both the Old Ryūkyūans and pre-Hispanic Mexicans selectively borrowed from their colonizer the ideas most akin to their 10  Catholic worship in Mexico differs to a great extent from European Catholicism. Although the days of cults and festivals come from the Christian calendar, in Mexico these festivals acquire an extraordinary symbolism rooted in their old agricultural calendar. 11  It should be considered that the Shuri court had to use the power of arts in order to play “the delicate political game of balancing their islands tenuous economy by keeping good relations with their more powerful neighbors, China and Japan” (cf. Stewart et al. 2011, 84).

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worldviews and reshaped those practices and beliefs that were not consistent with their particular ethos and identities. Even today, both territories have a great variety of different indigenous communities, which is why the cultural contrasts between them vary in many ways to a greater or lesser extent. The extension of the land in the Mexican case (having approximately sixty-five different indigenous communities) as well as the separation between the islands in the Okinawan archipelago (approximately one hundred inhabited islands) led to their indigenous populations flourishing in relatively autonomous ways even when they were within the same territory. Many of these communities have disappeared nowadays, leaving, unfortunately, only a few written records, which were destroyed during colonization/invasion processes or were subjected to reinterpretations under the dominant religious ideology. Fortunately, other communities still exist, preserving traditions that have been greatly influenced by the historical courses that they have undergone during all this time. Considering the above, a reasoned study of indigenous differences in both regions is far beyond the scope and possibilities of this chapter. Thus, the objective of this comparison responds not only to a need to examine the closeness that these two cultures share in the perception and understanding of death but to give us, as researchers, a different and complex approximation on it. To better comprehend these two perspectives toward death, it is imperative not to separate such knowledges from the epistemologies and worldviews undertaken by their producers. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the importance they gave to different rituals and belief systems as regards death and their dead. This examination of indigenous knowledges attempts to enlarge the space for discussing alternatives, allowing us to perceive them as a possible epistemology of resistance to approach and confront the global capitalist perspective of death in a broader sense.

A Continuum Between Life and Death A number of ceremonies and rites associated with the dead and the ancestors that are still performed by the indigenous communities in Mexico and Okinawa try to preserve ancestral traditions that are hardly reconciled with their modern cities. It is therefore essential to consider that, at present days and in a general way, the realities of both territories can be divided into (1) large urban centers (with all that it implies) where the spread of rituals is largely influenced by the religious policies of the government and

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where the rituals performed are minimum and (2) rural communities that perpetuate, in a more evident and traditional way, the elements, rites, and ceremonies inherited from their ancient past. It is precisely the indigenous heritage, however, that not only distinguishes Okinawa and Mexico from many other cosmopolitan regions but clearly distinguishes them from the spiritual dependence and domination of Japan and Spain. What is singular about both is the ideological context that precedes them,12 where death, the dead, and the ancestors had significant importance in their indigenous populations. Following the theory of Robert Hertz, Roberto Martínez proposes the existence of at least three diverse mortuary strategies that seem to encompass the different ways of thinking about the relationships between the living and the deceased in many cultures: (1) distancing strategy, where the deceased become enemies (whether beings or things) whose “social contact” should be avoided; (2) recycling strategy, where the ties with the dead need to be reconstructed or when some components of the deceased would be reused to shape other individualities; and (3) retention strategy of ancestors and the dead that, beyond the recognition of a genealogical link, underlines the permanence of the deceased in certain familiar and communal aspects. Here, the spirits of the dead are not so easily detached from the relationships they once held with their relatives, and although the deceased may become an almost divine being, they will continue to affect the life of their origin community (2017, 221–244). In this last mortuary strategy, the rites and beliefs of both the Old Ryūkyūans and the pre-Hispanic Mexicans are inscribed, as will be seen below. To illustrate this, it is enlightening how the Inoha village in Motobu, Okinawa, built a sense of belonging to the village (shima). Its inhabitants use uya-faafuji to refer to people who have deceased but also to parents and grandparents because, for them, their relatives, whether alive or dead, still belong to the village. In fact, this connection also operates in the opposite way, as kwaa-maaga refers to babies who are yet to be born but also to children and grandchildren. According to Masako Tanaka, “the forebears and offspring, as well as the living members of the community, 12  Although their “singularity” is debatable since elements of both ceremonies and rites associated with the dead can be found in many other cultures. See, for example, Van Gennep, A. 1909. The Rites of Passage; Campbell, J. 1986. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion; and Köpping, K. P. 2005. Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind.

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are therefore all ‘villagers’ (shimanchu) who have legitimate interest in the continuity and welfare of the village” (1977, 33). As regards the pre-Hispanic Mexican case, it is interesting to note the concept of altepetl. Briefly, the altepetl was the modular organization of its regions, whose smaller subunits, calpolli, “[consisted] of extended kinship groups –contain all of the aspects of the altepetl in general: political leadership (in the form of the tlatoani or speaker), ruling dynasty, and tutelary god” (Greer et al. 2007, 153). Since the tutelary god was seen as the oldest ancestor of the lineage (Fernández and Urquijo 2020, 224), “the composition of the altepetl follows a spatial organization that structurally contains its history” (Greer et al. 2007, 153, my emphasis). The altepetl also refers to the relationship between water and the afterlife. According to the informants of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the old people of the New Spain said that the rivers that make up the human settlements come from “there,” from the Tlallocan (one of the worlds of the dead were ancestors reside), which is why altepetl means water hill (Contel 2016, 89–90).13 The perception of water as a liminal space between the world of the living and the afterlife is a very common one in the Old Ryūkyū as well. In the poem Love of the Red Soil (1983) by Mikio  Yonaha from Miyako Island (in Stewart et al. 2011, 142), a clear reference to the above can be observed. The corals are a metaphor for how bones, when meeting water, germinate to be reborn: Where are the souls Of the billions now? Did they melt like salt Into the sea, or descend into the blind abyss? Without rest, do they drift homeless on the waves? Blue ocean, blue sky, darker blue of night, Of the ocean’s depths –generations of spirits Dyed the cloth of sky and ocean this pure blue. Before they are spirits, are their souls scarlet As the red hibiscus trembling in the wind Living coral in the waves? – yes, I think they are.

In this sense, the powerful relationship that both gave to life and death can be illustrated by some particular rites and beliefs that come from pre-­ Hispanic Mexico and the Old Ryūkyū and that can even today be observed  Mexico-Tenochtitlan was built in the middle of lake area.

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in certain regions. For example, William Lebra points out that in Kanegusuku (in Haebaru town) the first bath that the newborn takes must be done in the waters of the community fountain, Kanegusuku Hijaa, the same one that serves to wash the bones of the dead (1966, 191–195).14 Also interesting is the importance of the memorial tablet (small wooden tablet with the name of the deceased inscribed on it), toward which living relatives make prayers and offerings whenever there is a rite of passage by which each individual obtains a new status within the community, such as the birth, adolescence, starting school, marriage, establishing a new home, and, of course, dying (Lebra 1966, 191–195). In pre-Hispanic Mexico, on the other hand, death was also considered one of the rites of passage along with birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, class progression, and occupational specialization. This idea of death as another process of life may be explained by the exhaustive attention that pre-Hispanic indigenous people devoted to the cycle of the stars, which gave them a fundamental principle of nature as constant, repetitive, and eternal (Romero 2012). This is why they believed that the vital force could not disappear, but that it is disintegrated, transformed, and resurfaced in a different form, just like the soil serves to bury but also to sow. The concern for death, then, was motivated, above all, by its relationship with life. From these examples, it is evident that for the Old Ryūkyūans and pre-­ Hispanic Mexicans the categories of life and death were perceived as an intertwined relationship on a continuum. This continuum points to the importance that both indigenous societies attached to the mortuary rites, especially for two main purposes: to reincorporate the spirit of the dead to the ancestral lineage and to aid the rebirth of the spirit. Since they believed the body and the spirit remained linked even after death, proper purification and preservation of the body were considered essential to promote a healthy state of the spirit.

14  In the Yaeyama dialect, for example, deities that guarantee human and agricultural fertility are also related to death. Their names contain the root mar-, which appear in words such as marahyan, “to die,” and maran, “to be born” (Kreiner 1968, 109).

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The Journey to the World of the Beyond: Postmortem Body Considerations In a general way, there are similarities between Okinawa and Mexico in terms of the methods for disposing of the corpses, according to their correct postmortem treatment. It is important to mention that the described methods were carried out frequently in old indigenous times, although at present, some rural areas still perform them. In Old Ryūkyū, this method consisted of three stages. The first ritual took place just after death and with the eventual disappearance of the flesh. Three to twelve years later, the second ritual was performed, the washing of bones, which had two purposes, to cleanse and thereby purify the last “imperishable” remnants of the bodily materiality and to recover, retain, and use the power of the dead so that the next generation of children will be born with capacities equal to those of their parents (Nelson 2008, 147). After cleaning, these bones were placed in individual vases, caves, or tombs. Thirty-three years after death, the last ritual stage was conducted. The bones had to be transported to a general platform, where they were added with the bones of the ancestors. This same three-stage ritual structure can be observed in the stepped interior design of the kameko ̄baka or turtleback tombs, where the lower step contains the coffins (i.e., the bodies), the middle one the individual vases with the bones, and, finally, the upper step lodges the ancestral bones (Tanaka 1977). This triple disposition sums, in parallel, the spiritual level. Old Ryūkyūan people believed that the spirit, mabui, spent many years between the world of the living and the world of the dead. For this reason, they believed that many years should pass for the spirit to get rid of all its materiality, because just as a living person begins to live through socialization with the community, the spirit of the dead (sooroo—dead soul/gusoon’chu—people of the other world) follows the same path with ancestors and gods. In this sense, Masako Tanaka differentiates between three kinds of ancestors according to their “age,” futuki, kami, and gwansu. Every dead person becomes a futuki, and if the living descendants correctly performed the necessary procedures and ceremonies, the futuki becomes a kami. Kami (or kan, kam, kambito, kampito) is usually translated as a deity, although that is not its specific meaning, since a kami is not separated from nature but comes from it. The kami is related to an impersonal and mystical power that inhabits the gods, human beings, nature, animals, spirits, objects, and sacred places. Therefore, a kami is

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neither good nor bad, neither omniscient nor omnipotent, but since it has the power to influence human affairs, people have the responsibility to perform proper rituals toward it. The main sites for worship of kami are sacred groves (utaki), the hearth or fire (hi nu kan), and ancestral tablets (ihai): [Kami>]  is honored and worshipped at a series of seasonal, agriculturally oriented, public ceremonies …. All villagers though in varying degrees, participate in these ceremonies. As members of descendent groups, “villagers” are represented by various [female] ritual specialists (kamin’chu, or priestesses). (Tanaka 1977, 48–49)

Finally, gwansu considers “all forebears of the household since its establishment. [Thus,] the category includes both, the futuki … and the kami” (Tanaka 1977, 52). According to their beliefs, the spirit had to go through a long path of socialization in the afterlife, therefore, it did not leave the materiality of the living immediately but did it eventually and over time. Evgeny Baksheev suggests that this socialization period in the afterlife takes the spirit around thirty-three years, the same period in life that someone needs to establish a new home and family (2008, 281). In this sense, for Old Ryūkyūan people the spiritual world of the dead mirrors the earthly life. Like the body, the spirit also goes through the same postmortem stages. First of all, the disappearance of the flesh corresponds to a period of forty-­ nine to a hundred days on the spiritual level, in which the death forces the spirit of the deceased, called busozu, to wander between the two worlds. Regarding this, I would like to draw attention to the tradition of eating and offering shiromochi to the deceased during these days. Shiromochi is a special cake very similar to Japanese mochi with a very particular story. During the period of the disappearance of the flesh, it was considered that the deceased experienced great suffering. Therefore, family members had to take care of him/her during the difficult process of “becoming truly dead.” Thus, relatives prepared forty-nine cakes of special white mochi or muuchii, namely shiromochi, which referred to the number of bones that make up the skeleton (in other regions there were forty-eight shiromochi and one more that represents the skull). They were later offered to the recently deceased at the grave or the butsudan/buchidan, the family altar. Later, the ritual of washing the bones helped the individual spirit to become an ancestral one, also called uyapisu. For this reason, the rites

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associated with it demanded greater attention and care. Evgeny Baksheev points out: “For two or three generations (usually for thirty-three years) the deceased will be worshiped, consulted and prayed to as an individual” (2008, 281). In the last mortuary rite or ubushokkoo, the spirit completely loses its individual identity by joining as one with the ancestral deities (Kokubu and Kaneko 1962, 95). At this stage, the spirit is no longer an ancestor or uyapisu but is a deified ancestor or gwansu/gansu, that is, the one who is situated beyond the living in terms of time and memory.15 Considering this continued worship under the main idea of the non-­ duality of realms, the ancestors, the living members, and the newborn children remained connected through the idea of the village. The ideological unity is conceived as a perpetual identity where “all ‘villagers’ are theoretically under the spiritual protection of the deity of the ‘sacred grove’ (utaki) of the village” (Tanaka 1977, 34). The importance of worship, therefore, becomes crucial. For the indigenous people of pre-Hispanic Mexico, on the other hand, the methods for disposing of the corpses also meant a very important ritual. The varieties of sites that served as receptacles for bodies and bones range from holes in the ground, to caves, eyes of water or cenotes, or even rich burial chambers, always in a metaphorical sense of “being inside the womb.” The dead were generally buried in their own home or near their workplaces. Among the Mayans, for example, burials consisted of three phases. The first one is an initial burial made up of grave goods, which was believed to help the deceased on their journey to the afterlife. In addition, it was customary to place a mask on the deceased’s face, as a symbol of change and regeneration. The second phase was the cleaning of the bones, a ritual where, as in the Old Ryūkyū, the remains were exhumed after three to four years of death to remove the flesh remains. Once the bones were cleaned, cinnabar powder was placed on them, a natural red dye that represented rebirth and was related to the east, the direction in which the sun rises. Finally, the bones were deposited in family ossuaries, inside caves or cenotes, for example. At present, these family ossuaries preserve the idea of maternal extension in the peculiar form of miniature houses; that is, they embody an extension of the family sine, of the world of the living (Martínez 2014, 28–30; Tiesler 2008, 48–50; De la Garza 1997, 18–22). As can be seen, be it the Ryūkyūan kameko ̄baka or the Mexican miniature 15  Similarly, in the Mexica and Mayan cosmogonies the human-god relationship was the axis around which the existence of the cosmos revolves. See De la Garza (1978, pp. 55–56).

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houses, the spaces designed to contain the mortuary remains metaphorically represent the maternal womb, a clear symbol of life. The reason why the people assumed the ossuaries as an extension of the living world could be better understood if it is considered that, for them, death did not mean a definitive separation between the body and the spirit, since both remained linked in order to make the “long journey” to become ancestors. For the Mexica, this unbreakable connection between the spirit and the body after death is better exemplified in the idea of the three souls that made up the human being: teyolia, tonalli, and ihiyotl. Teyolia was in the heart, the place from which the essence, the mental faculties, and the kinship came. Therefore, with death, the teyolia travels to the world of the dead. Tonalli, on the other hand, was linked to individuality and destiny (in a very similar way to the inn for Ryūkyūan people).16 With death, tonalli rests on the ground and is kept in the form of ashes and locks of hair by the family. Ihiyotl, finally, was formed from the passions that, when death came, were dispersed on the soil, being prone to turning into ghosts or diseases (Báez-Jorge 2012, 225–226). Thus, the newly deceased joined the elder gods of death, who were responsible for the cycle that perpetuated life, also participating in plant breeding and agriculture, since strength and protection emanated from their remains. The cult of ancestors among the Mexica included acts as diverse as the treatment of the corpse for its preservation, the provision of the necessary resources for the journey and its permanence in the afterlife, and the veneration and tribute payment to its mortal remains. For example, for recently deceased adults, one or two sticks of quince were placed to help them on their journey to the afterlife, since they had to face several vicissitudes, such as animals and fire-spitting vipers (in Okinawa there is still the tradition of offering Guusanuuji [long sugarcane] to ancestors, to be used as a walking stick in their arrival and return to their world). For the Mexica, body remains were not only worshiped but were also believed to be a source of supernatural powers that could attract benefits, ward off damage, or cause it. Alfredo López Austin points out that warriors’ skulls were buried under the corners of temples to use them for magical purposes by the ritual specialists (1997, 4–9). Mayans and Mexica believed that the body of the dead (or their bones) retained certain powers, since they were a connection point between the 16  According to Masako Tanaka “certain important happenings of life are pre-ordained by some mysterious force, which they [Ryūkyūan people] call inn” (1977, p. 36).

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world of the living and the afterlife. The bones were, so to speak, the only materiality that belonged to the two worlds. Furthermore, the meeting between the spirit of the recently deceased with the ancestors meant a renewal in the life of the afterlife. Vera Tiesler points out that this perception of cyclical continuity is exemplarily contained in the term Jaloj-K’exoj, an expression that indicates two types of exchange. Jaloj refers to the transformations that human being experience throughout life: birth, growth, and old age. K’exoj, for its part, alludes to the generational change, where the individual life is extinguished with the death and it is replaced by joining with the ancestors (Tiesler 2008, 48). These two changes, together, renew and perpetuate the individual and social life, since the life of the community is possible thanks to the individual death. To sum up, the analysis of mortuary practices performed by the Old Ryūkyūans and pre-Hispanic Mexicans helps to decolonize dominant interpretations of death, since they reveal how the process of becoming an ancestor is more important than the outcome of being dead. Besides being long, this process also has to be slow, enabling relationships with others and making healing possible based on learning from other people, the environment, and dealing with one’s emotions.

The World of the Dead There are very few records about the world of the dead in the Old Ryūkyū times, perhaps because this knowledge was reserved for the priestesses and they kept with great misgivings the information regarding the spiritual tasks to which they dedicated a large part of their lives (Allen 2002). From the available sources, however, there is no consensus on the exact location of the world of the dead, nor on whether it is limited to a single location. Broadly speaking, scholars distinguish two worlds of the afterlife, which usually have four different locations. To discern between these two worlds, Kazuhiko Komatsu distinguishes the “other world” from the “another world” (in Baksheev 2008, 287). For the Old Ryūkyūans, the former is called gushoo or gusoo and specifically designates the world of the dead. The “another world,” for its part, is called Nirai Kanai (or ni’ija, nirāhara ̄, nirai, nirasuku-kanerasuku, niiran), and it encompasses not only the world of the dead but also that of the ancestors, deities, supernatural entities, and demons. As has been mentioned, these two spiritual worlds belong, moreover, to different locations. Baksheev, for example, distinguishes four otherworldliness axes: the

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overseas world, the celestial world, the subterranean world, and the submarine world (2008, 287) (very similar axes compared to those of the pre-Hispanic Mexico, as it will be seen later). Kreiner, for his part, mentions three of them: the “heavenly paradise,” obutsu-kagura, up in the skies; the sanctuary on a mountain, obutsu-kamiyama; and the realm of the “beyond [the sea]” (1968, 112–113). The complex interconnection of the spiritual space with the living world allows establishing an integral axis of verticality and horizontality between them (Kreiner 1968, 113; Mabuchi 1980, 7). Considering the spiritual importance of Nirai Kanai, Ryūkyū’s particular spirituality is believed to come from the east side of Kudaka island, as it “appears to be the direction of the heavenly world” (Goto 2016, 81). As Yasuo Higa states: Amamiya (female) and Shiramikyo (male) deities came to Kudaka Island from beyond the eastern sea (nirahara, also called nirai kanai in other parts of Okinawa). There the eastern waves surpassed those in the west, and the western waves surpassed those in the east, swaying to and [from] inside the ocean. Amamiya asked the deities from beyond and received soil, stones, grass and trees from the sky. This is how Kudaka Island was born. (In Jack 2018, 100)

From this perspective, Nirai Kanai allowed not only the rise of Ryūkyūan people but also their prosperity and fertility. It is necessary to point out that this other world “beyond the seas” should not be compared with the notion of “paradise” in a Buddhist or Judeo-Christian sense, which would certainly limit its scope. As noted above, the principle of non-duality turns Nirai Kanai into a less stable realm that also comprises a source of suffering, death, and pestilence (Kreiner 1968, 109), referring to a much more complex realm, a clear reflection of the world of the living. In this sense, it could be argued that Nirai Kanai is extended in a horizontal plane at the same level as the living world. Perhaps this could explain why in the Omoroso ̄shi (the compilation of ancient Okinawan songs and poems) there are references to the tandem connection of various islands. The reason could be that their linking depends on the belief that the spirits’ first passage is the path that runs from Chinen and Katsuren peninsulas and extends out into the sea (Jack 2018, 104). This intricacy between realms also shapes the Mexica and Mayan worldview. According to Nielsen and Reunert, the evidence shows that the most dominant scheme of the universe in the Mesoamerican data is a four-part image in a horizontal structure (2009, 402). The Mexica universe

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comprises a horizontal plane that encompasses the four cardinal points subdivided into three parts, the overworld, the world (supported by four giant trees symbolizing the four cardinal points), and the underworld or Mictlan. The axis mundi for Mayans, on the other hand, was a giant sacred tree, a ceiba, comprising the celestial world, the terrestrial world, and the underworld or Xibalba (Romero 2012). Traditionally, the interpretation of these realms has long been influenced by the Euro-Christian vertical layered universe, even though none of the early colonial sources refer to a descending or ascending movement from one reality to another (Nielsen and Reunert 2009, pp. 403–404). Since the 2000s, however, research studies state that the boundaries between realms were fluid and far from being stable, more like a “journey through territories” located on the same level. Roberto Martínez and Katarzyna Mikulska affirm that a new image of a much more dynamic Mayan and Mexica cosmos must be proposed, in which the realms of the dead move through the subsoil, the surface, and the sky (2016, 7–8). A world of the dead that “in many ways mirrors the earthy level and its organization” (Nielsen and Reunert 2009, 404). This new position demonstrates that a strictly stratified universe assigned to the Mexica and Mayan cultures derives from the Judeo-Christian influence, as well as from the moral and epistemic values that the West applied to pre-Hispanic sources (cf. Nielsen and Reunert 2009). The mythical space of the afterlife for the Old Ryūkyūans and pre-­ Hispanic Mexicans allows, therefore, a multi-local image of the afterworld that functions as a reflex. The following two poems, Mexica and the Old Ryūkyūan respectively, exemplify this idea. The first one is a Nahua manuscript of 1477 sheltered by the National Library of Mexico (in Martínez and Mikulska 2016, p. 16):17  Ihuan onca mani in coyahuac tezcatl in necocxapon in mictlan ontlaneci, inic oncan tontlachixtica; in quenamican, in mictlan in ilhuicac inic tonitztica in nohuian in cemanahuac. Y allá está un gran espejo horadado por ambos lados; allí aparece la región de los muertos; con él estás mirando el lugar que es de algún modo, la región de los muertos, el cielo: con él estás viendo todas las partes del mundo. [Author’s translation from Spanish]

17

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And there is a large pierced mirror on both sides; there appears the region of the dead; with the mirror you are looking at the place that is, in some ways, the region of the dead: the celestial region. With it, you are seeing all the parts of the cosmos.

The second one is  from the play Gods Beyond the Sea by Tatsuhiro  Ō shirota, inspired by the Izaihō ritual of Kudaka Island (in Stewart et al. 2011, 75): I am Kunikasa, a shaman of Kudaka Island. Last night I dreamed of the horizon: Beyond the deep blue water, beyond the infinite space. From the far-off world of uneasiness, A white horse came galloping toward us, Its mane bristling, Toward this island, toward myself, as if attacking … I am none other than King Shō Toku. The gods at Chūzan, Shuri Castle, Instructed me to seek the gods of Nirai Kanai—. Following a white bird. Who knew we would be shipwrecked by a typhoon? My life was saved on Kudaka Island, Saved by the father and brother of Kunikasa. And Kunikasa tenderly cared for me.

Considering that for the Old Ryūkyūans and pre-Hispanic Mexicans, birth and death remained linked, “the end of life is a transition of the spirit rather than solely the end of the body” (Anderson and Woticky 2018, 51). This perspective allows reconsidering death not only from the physical/ biomedical lens where the spirit is absent. It also opens the space to recognize the interconnection between the physical and the spiritual, enhancing opportunities for decolonized thought.

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General Conclusions For the Old Ryūkyū and pre-Hispanic Mexico indigenous communities, the ritual ties that had to be maintained with the deceased and the ancestors were a constant source to their worship. They were invoked or summoned to carry out activities such as sowing and fishing, for magical rites and divination, or social events such as births and marriages. The spirits of the dead and the ancestors continued to participate actively in the life of the groups, observing and evaluating how life was lived, and this is precisely the meaning they gave to the idea of transcendence. For this reason, indigenous perspectives of both territories considered the devotion to the spirits of their ancestors as a fundamental practice to save their memory. Death, then, was constantly present in the idea of life, invisibly occupying the world of the living. As analyzed in this chapter, for the indigenous conceptions of the Old Ryūkyūan and pre-Hispanic Mexican people, dying did not imply a critical moment defined by opposition to life. The hegemonic framework of the transition from one-being to non-being becomes the primary fear and anxiety about death. This imposed perception operates from the objectivity of the individual’s death, where community, emotions, and environment have no implication. But according to these two case studies, death has more to do with culture and community. In this sense, rediscovering these traditional belief systems can develop a decolonized understanding, learning, and even education of death. “As a process, decolonization means engaging in the activities of creating, restoring … cultural practices, thinking, beliefs, and values that were taken away or abandoned but are still relevant” (Waziyatawin and Bird 2012, 3). Therefore, taking into account this decolonized perception of death, the relationship between medical/physical and indigenous knowledges would be improved, enhancing opportunities for emotional support. Furthermore, a decolonized death would overcome the existentialist problem of individual death by including the connection to community and culture. In this sense, death has no moral connotation because it is not a threat to human benefit. Life and death, therefore, are not dichotomous because they are not understood as absolute states. Thus, the “world of the beyond” creates, together with that of the living, a coherent and inseparable whole. As discussed in this chapter, the intellectual production that the Old Ryūkyūan and pre-Hispanic Mexican people broadly addressed to the world of the beyond demonstrates the autonomous understanding of their

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traditions and worldview within a colonial order and then, in present times, their legacy within the global order. This is especially visible in the Okinawa and Mexico performance to honor their ancestors and the dead’s spirits, Kyu ̄ Bon (Old Bon) and Día de Muertos (Mexican Day of the Death) (Cabrera 2020). Despite the colonial epistemological influence that both territories suffered, the survival (original or syncretic) of their perception of death demonstrates an act of resilience and an active critique of the supposed spiritual dominion hegemony. Although the hegemonic global narrative as rational, positivistic, and techno-economic systematically obscures the indigenous contributions to the forging of the modern world, such a perception of the death and spirits of the dead as an integral realm offers an alternative solution to that narrative to understand death solely as a “tragic human dimension.” Therefore, in trying to open up our thinking by learning about the Old Ryūkyūan and pre-Hispanic Mexican death worldview, I have intended to reimagine how this particular case study engages with the issue of a decolonized understanding of the idea of death. In this pressing moment where techno-scientific developments seek eternal life, this chapter sought to explore alternative ways of thinking about death, not from a reified consumption of indigenism but from how indigenous perceptions can be re-elaborated by a contemporary consciousness and get a lesson from them. And this is important because constructing indigenous worldviews as culturally essentialist not only makes them ahistorical (Dirlik 1997, p. 224) but also marginalizes their epistemological legacies, in a way that renders them incapable of changing, teaching, and surviving modernity. Thus, from the cultural data analyzed here, contributions may emerge to face hegemonic perspectives and thus overcome the stereotype of indigenous epistemologies as marginalized knowledges.

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Nelson, Christopher. 2008. Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Perform and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa. Durham: Duke University Press. Nielsen, Jesper, and Toke Sellner Reunert. 2009. Dante’s Heritage: Questioning the Multi-Layered Model of the Mesoamerican Universe. Antiquity 83: 399–413. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00098513. Padrón, Ricardo. 2012. ‘The Indies of the West’ or, The Tale of How an Imaginary Geography Circumnavigated the Globe. In Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age 1522–1657, ed. Christina H. Lee, 19–41. Burlington: Ashgate. Romero, Roberto. 2012. El devenir en el mundo subterráneo. Revista Digital Universitaria 13 (11). http://www.revista.unam.mx/vol.13/num11/ art108/index.html Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Roullier, Caroline, Laure Benoit, Doyle B.  McKey, and Vincent Lebot. 2013. Historical Collections Reveal Patterns of Diffusion of Sweet Potato in Oceania Obscured by Modern Plant Movements and Recombination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (6): 2205–2210. https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1211049110. Sousa Santos, Boaventura De. 2010. Para Descolonizar Occidente: Más allá del pensamiento abismal. Buenos Aires: Clacso. Singer, Michael. 2005. The Legacy of Positivism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smits, Gregory. 2000. Ambiguous Boundaries: Redefining Royal Authority in the Kingdom of Ryukyu. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60 (1): 89–123. Stewart, Frank, Katsunori Yamazato, and Yasuo Higa, eds. 2011. Living Spirit: Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Tanaka, Masako. 1977. Categories of Okinawan ‘Ancestors’ and the Kinship System. Asian Folklore Studies 36 (2): 31–64. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/1177816. Tiesler, Vera. 2008. Cultos funerarios Mayas. Investigación y Ciencia 380: 47–53. Waziyatawin, and Michael Yellow Bird, eds. 2012. For Indigenous Minds Only. A Decolonized Handbook. New Mexico: School for Advance Research Press.

CHAPTER 9

The Vedette China on Havana’s International Cabaret Stage Rosanne Sia

Introduction In July 1956, Cuba’s Show magazine described the distinctive appeal of vedette Xenia López: “When you gaze at her face [it is that of] stumbling onto a dancer brought to us from the Asian continent. However, Zenia is a national product, cultivated and raised under the embracing sun of our Cuba, fruitful in producing artists and athletes who manage to reach the zenith of fame.”1 At mid-twentieth century Xenia had achieved the rank of a Cuban vedette, a national symbol enmeshed with Cuba’s histories of 1  “La primera impresión que se recoge al contemplar su rostro es el de tropezarnos con una bailarina que nos han importado del continente asiático. Y, sin embargo, Zenia es un producto nacional, cultivado y elaborado bajo el sol abrasador de nuestra Cuba, fecunda en la promoción de artistas y deportista que logran alcanzar el cenit de la fama.” “Zenia, la primera bailarina de revistas,” Show, July 1956, 16. Thank you to the Goizueta Foundation Graduate

R. Sia (*) Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_9

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race, performance, and internationalism. Her statuesque body, facility across languages, and unparalleled artistry as a dancer, singer, and actor dazzled elite Cuban audiences at Havana’s cabarets—with just an extra hint of the exotic. This chapter explores how the figure of the vedette china rose to visibility on the stages of Havana’s cabarets in the 1950s. I argue that she claimed her spot in the Cuban nation through a commanding performance of divadom that allowed her to transgress boundaries of race and gender. Her diva performances inhabited a realm of excess that approached the limits of normative femininity and, significantly, also disturbed Cuban racial categories. The vedette china attracted deep fascination among elite Cubans who watched her perform on the cabaret stage, but she also provoked anxiety. She revealed the contradictions of Cuba as a nation striving toward whiteness in which elites attempted to restrain racialized sexuality even as the figure of the mulata stood as a national symbol for Cuba. It was in this context that the vedette china staked her claim to the very heart and soul of the Cuban nation on Havana’s cabaret stage. That this was unexpected cannot be overstated. Official national discourses have erased Cuba’s transpacific histories of migration despite their significant impact on Cuban culture. Scholars including Lisa Yun (2008), Evelyn Hu-DeHart (1994, 2017), Juan Jiménez Pastrana (1983), and Denise Helly (1979) have studied the estimated 142,000 Chinese who entered Cuba as “coolie labor” between 1847 and 1874. The coolie formed part of a colonial experiment to replace slave labor, banned in Cuba in 1886. In a population of approximately 1 million in the mid-­ nineteenth century, the Chinese became a significant proportion of the population in Cuba. Chinese laborers continued to migrate to Cuba in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries despite the American-­ imposed ban on Chinese entry (López 2013, p. 4). Notably, this migration led to cultural and physical mixings between Chinese laborers and former African enslaved people (López 2013; Triana et  al. 2009). As a result, Cuba’s national symbol of the mulata carries the legacies of Cuba’s African, Indigenous, and Asian presence (Fraunhar 2018, p. 9). Scholars including Ignacio López-Calvo (2008, 2018), Luisa Marcela Ossa (2019), and Martin Tsang (2019) have studied the figure of the “china mulata” or the “mulata achinada” in literature and religion. Despite these Fellowship Program at the University of Miami Libraries Cuban Heritage Collection for their support.

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deep-­rooted transpacific connections, official accounts of Cuban mestizaje erase the presence of the Chinese who have been relegated to the position of outsiders and aliens (López 2013, pp. 209–210). The rise of the vedette china on Havana’s cabaret stage reflects Cuba’s complex histories of transpacific migration and cultural exchange in the early Cold War period. In the 1950s, white American tourists drove the growth of Havana’s cabaret and casino nightlife (Merrill 2009; Schwartz 1999; Cirules 2010). And yet, it was the Cuban vedette who captivated her audiences in the spectacular shows at the Tropicana, Montmartre, and Sans Souci cabarets. She catered to the fantasies and desires of American tourists while also serving Cuban national ends. In the early Cold War period, American tourists were bringing in fantasies of tropical blackness, but also of the transpacific. Christina Klein (2003), Danielle Seid (2017), and Benjamin Han (2020) have identified the blossoming of “desirable” and “pleasing” images of the transpacific that served to promote global integration under American leadership in the early Cold War. The vedette china emerged out of this meeting between American Cold War imaginaries of the transpacific and Cuban imaginaries of the china mulata. And, as a result, for elite Cubans, she came to represent the pinnacle of Cuban cosmopolitanism and modernity. They celebrated the vedette as a particularly Cuban contribution to the international scene in the early Cold War. This chapter uses the lens of performance to explore the complex transpacific connections embodied by the vedette china in mid-century Cuba. Scholars including Melissa Blanco-Borelli (2016), Alison Fraunhar (2018), and Alicia Arrizón (2006) have argued that the figure of the Cuban mulata is characterized by performance. As a “performative way of being in the world” the figure of the mulata exceeds colonial erotics of the tragic mulata (Fraunhar 2018, p.  8). Dance scholar Borelli argues that the mulata’s movement of her hips in rumba sustains and transmits alternative knowledge and histories, which “ultimately forces the viewer to acknowledge the ‘blackness’ inherent in the history of the Americas, as it specifically relates to black female sexuality, its power, and its pleasure” (Borelli 2016, Loc.471). Building on Borelli, I explore how performance also serves as a lens to reveal the erased transpacific histories of the Americas, especially in relation to the power and pleasure of the vedette china in Cuba. Through the “excess” of her diva performance, the vedette china defied boundaries of race, gender, and genre. She folded herself into the national symbol of the vedette by performing a cosmopolitan vision of Cuba celebrated by elite

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Cubans at mid-century. Her performance of divadom exceeded the constraints of normative femininity and momentarily revealed Cuba’s longstanding, if erased, connections with Asia.

The China Mulata on Stage In a scene from the 1938 Cuban film El Romance del Palmar (The Romance of the Palm Grove), Rita Montaner’s character Fé, a recent arrival from the countryside, sits with a male companion in an open-air café in Havana. Behind them, the Saratoga orquesta femenina (all-girls band) wear matching slinky dresses with flowers in their hair, playing instruments including the clave, bongo drums, maracas, trumpets, violin, and bass. A woman identified as a gallega (Galician) walks by selling lottery tickets and Fé’s companion laughs that she is illiterate.2 Next, two Chinese peanut sellers walk from table to table. In a singsong voice, both accented and grammatically incorrect, one advertises: “Maní, maní tosta’o y calienta” (Peanuts, peanuts, toasted and hot). The second repeats an indecipherable phrase. Fé’s companion asks the first Chinese man about the second one and he replies that the other man does not know how to speak Spanish. Fé, her companion, and the Saratoga band laugh heartily as the two Chinese men continue to walk throughout the café, the first calling out “maní.” Fé’s companion then invites her to sing “El Manisero,” the pregón-son composed by Moisés Simon and recorded by Rita Montaner in 1927 and then Don Aspiazú in 1930, which made Cuba’s music globally famous. Backed by the Orquesta Saratoga, Fé stands up and sings. In this Havana street scene, one of the most famous Cuban mulatas, Rita Montaner, elevates the cries of the Chinese peanut sellers into a virtuosic song that represents the very essence of Cuba. Her character may have been as new to Havana as the gallega or the chino, but unlike them, she was Cuba. The mulata as a national symbol of Cuba was paired with underlying anxiety about histories of interracial mixing in Cuba, including intermixing with the Chinese. In the colonial era, the figure of the mulata had served to erase the violence of slavery and to displace the interracial desires of white creole 2  The gallego and gallega were popular characters that had commonly appeared in Cuba’s teatro bufo based on a stereotype of Spanish immigrants, especially from Galicia, who began migrating to Cuba in the nineteenth century.

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men onto her hypersexualized body (Kutzinski 1993, pp. 27–33). Colonial narratives have rendered the mulata a tragic figure irreconcilably caught between whiteness and blackness, perhaps most famously in Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882). At the height of Afrocubanism in the 1920s and 1930s, the figure of the mulata gained new prominence as a national symbol. However, although Afro-Cuban culture could stand for the essence of Cuba, Cuban society continued to exclude Afro-Cuban people from social, economic, and political power (Moore 1997). The figure of the mulata remained an ambivalent figure in a society aspiring toward whiteness. In Cuban popular culture of the 1930s to the 1950s, the figure of the mulata was sometimes played off against the figure of the chino. Significantly, this often took place within the realm of performance through the sonic play with language. In El Romance del Palmar, the chino’s broken Spanish highlighted the mulata’s natural facility with song. The chino was relegated to the sounds of the barrio, a figure who was criollo and yet who could never fully stand in for Cuba. The mulata’s vocal mastery, juxtaposed against the chino’s vocal failures, served to assert the mulata’s identity as a modern figure who pulled Cuba into the cosmopolitan world. The character of the chino formed part of Cuba’s teatro bufo tradition, which played a crucial role in shaping Cuban national identity in the nineteenth century (Lane 2005). In the early twentieth century, the Teatro Alhambra adapted the bufo tradition to the tastes of Cubans with shows that interspersed music, song, dialogue, and monologue for all-male audiences (Díaz-Ayala 2002; Lapidus 2015). Arturo Feliú played the part of the chino at the Teatro Alhambra. Existing recordings include the 1914 Un chino aplatanado (A Cubanized Chinese) and the 1911 Chino Perico (Chinese Parakeet).3 In these recordings, Feliú did not just speak in accented Spanish, he adopted a rhythmic, rapid, and high-pitched delivery that as a whole became read as a performance of the chino. Feliú’s interpretation can be viewed as a form of sonic masking, a display of mastery over the chino through sound. When the chino did speak, he had to work within the limits placed around his vocal delivery. By the 1940s and 1950s, Chinese Cuban Emilio Ruiz, better known as Chino Wong, gained widespread popularity for playing the role of the chino in nightclubs, 3  Thank you to Verónica A. González at the Díaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection, Florida International University.

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theater, radio, and film. His work reveals complicated negotiations of race in Cuba, but he invariably performed with a strong and comedic “Chinese”-inflected accent in Spanish. In contrast, the diva began to emerge as a powerful and indisputably feminine figure in the 1920s and 1930s. Rita Montaner, a light-skinned mulata, was among the first mixed-race women to actually perform the figure of the mulata on stage and screen. While the figure of the mulata had previously circulated through representation, Madeline Cámara argues that Montaner now gained a level of agency by asserting her voice and presence on the stage as a “diva cubana” (Cuban diva) (Cámara 1999, p.  75). Montaner brought Cuban culture abroad, touring across the United States, France, and Mexico. She was renowned for her facility with Afro-Cuban vernacular street culture, including her character Lengualisa, who showed off her rapid-fire, tongue-twisting ability to switch between street vernaculars. Although celebrated in Cuba for her work on stage and screen, Montaner also experienced racism as a mixed-race woman, reflecting the contradictions of Cuba’s relationship to Afro-Cubanness (Fraunhar 2018, p.  87). Cámara, however, contends that Montaner carved out a space for the figure of the “rumbera”—and, for our purposes, the figure of the vedette—to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s (Cámara 1999, pp. 77–78). Other Cuban female performing artists joined Montaner as pioneers who brought Cuban culture abroad. One was renowned Cuban rumbera (rumba dancer) Estela.4 During a career that spanned the 1930s to 1950s, Estela became synonymous with Cuba’s national genre of the rumba and the national symbol of the mulata. In the opinion of journalist Jess Losada, Estela was “the best rumbera that Cuba has produced.”5 Show wrote that Estela “has been an ambassador of the Afro, of authentic rumba.”6 And yet, by her telling, Estela had neither white nor Black parentage. Estela was the stage name for Ramona Ajón, a last name that harkened to her father’s Chinese background. Her mother was reportedly of Mayan Indigenous

4  On Estela see Rosa Marquetti, “Estela reinó en Broadway,” Desmemoriados: Historias de la música cubana, 2014, http://www.desmemoriados.com/estela-reino-en-broadway/. 5  “Allí está la mejor rumbera que ha producido Cuba.” Jess Losada, “Rumba y Deportes en Broadway,” Carteles, May 5, 1940, n.p. 6  “Ha sido Embajadora de lo afro, de la rumba legítima.” “ANISIA, la de la cintura eléctrica,” Show, April 1955, 18.

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ancestry.7 She reflected a Cuban-born generation with Chinese ancestry who were incorporating themselves into Cuban mestizaje. Despite historical efforts to fix the figure of the mulata by her biological race, scholars have argued that she is instead defined by her performance. As Alison Fraunhar writes: “[The figure] is as much a gestural, performative way of being in the world, usually characterized by the qualities of sensuality, grace, rhythm, flirtatiousness, love of pleasure, and desirability, as it is a catalog of physical characteristics” (p. 8). The idea of the mulata encompasses performances that have widened to include Cuba’s complex histories of migration, exile, enslavement, and diaspora. Drawing on Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1996), Fraunhar argues that these associations have been collected through a process of continuous repetition and return (Fraunhar 2018, pp. 5–6). As a result, the figure of the mulata inhabits an ambiguity that cannot be pinned down. As a young girl, Estela learned to use performance to gain access to the figure of the mulata. In an interview with journalist Don Galaor in Bohemia, a popular weekly geared for middle-class Cubans, Estela recalled being initially cast in foreign dances when she joined Roberto Rodriguez’s child dance company: “I did not precisely dance rumba, nor son nor conga, which is what I had underneath the skin driving me to dance, but rather some oriental dance… something Brazilian also.”8 Estela worked up the courage to ask Rodriguez if she could dance the rumba. “Astonished,” he replied: “Really, you know how to dance rumba?”9 He asked her to demonstrate in front of the entire company. Galaor re-­ imagined the scene: The cinnamon flesh soon vibrated. The thin bust tipped upwards and one foot advanced in front of the other. Undulating the hips, hardly in the form of hips. She shook the shoulders and all of her was rumba. Cuban rumba learned in that universal and magnificent school which is the street. As she advanced, new figures, new steps showed that she, Ramona, knew about this.10  Don Galaor, “Bailó Estela Su Primera Rumba,” Bohemia, August 15, 1954, n.p.  “Pero no bailaba precisamente rumba, ni son y conga, que es lo que yo tenía bajo la piel impulsándome a bailar, sino algún baile oriental… algo brasileño también.” Galaor, “Bailó.” 9  “Asombrado -¿De verdad, tu sabes bailar rumba?” Galaor, “Bailó.” 10  “La carne canela vibró de pronto. El busto delgado se empinó y un pie se adelantó al otro. Ondularon las caderas, apenas con forma de caderas. Se agitaron los hombros y toda ella fue rumba. Rumba cubana, aprendida en esa escuela universal y magnífica que es la calle. 7 8

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Although Estela’s dancing revealed her skill as a rumba dancer, her movements clashed with her physical appearance. Galaor continued: The Chinese-like eyes. The dark skin. The black and strong hair falling on the shoulders, barely in the form of shoulders. The beautiful and laughing mouth … The impresario, the choreographer, the pianist observed her. They did not know to say yes or no, because the girl was thin and ugly [feúcha]. Ugly? [Feo] No, she was not really ugly. Out of all the traits that her racial ancestry left on her physical appearance, Chinese on the part of the father and Mayan Indian on the part of the mother, was composed an original face, attractive, of enormous personality. This! There was in this girl that had just danced her first rumba, a large personality. And when more years went by and the woman rounded into curves only hinted at in the girl, there would be a monument in sepia, undulating to the beat of Cuban music on the world stage.11

As a skinny child whose hair was too black and too straight, Estela was “feúcha.” Unlike the word “feo,” the word “feúcha” can have a positive connotation that expresses affection for the described person (de Bruyne 1961, pp. 181–188). Once she had grown curves, however, her skin tone, personality, and unmatched ability as a rumbera allowed Estela to embody the figure of the mulata. She was celebrated as an unofficial Cuban cultural diplomat who had brought “authentic” Afro-Cuban rumba to international audiences across the United States and Mexico. Through performance Estela transformed herself from a foreigner into the very heart of Cuba. As a rumba dancer, Estela embedded herself into histories going back to slavery, laying claim to Cuban national identity as it was being defined through Afrocubanismo in the 1930s. Estela’s dance transmitted vernacular histories of blackness that brought to Galaor’s mind the vibrant street cultures of Havana. However, the press added extra adjectives: Estela was exotic, she was unique, and she was original. Cuban entertainment magazine Carteles stated: “Other rumberas try to copy the exotic routine of Estela’s rumba, but they do not succeed because A medida que avanzaba, nuevas figuras, nuevos pasos ponían de manifiesto lo que ella, Ramona, sabía de esto.” Galaor, “Bailó.” 11  “Los ojos achinados. La piel oscura. El pelo negrísimo y fuerte cayéndole sobre los hombros, apenas con forma de hombros. La boca bonita y reidora … La observaban el empresario, el coreógrafo, el pianista. No sabían si decidirse o no, porque la chiquita era delgada y feucha [sic.].” Galaor, “Bailó.”

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Estela is unique.”12 Estela’s Chinese ancestry was an absent presence in the Cuban press, reflecting how the Chinese have formed a significant part of vernacular street culture in Cuba. It was through her performance that Estela transformed anxiety about Cuba’s histories of interracial sexuality into an appealing exoticism. Estela’s transformation reflects the emergence of Afro-Asian intimacies into limited visibility in the 1950s. In May 1957, famed illustrator Andrés García Benitez depicted the emergence of the figure of the “china mulata” on the cover of Carteles. The backdrop shows two Chinese men, little more than stick figures, one carrying a basket of peanuts and the other in front of a Chinese lottery. In contrast, the figure of the china mulata is foregrounded in full brilliant color, a reddish-brown sepia-tinged with yellow, surrounded by a radiating white light. She looks down demurely, but perhaps also flirtatiously, her cleavage on display and her hair done up with Chinese sticks. Her voluptuous beauty overtakes the line drawings of the chinos. She is transforming into the mulata, embodying a process of becoming, looking toward Cuba’s future. In the realm of the performing arts, Estela too represented this process of becoming as she and others paved the way for the emergence of the vedette “china” in 1950s Havana.

The Vedette China on Havana’s World Stage Standing under the spotlight, the vedette china rose to stardom in Havana’s mid-century cabaret scene. She joined other Cuban vedettes who catered to the white American tourists flocking to Cuba’s tropical playground for adventure, romance, and pleasure. It was the 1950s, when Havana’s nightlife was owned and controlled by the American mafia, including Meyer Lansky, who profited off the city’s cabarets, casinos, and prostitution. US economic and technological advancement set the standards elite Cubans aimed to meet, but their relationship with the United States remained marked by what Louis A. Pérez (2003) has called a “pervasive ambivalence” (p. xviii). It was in this context that the vedette gained national prominence as a specifically Cuban contribution to the international arena during the early Cold War. Significantly, a gendered figure of the china joined the ranks of the vedette through a powerful performance of divadom.

 Losada, “Rumba.”

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In March 1954, Dr. Carlos Manuel Palma released the first issue of his glossy Show magazine, the only periodical devoted entirely to Cuba’s entertainment scene for a middle and upper-class Cuban readership. It was an unabashed celebration of the Cuban vedette’s body. The figure of the vedette evoked the romanticism of Paris’ Belle Époque when vedettes Mistinguett and La Bella Otero had enthralled avant-garde artists and radical intellectuals at Le Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge. But now, it was the Cuban vedette who visited the cultural capitals of the world. Palma recruited local correspondents to photograph and report on the vedette’s travels to Paris, New  York, Hollywood, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and beyond. On page after page, Show displayed the Cuban vedette’s body. Yeidy Rivero (2015) has argued that Cuban television sought to “restrain” blackness in order to promote a white Cuban vision of progress and modernity (p.  82). Similarly, Palma promoted a light-skinned or white figure of the mulata. He positioned Cuba at the cutting edge of the global circulation of images, ideas, and desires surrounding this modern female body. In his opinion, the Cuban vedette offered an alternative to American models of femininity. In 1956, Palma wrote a strongly worded critique of the Miss Universe pageant won by American Carol Morris. He accused the judges of awarding the prize based on American standards of beauty: “The American people … have created in their psyche a type of characteristic beauty, a  woman that in our conception appears as thin as lilies, over there appears fascinating and perfect … But nobody has the right to impose [their standards of beauty].”13 Palma called for an annual contest to crown “Señorita Latino-América.” He implicitly rejected a US pan-­ Americanism that sought to promote American interests in the hemisphere under the aegis of goodwill. Palma instead imagined Show as “a continental institution that links – like a beautiful treaty of reciprocity – all those who dedicate their talent and efforts in the service of any artistic form.”14 He insisted that Latin Americans play a defining role in the international arena. 13  “El pueblo americano … ha creado en su psiquis un tipo de belleza característico, mujer que para nuestro concepto parecen delgadas como lirios, allá resultan fascinantes y perfectas … Pero nadie está en el derecho de imponer [su estándar de belleza].” Carlos M. Palma, “En favor de las bellezas de Latino-América,” Show, Sept. 1956. 14  Rosa Marquetti, “SHOW Digital,” accessed Dec. 1, 2018, http://www.desmemoriados.com/show-digital/

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Palma viewed Cuba’s performing artists as cultural diplomats who promoted Cuban national culture abroad. This included Tropicana choreographer Rodney who had brought the figure of the mulata to international eyes with his traveling show “Mulatas de Fuego.” Palma wrote: “Rodney has given more reputation to Cuba than our diplomatic corps.”15 Further, using language that evoked the rational progress of science and technology, Palma termed Rodney a “discoverer” and a “laboratory worker.” But what had Rodney discovered? He had “discovered” the broad appeal of the vedette to whom the Cuban elite ascribed Cuban cosmopolitanism and modernity. He did so, however, while catering to white American tourists. Dancing under the stars at the Tropicana cabaret, white Americans drove the demand for Havana’s cabaret culture. They brought with them fantasies in abundance, which Cubans creatively repackaged for both white American and elite Cuban eyes. Performing artists drew on the wide range of imperial tropes circulating in Cuba’s cabarets. As Rosalie Schwartz argues: “Lacking authentic Indian ruins or readily identifiable popular arts, [Cubans] used various Spanish, African, Chinese, and Creole elements. They improvised, revived, adapted, and modified” (p.  76). Transpacific fantasies swirled amid tropes of tropical blackness and Spanishness. Chinatown had long been featured in Havana’s tourist guides. In the 1920s, Gray Line tours invited tourists to explore the “wealth of mystery the word CHINATOWN suggests.”16 Americans discovered a familiar Oriental exoticism in Havana—and yet not entirely familiar. In the 1950s, Cubans well knew Asia’s appeal to American tourists. As avid consumers of American culture, Cubans took part in the blossoming of middlebrow American productions about Asia in the early Cold War. Christina Klein (2003) has argued that this “Cold War orientalism” served an internal pedagogical function, teaching white Americans the “correct” feelings of sympathy and goodwill toward Asia in order to promote an integrated world order under American leadership. Danielle Seid (2017) has argued that this led to the growth of the “Asian/American femme” as a popular figure in Cold War television. Through her display of beauty, 15  “Rodney le ha dado más nombre a Cuba que todo nuestro cuerpo diplomatico.” Carlos M. Palma, “En favor de las bellezas de Latino-América,” Show, Sept 1956. 16  Cuban Heritage Collection, Vertical Files—Cuba, Item 0230, Tours—Seeing Havana— The Great Line Motor Tour.

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fashion, and style, this feminine Asian figure represented a “desirable” image of racial difference that stood as a “symbol of inclusion” (p. 1257). In the 1950s, Rodney produced four full-length Asian-themed revues at the Tropicana by riffing off popular American productions. In 1955, a month after John Patrick’s Broadway play Teahouse of the August Moon opened in Mexico City, Rodney premiered Casa de Té (Teahouse). He branded Casa de Té the “first” all-Asian cabaret show in Cuba. In July 1956, a month after the release of the Hollywood film The King and I, Rodney opened Lola y el Rey de Siam (Lola and the King of Siam). In 1958, Rodney’s double shows Chinatown and En un Paraíso del Asia (In an Asian Paradise) followed closely on the heels of the Broadway play Flower Drum Song. For these last two shows, Rodney flew in five performers of Asian descent, all apparently based in New  York City, including Erlinda Cortés, Loma Duke, Denise, Ana Correja, and Vie Voon Hum. In Rodney’s show Casa de Té, the vedette came to embody modern Cuba against the foil of the figure of the chino. Although the American production of Teahouse of the August Moon took place in Okinawa, Rodney set his version in ancient China. Bohemia covered Rodney’s show with some humor. In one photo, a woman covered her face with a mask that depicted a wizened Chinese man with long wispy hair on his chin and mustache. The foreboding mask sharply contrasted with her voluptuous body dressed in an evening gown slit up her thigh. She held up a long braid, transforming it into a queue. The photo’s caption read: “Quién es?” (Who is it?). On the next page, the magazine revealed the woman’s smiling face: “It’s the marvelous Emilita Dago, who in Casa de Té contributes her beauty to the sumptuousness of Rodney’s spectacle. See how even the mask smiles better when it is not bringing ugliness to such a harmonious grouping.”17 It was a study of contrasts: Cuban versus chino, beautiful versus ugly, woman versus man, young versus old, modern versus ancient. At the same time, however, the china was staking her claim to the figure of the vedette. She confronted and disrupted these binaries. A March 1954 photograph in Show showed vedettes Emilia Villamil and Nora Osorio, both of mixed Asian descent, laughing with vedette Sonia in their

17  “Es la maravillosa Emilita Dago, cuya actuación en ‘Casa de Te’ contribuye con su hermosura a la suntuosidad del espectáculo de Rodney. Vean cómo hasta la careta sonrie mejor cuando no está afeando un conjunto tan armonioso.” “Lo chino espectacular,” Bohemia, Sept. 11, 1955, 117.

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dressing room.18 Emilia held Sonia’s curiously long black ponytail, a “queue” that matched Sonia’s orientalized outfit with its bikini top and harem pants. On the left, Nora Osorio wore a leopard print two-piece bikini and feathered anklet bracelet. “Two ‘chinas’ and one ‘mongol,’” announced the caption. Defining Emilia and Nora as “chinas” through their distance from the “mongol,” these comparisons betrayed traces of anxiety about Cuba’s histories of mixed-race sexuality. On stage, however, vedette chinas including Emilia “la china” Villamil and Xenia López developed powerful performances of divadom that served not so much to dispel as to revel in this anxiety. Michelle Dvoskin (2016) has argued: “Divas are inherently excessive: too loud, too talented, too ambitious, too emotional, too visible. This excess allies them, affectively, with racial others marked as excessive in the national imaginary” (p.  101). Both Emilia and Xenia inhabited a racialized and sexualized excess that slid toward danger, transgression, and vulgarity. However, they developed over-the-top performance styles to instead provoke awe, wonder, and amazement. Both Emilia and Xenia were participating in long traditions of divadom among racialized women. Pamyla Stiehl has argued that African American dancer Katherine Dunham “used her divadom to both transgress and transcend inscribed binaries and boundaries of normativity in terms of gender, race and art” (2018, p. 62). As with Dunham, both Emilia and Xenia developed performances that dwelled in this realm of excess and disturbed these normative boundaries of “gender, race, and art.” Emilia was highly celebrated for her work as a cabaret dancer, having won the 1955 award for “best partner dancer” in Show. Emilia’s first stage name had been “May Lay,” but it was the nickname “la china” that stuck. This term of endearment served to distinguish Emilia rather than to confine her to “Asian” roles. The press praised her range as a dancer in shows inspired by Afro-Cuban, Mexican, and Spanish themes. Indeed, Emilia was celebrated for embodying Afro-Cuban roles with authenticity. In 1954, Emilia starred in Rodney’s production of El Mayombe at the Tropicana. Rodney, himself a practitioner of Afro-Cuban religious rituals, began to stage Afrocubanism at the Tropicana in the 1950s. Dance historian Elizabeth Schwall (2016) argues that Rodney’s work normalized Afro-Cuban aesthetics on the commercial stage, but also exoticized religious rituals: “The spectacular rendition warped sacred songs and dances  Nicoff Tabacoff, “Profecias Artisticas,” Show (March 1954), 21.

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to entertain a mostly white, Cuban and foreign, audience unfamiliar with the beliefs portrayed” (p.  126). Show’s review of El Mayombe played up this exoticization: “Roderico has created a superb show, of real Afro-­ Cuban roots.” Show went on to write: “[It has not lost the] chilling mystery of its superstitions, nor its formidable expressiveness, nor the magical charm of its rhythms, nor the savage force of the primary impulses that encourage it.”19 Since primarily white dancers executed Afro-Cuban dances in elite cabarets, this transformed the transgressive African origins of these dances into an underlying energy or spirit that served to rejuvenate white Cuban and tourist audiences. However, as Martin Tsang (2019) has pointed out, due to Cuban histories of interracial mixing the Chinese have played a significant role in the formation of Afro-Cuban religious cultures. Emilia brought the figure of the china on stage, evoking these longstanding mixed-race histories between Afro-Cubans and Chinese. Show praised Emilia’s dancing in El Mayombe: “The ‘china’ Villamil put forth a histrionic dance work that I don’t hesitate to call the best I have seen in a long time.”20 Emilia’s “histrionic” dance style luxuriated in the excess of the diva, which she turned into an assertion of her authority and command of diverse forms on stage. In April 1954, Show wrote: “Emilia Villamil, dancer, the impressive ‘chinita’ that dominates all the rhythms, is positively a living sculpture.”21 An accompanying photo of Emilia in a parallel retiré position revealed her fluency in not only vernacular Afro-­ Cuban forms but also classical dance vocabularies. Her ability to “dominate all the rhythms,” moving between Afro-Cuban and European dance forms, served to demonstrate Cuba’s cosmopolitan modernity. Vedette Xenia López developed her own diva performance in Havana’s nightlife at mid-century. A striking photo shows Xenia costumed for Medianoche en París (Midnight in Paris) at Havana’s Montmartre cabaret in 1955. Medianoche en París held special meaning in Cuba because the 19  “Roderico ha realizado un espectáculo soberbio, de verdadera raíz afro cubana.” “No perdió su misterio escalofriante de supersticiones primitivas, ni su formidable plasticidad, ni el encanto mágico de sus ritmos, ni la fuerza de los impulsos primarios que alientan.” Renee Mendez Capote, “Televisión,” Show, August 1954, 33. 20  “La ‘china’ Villamil, que rindió una labor histriónica y danzaría, que no vacilo en calificar de lo mejor que he visto en mucho tiempo.” Renee Mendez Capote, “Televisión,” Show, August 1954, 33. 21  “Emilia Villamil, bailarina, la imponente ‘chinita’ que domina todos los ritmos, es positivamente una escultura viviente.” “Espectáculos,” Show, April 1954, 38.

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show pitted Cuba’s talent against the zenith of European cabaret culture. As its star, Xenia embodied Cuba’s culture and modernity. In the photo, Xenia was the picture of a French showgirl with white gloves pulled past her elbows, a sequined white leotard, and fishnet stockings. Her black hair styled in a cutting-edge pixie haircut, she stared down her nose through heavy-lidded eyes at the viewer. Xenia, the press declared, was responsible for the show’s success. Show awarded her the “best dancer in a revue show” in October 1955. The magazine wrote: “Xenia absolutely steals the show with her fascinating personality, with her dances, and besides because she reveals herself as a singer with a grave and emotional voice. We can confirm that Xenia is the ultimate star of ‘Medianoche en París.’”22 Through the undeniable draw of her personality and the emotional excess of her singing Xenia inhabited the singular presence of the vedette on stage. Xenia had chosen a stage name that referenced French vedette Xenia Monty, renowned throughout Latin America. She flirted with the modernity of Europe and the United States on stage, celebrated for her ability to sing fluently in both English and Spanish. And yet, Xenia nonetheless represented the heart and soul of Cuban show: “The chinita Xenia is ‘all around’, because she dances, sings, models, and has within her sensitive soul of a woman all that is show.”23 In the fifth scene of Medianoche en París, Xenia starred in the number “Cuba in my mind,” still Cuban enough to sing of home. As a “chinita,” however, Xenia retained traces of Cuba’s histories of racial mixing. It was the power of her diva performances that allowed her to embody Cuban cosmopolitanism at mid-­ century even while evoking the exoticism of the Orient.

Conclusion The rise to visibility of the figure of the vedette china revealed for a brief moment Cuba’s significant histories of transpacific migration, circulation, and exchange. Colonial histories have obscured these transpacific connections, especially as they intersect with histories of transatlantic slavery. As Lisa Lowe (2015) has argued, the maintenance of colonial power has in 22  “Xenia se roba materialmente la revista por su personalidad fascinadora, por sus bailes y porqué además se revela como cantante de voz grave y emotiva. Se puede afirmar que Xenia, es la máxima estrella de Medianoche en París.” “Sin precedente el éxito de ‘Medianoche en París,’” Show, December 1955. 23  “Carlyle, se crece otra vez,” Show, March 1956.

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part depended on setting up binaries in an effort to undermine the danger of interracial coalitions and friendships (pp. 171–175). However, the figure of the china mulata embodied these obscured Afro-Asian intimacies. The lens of performance gives insight into the contradictions of a national culture that concealed and yet could not fully deny the presence of the china mulata. Through a performance of divadom on the cabaret stage, the vedette china asserted her place within Cuban national culture. Through her striking stage presence, fabulous beauty, and outsized talent she exploded boundaries of race and gender, flaunting Cuba’s transpacific legacies with great pleasure. After the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship in 1959, the figure of the vedette who danced and sang in the glitz of the cabaret was replaced by the emergence of a revolutionary woman. This figure was an ideal citizen who illustrated the revolution’s stated aims of eradicating gender, class, and racial inequality. Wearing a worker’s uniform or military fatigues, she demonstrated the virtues of communal work, political commitment, educational achievement, and care-taking. The eroticized figure of the mulata made her return during Cuba’s Special Period after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Once again, the figure of the mulata became enmeshed with Cuba’s histories of race, performance, and internationalism but now in the context of Cuba’s economic reliance on international tourism and the growth of jineterismo. Beginning in the 1990s, Cuba’s sex tourism generated informal economies in which enterprising jineteras developed transactional intimacies and relationships, both sexual and otherwise, with international tourists. To invite the attention of tourist eyes, the jinetera or the transformista (drag performer) shook her hips to the fast-paced rhythms of timba music in Havana’s dance clubs. Due to the disrepute of Cuba’s association with sex and the erotic, the Cuban government has cracked down on jineterismo especially practiced by Afro-Cubans. And yet, still the jinetera finds possibilities for economic survival as well as self-expression through a performance of the mulata that caters to the international tourist economy. During the Special Period, China stepped in to become Cuba’s most important economic ally. Post-1959, large numbers of Chinese business owners left for the United States, but an integrated mixed-race community remained in Cuba where they have passed along Chinese cultural connections. Cuban government officials have attempted to capitalize on these historical ties as they forge economic links with China. According to Adrian Hearn (2016), Havana’s Barrio Chino now “carries the credentials

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of an up-and-coming national icon” (p. 101). With China now a symbol of economic modernity, new possibilities have opened up for the figure of the china mulata to assert her place within Havana’s tourist entertainment scene. Transpacific circulation and exchange take on new meanings and significance as they encounter the legacies of Cuba’s longstanding historical connections to China.

References Arrizón, Alicia. 2006. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. 1996. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by James Maraniss. Durham: Duke University Press. Borelli, Melissa Blanco. 2016. She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Cámara, Madeline. 1999. La Mulata, Cuerpo-Símbolo de la Cultura Cubana. Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica 15: 121–129. Cirules, Enrique. 2010. The Mafia in Havana: A Caribbean Mob Story. North Melbourne: Ocean Press. De Bruyne, Jacques. 1961. Hacia una definición de “feúcha”. Bulletin hispanique 83 (1–2): 181–188. Díaz-Ayala, Cristóbal. 2002. Teatro Musical Cubano. Encyclopedic Discography of Cuban Music, 1898–1925. Vol. 1. http://latinpop.fiu.edu/downloadfilesv1. html. Accessed 1 Dec 2018. Dvoskin, Michelle. 2016. Embracing Excess: The Queer Feminist Power of Musical Theatre Diva Roles. Studies in Musical Theatre 10 (1): 93–103. Fraunhar, Alison. 2018. Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Han, Benjamin K. 2020. Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hearn, Adrian H. 2016. Diaspora and Trust: Cuba, Mexico, and the Rise of China. Durham: Duke University Press. Helly, Denise. 1979. Idéologie et ethnicité, Chinois Macao à Cuba. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montreal. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. 1994. Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor of Neoslavery. Contributions in Black Studies: A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies 12 (5): 1–17.

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———. 2017. From Slavery to Freedom: Chinese Coolies on the Sugar Plantations of Nineteenth Century Cuba. Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History 113: 31–51. Klein, Christina. 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kutzinski, Vera M. 1993. Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Lane, Jill. 2005. Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lapidus, Benjamin. 2015. Chinita Linda: Portrayals of Chinese and Asian Identity and Culture by Chinese and Non-Chinese in Spanish Caribbean Dance Music. Chinese America: History and Perspectives 17–28. López, Kathleen. 2013. Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. López-Calvo, Ignacio. 2008. Imagining the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ———. 2018. From Interethnic Alliances to the ‘Magical Negro:’ Afro-Asian Interactions in Asian Latin American Literature. Humanities 7 (110): 1–10. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Merrill, Dennis. 2009. Negotiating Paradise: US Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-­ Century Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Moore, Robin. 1997. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ossa, Luisa Marcela. 2019. Parallels and Intersections: Afro-Chinese Relationships and Spiritual Connections in Monkey Hunting and Como un mensajero tuyo. In Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, 115–135. London: Lexington Books. Pastrana, Juan Jiménez. 1983. Los chinos en la historia de Cuba, 1847–1930. Havana: Ed. Ciencias Sociales. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. 2003. Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy. 3rd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Rivero, Yeidy M. 2015. Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950–1960. Durham: Duke University Press. Schwall, Elizabeth. 2016. Dancing with the Revolution: Cuban Dance, State, and Nation, 1930–1990. PhD Dissertation, Columbia University. Schwartz, Rosalie. 1999. Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Seid, Danielle M. 2017. Cold War Asian/American Chic on TV: Beauty, Fashion, and the Asian/American Femme. The Journal of Popular Culture 50 (6): 1254–1275.

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Stiehl, Pamyla. 2018. Katherine Dunham: The Crossing and [Con]fusion of Borders by Broadway’s Original Diasporic Dance Diva. Studies in Musical Theatre 12 (1): 61–77. Triana, Mauro García et al. 2009. The Chinese in Cuba, 1847–Now. Edited and Translated by Gregor Benton. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Tsang, Martin. 2019. La Mulata Achinada: Bodies, Gender, and Authority in Afro-Chinese Religion in Cuba. In Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, 209–224. London: Lexington Books. Yun, Lisa. 2008. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Between North and South: Colombia in Korean War Exhibitions Gina Catherine León Cabrera

Introduction The Korean War was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century. In it, under the command of the United Nations (UN), several countries joined a struggle that ended with the division of the Korean peninsula and the maintenance of a border that seems to perpetuate the Iron Curtain to this day. In Colombia, one of the countries that participated in the hostilities, the Korean War is almost unknown to most citizens. It is not part of the history contents of school curricula and it is very seldom addressed in artistic or literary works. The few public references to this event can be found in two small museums of the army and navy, in an annual parade of veterans, and in the memory of the people who fought there. Unlike Colombia, in South Korea there is a vast volume of exhibits in national museums, memorials, and monuments, in which the participation of the Colombian army and navy is repeatedly represented. After the

G. C. León Cabrera (*) National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_10

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confrontation, diplomatic relations between the two countries have been significantly strengthened. These differences lead me to question how different versions of the same violent event, such as the Korean War, are constructed, and what type of variables are involved in this process. To do this, I stem from the assumption that institutional memories of the Korean War depend on a particular political agenda and that the curatorial processes and their specific contents help to build national narratives that adjust to the political present of each country. In this chapter, I am interested in reflecting upon how institutional memories about Colombia’s participation in the Korean War are constructed in public museums, pinpointing the political uses of these initiatives in the mobilization of national narratives in each country. With this aim, I analyze the “Korea Room” permanent exhibition at the Colombian Military Museum in Bogotá and the “Korean War Room” at the Korean War Memorial in Seoul. The text analyzes the way in which Colombia’s participation in the exhibitions is narrated, putting it in contrast to other versions of the war based on individual testimonies. This study investigates the external factors involved in the exhibitions, such as political contexts (Foote and Azaryahu 2007), objects donation (Adamek and Gann 2018), and financing. Finally, these versions are compared, seeking to understand their divergences and intersections within the framework of the geopolitical relations in which the two countries are immersed.

Museums, Memory, and National Narratives In the field of social memory studies (Olick and Robbins 1998; Erll 2012), museums have gained ground as tools for analysis, insofar as they have been erected as institutions whose function relates to the management of the past. The movement referred to as the “memorial boom” has brought a compulsion for memory that manifests itself in a growing and accelerated creation of museums. The relationship between research on memory and museum studies is remarkably close due to the dynamics of memory that operate in them. Since their origin as institutions of the nation-state (Bennet 1995), public museums have been used to spread an idea of belonging to a political community through the dissemination of the nation’s past. There is, therefore, a constitutive relationship between memory, museums, and identity.

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In this sense, museums can be considered places of memory (Nora 2009): material, symbolic, and functional places where the memory of a group crystallizes as a collective construction of the past (Halbwachs 1992). As places of memory, museums allow for a reading of both the representations of the past and the actors involved in their creation. Public museums were born in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In building this imagined community (Anderson 2006), the creation of feelings of belonging and brotherhood, symbolism, and a shared knowledge were essential (Macdonald 2003). Together with the census and the map, the museum allowed to consolidate an idea of a shared belonging based on the idea of a common culture. In the West, museums, collections, and exhibitions have been expressions used to materialize the history of the nation and its inclusion within the universal order of progress. For example, the exhibition of objects collected in other geographies would demonstrate the colonizing power of empires, which would embody a “primitive and inferior” past in the scale of development of civilization. However, the discussion on the relationship between museum and nation has failed to emphasize the fact that the development of public museums in Europe was different from regions such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia and that these particularities will have consequences in the way in which public museums are related to national projects. This failure strengthens the need to place the study of museums, memory, and national narratives within a geopolitical framework (Berger 2007), in order to identify the level of influence of the actors involved in exhibition policies (Macdonald 2010) and the shifting nature of national narratives. From this point of view, it is worth recalling the conclusion reached by Tessa Morris-Suzuki (2009) in her analysis of the Korean War museums in Australia and China. She points out that the narrative depends on the existing power balance between each of the participating countries and their relationship with power strongholds such as the United States. In this sense, exhibition policies can be understood as situated practices that represent power relations between different states (Gieryn 2010). Thus, observing the way in which two museums represent the same event allows us to test whether national narratives correspond to the Global North or South locations (Braveboy-Wagner 2016) and how these geopolitical relations are expressed in the cultural production of public memory about the war. Consequently, the public museum can be considered as a governance strategy (Foucault 2009, 136), since it not only exhibits modern

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narratives, “it is also one of the technologies through which modernityand democratic ideals, social differences and exclusions, and other contradictions which this has produced- is constituted” (Macdonald 2010, 8). In this sense, nation-building involves an imaginative exercise in which individuals share and forget certain elements (Renan 1996). Consequently, in the creation of national narratives, there is a dynamic of memory and oblivion that is dependent on power relations, which reveals its discursive nature (Zuelow et al. 2007) and its narrative approach (Pease 1997). As shifting stories, national narratives account for the political construction of a representation of the nation. These narratives situate the groups within a certain space and time and highlight events of the past by sorting and linking up episodes, which are reinterpreted and adapted according to the political present (Zuelow et  al. 2007). By constructing a version of the past, the actors who mobilize these representations are rewarded, as “modern politics gains legitimacy from a remembered past while forwarding contemporary agendas” (Zuelow et al. 2007, 5). At the same time, the selective nature of the national narrative leaves out other representations of those same events, evidencing the political use of the past and the fragmented nature of its accounts. What is significant about observing national narratives is that they are no longer monolithic constructions, but we should rather consider their fractures and power structures. They can eventually be linked to other places where different representations of the past are produced, such as individual memories (Candau 2002).

Studying Museums Two methodological positions have been recognized in museum studies. The first one emphasizes the socio-genesis processes of museums to account for the social order around which they revolve (Bennet 1995; Fife 2016). The second one deals with museums as content, analyzing exhibitions under a narrative perspective, their ideological dimension (Watson 2011), and relation to other narratives. This division stems from an inability to simultaneously address museums as social and narrative processes. It loses sight of the fact that an exhibition, as the cultural production of memory, refers both to the “medium of presentation and to the process under which a representation takes on a certain form” (Foote and Azaryahu 2007). Unlike archives and libraries, museums mobilize a discourse about the past based on the display of objects.

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In this chapter, museums are considered as immersed in a sociopolitical environment that affects both their production processes and their content. For this purpose, an analysis is carried out that conceptualizes exhibitions as narratives where relationships of text and context converge (Van-Dijk 2004). External factors are identified, such as political contexts, the origin of exhibition pieces (Adamek and Gann 2018), and sources of financing, as well as internal factors such as the meanings that the pieces acquire within the staging and showcasing (Bennet 2005; Noy 2017). Museums rely on regimes of objectivity under which the relationships between objects and publics allow the creation of “new realities and relationships both thinkable and perceptible” (Bennet 2005, 7). This operation happens within the process of decontextualization of the object from its original use and its recontextualization inside the museum. The meanings that one object can take in relation to another make for highly diverse outcomes, including the sorting of time, geographic locations, and populations, which leads museums to represent both epistemological and civil settings, in the sense that they can lead to creating new ways of understanding reality. National narratives mobilized in exhibitions arrange the representations of the community and its relationship with the state and with other nations. These narratives derive their coherence and their claim of universal value by creating oppositions (Velmet 2011, 200), such as the creation of a national enemy to strengthen a patriotic identity (Pease 1997, 5), and could be supported in class and race differences (Berger 2007). Consequently, the shaping of the representation of the Other is present in the museum narrative. It is mobilized through museum resources and is framed within a certain political context. Finally, public museums are mechanisms with which the state creates the past, using the same operations of acquisition and classification involved in the archive (Mbembe 2002). An approach studying museums as an ethnography of the nation-­ state (Rufer 2014) allows us to identify weak points of these official narratives and to problematize new intersections in the memory of the Korean War. The Sample The selection criteria for the exhibitions analyzed were, first, being a public museum, second, referencing Colombia’s participation in the Korean War, and third, having been created or renewed in the last decades. Under

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these criteria, the Korean War exhibition of the Korean War Memorial in Seoul and the Korea Room of the Military Museum of Colombia in Bogotá were chosen. An important characteristic of the sample is the type of museum institutions represented. On the one hand, the exhibition in Seoul is part of the War Memorial of Korea. Memorials are built mainly for remembrance, evoke funeral practices, and have the function of “establish[ing] a community united in mourning and in the resolve to prevent the cause for such grief and suffering in the future” (Hoskins and Sutton 2013, 76). On the other hand, the Korea Room is part of the Military Museum of Colombia. Unlike memorials, museums fulfill an educational role, through the critical interpretation and contextualization of events (Hoskins and Sutton 2013, 76). In the case of military museums, these have been created to tell the story of the armed forces and “for the specific purpose of instilling and fostering in the regiment the esprit of corps which enables it to fight more effectively” (Jones 1999, 152). However, the differentiation between museum and memorial is increasingly blurred. Museums also perform memorial functions by offering commemoration events (Sodaro 2018). Beyond evaluating the consistency between one and the other, the comparison between the two selected exhibitions makes it possible to identify different approaches to the past related to the function of the place of memory (Nora 2009) that each exhibition represents. The method used for analyzing the exhibitions was a combination of an ethnographic approach (Guber 2001) and discourse analysis (Van-Dijk 2004). On-site observation of exhibitions was recorded in a field journal and systematized in spreadsheets that reproduced the order of the exhibitions piece by piece, accompanied by identification information such as origin.1 Once the information was sorted out, a first description of the exhibitions was made, in which several thematic axes were identified. A second analysis was made based on discourse analysis, relating each topic to two types of information. First, each theme was compared to individual testimonies of the Korean War (oral, written, recordings), identifying similarities, differences, and contradictions in the narratives. Second, each 1  The observation of the Korean War Room at the Korean War Memorial was made in 2016 during my stay as a visiting scholar at the Museum of Contemporary History of Korea. The observation of the Korea Room of the Military Museum was made in January 2020. This chapter is part of the thesis as a student of Social and Political Science Doctoral Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico sponsored by CONACYT and MINCIENCIAS-COLFUTURO.

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thematic axis was cross-referenced with information gathered in conversations with members of the museum that provided data on the origin of the pieces and secondary bibliography that recreated the political context under which the exhibitions were created.

The Korean War The Korean War was the first violent confrontation of the Cold War. During this period, the main armed conflicts took place in countries that were not world powers. For this reason, to problematize the origins of the Korean conflict and the role of the Colombia in it allow us to do not understand this past as a confrontation between Washington and Moscow exclusively. Between 1950 and 1953, eighteen nations organized under the UN, led by the United States, fought on the Korean peninsula against a large North Korean army with military support from China and backed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The war was the result of the intersection between the postwar geopolitical order and the multiple tensions that Korea experienced during the first half of the twentieth century with deeply rooted historical backgrounds. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese empire sought penetration into Korea based on its influence with modernizing reforms that culminated in a protectorate and then a colony in 1910. The Japanese colonial regime sought to cement Korea’s representation as a nation that required intervention. The creation of the Imperial House Museum in 1908 was one of the projects that sought to diminish the hatred of Koreans toward Japan for establishing a colonial regime, arguing their need for the consolidation of Korea as a modern nation (Sang 2015). The period of occupation continued until 1945. Faced with the deployment of the Chinese army in Manchuria, the United States proposed to the USSR to establish the 38th parallel (an imaginary line of military strategy) as the limit for the Japanese forces to withdraw from the peninsula. In September, after the Japanese surrender was signed, Soviet and US troops positioned themselves north and south of the 38th parallel. After World War II, a power vacuum in the Korean peninsula was evident, as well as the absence of a strong national project and the internal division between guerrilla groups located to the north and separatist groups to the south. The new occupation by these superpowers was badly received in the peninsula, but this rejection did not prevent the United States and the USSR from aligning themselves with local political factions.

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In 1948, the first elections were held in the South, being influenced by the United States, which put the anti-communist Syngman Rhee in power. In the North, Kim Il-Sung proclaimed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel. Two days later, US president Harry S. Truman entered the conflict. The US government convened the UN Security Council and called the North Korean invasion an attack on the international charter, so that the counterattack would not appear unilateral. The Council summoned all the countries that were part of the institution to create a unified armed side. Colombia heeded this call as the only Latin American country to do so, which would partake in the war with a battalion and a frigate. When President Mariano Ospina announced that Colombia would participate in the conflict, the war minister announced that the precarious national army did not have enough members to participate in it and attend to the chaotic domestic public order situation in the country at the same time. By 1950, Colombia was experiencing a deep crisis caused by clashes between the Liberal and Conservative parties, social discontent, and the organization of guerrillas in rural areas (Henderson 2006). This internal confrontation had a long heritage of conflict that had prevented the construction of a national narrative. When the war started, the Colombian economy depended on the export sector, and the United States was the most important buyer of coffee, the country’s main export product. The Colombian government and its anti-communist policy aligned itself with the United States’ self-appointed role as liberator of the Korean people. Colombia’s participation in the war was accepted based on an agreement that included payment to the United States for the acquisition of weapons and training of troops. In debt and in a state of internal unrest, Colombia sent more than 5000 soldiers that made up the Colombia Battalion to the Korean peninsula, entering a war against international communism. When Colombia entered the war, a negotiation process had begun between the parties, motivated by the end of the Truman presidency and the death of Joseph Stalin. The Colombia Battalion participated in three battles. Two years later, on July 27, 1953, an armistice was signed in which a cease-fire was stipulated, with no winners or victors.

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The Museums The War Memorial of Korea—Seoul With the war paused, South Korea was totally destroyed and an accelerated modernization process began, economically supported by the United States. The rebuilding period took place during the presidency of Rhee, who was in office until 1960. Rhee’s remaining in power for more than a decade significantly influenced the social memory process of the war. Since his arrival in power, anti-communist war films were promoted that enhanced feelings of belonging and patriotism. Likewise, in the years following the war, the circulation of images about the warfare was not common (Lee 2013, 337–370), and by 1955 the mission of the National Museum of Korea—an object of dispute during the war—was the establishment of the new republic based on the archeology, art, and ethnography collections (Sang 2015). The successive establishment of authoritarian governments in South Korea from the liberation process until the late 1980s was characterized by social and political tensions that problematized the construction of a public memory of the recent past (Ruoff 2017). Toward 1990, the limits of accelerated economic growth began to be evident and there was a change of power toward a more liberal political faction. In 1993, Kim Yang-Sam was the first civilian to win the elections democratically. That same year, the construction of the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul began. The mission of the memorial curatorial team is “to create the national heroes to defend this country and its remembrance ceremonies.”2 The exhibitions cover a span of more than five thousand years of history.3 As part of the collection creation process, a massive donation program of objects from the countries that participated in the Korean War was carried out. In fact, in the Korean War Room, the relationship between the different government institutions is evident, as can be seen in the origin and type of the objects collected.4 Donations are made thanks to the

2  The War Memorial of Korea Website. https://www.warmemo.or.kr/LNG/introduction/eachTeams.do. Accessed September 2, 2020. 3  It includes the first settlers, the Three Empires, the Goryeo and Joeson dynasties, the Empire of Korea, the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, the armed forces of the Republic of Korea (ROK), the UN, and donations. 4  In 2016, the process of donating a weapon from the Colombian army took place.

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efforts of institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Ministry of Patriot and Veterans Affairs. Military Museum of Colombia—Bogotá When the Colombia Battalion returned to its homeland, it did so in the midst of the military government of Rojas Pinilla, in an environment of strong social tension. Civil society did not understand the role of the battalion in Korean lands, and in 1956, it would be accused of causing several deaths during a demonstration of the student movement (Quiroga 2015). In the 1960s, the Korean War would not be addressed as an issue in the country, and the nation’s past would be focused on its history of independence (Rodríguez 2017). The Military Museum was created at the beginning of the 1980s when, after the end of the pact known as the National Front, Julio César Turbay took power. At that time, Colombia was facing serious problems due to the increase in social protests and the theft of weapons from the armed forces by the M-19 guerrillas. The president decreed a security statute. The museum, located in the city’s downtown area, has the mission “to promote the recognition of the military forces as historical heritage and to disseminate their contribution in the creation of the nation-state.”5 The Korea Room is located on the second floor. Its location sets up a dialogue with the Communications and the Administrative Department of Security rooms. The Independence Room and the room on the Colombian armed conflict are exhibited on the first floor.

Narrating the Korean War The Participation of the UN The Korean War exhibition at the Seoul War Memorial has a space dedicated to the UN’s decision to respond to the North Korean attack in 1950 through its Unified Command. Starting from a large diorama with the raised hands of the representatives of the countries at the time of the vote, a narrative of the war is installed that is framed under the rationale of the

5  The Military Museum of Colombia Website: https://www.museomilitarco.com/mision-­ y-­vision/. Accessed November 10, 2020.

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Western democratic order as a legitimizer of the beginning of the counterattack. It is worth mentioning that by the time of voting at the UN the global tensions of the postwar period were transferred to the international organization. At that time, the USSR had stopped attending some Security Council sessions as a protest mechanism against the non-recognition of communist China. In the same way, in the structural decisions that were taken by the international organization, Latin American countries were not consulted, and when they voted they did so as a block with the United States (Slawdoska 2007). On the other hand, it is paradoxical that the beginning of the confrontation is portrayed in the Memorial as a result of a democratic mechanism when the very idea of autonomy had been denied to Korea within the framework of the Potsdam Conference in 1945, where military leaders and not heads of state decided upon a regime of joint administration for the peninsula. Nor did it occur in 1943, when, despite the fact that the Cairo Conference had established a supposed independence for Korea, the powers viewed it more as a fiduciary or tutelary government (López-Aymes 2016). The ambivalence in the representation of the UN as a democratic actor is evidenced in the Memorial when addressing the countries that joined the war. Each of the armies of the participating nations has a display case where similar objects such as flags, military uniforms, insignia, badges, and military boots are kept. However, no mention is made of the social or political condition of each country, the reasons for participation, or its relationship with the Korean people. Swept under an assumption of international unity in defense of freedom, a blind eye is turned on the strategic and dependency reasons involved in the participation. For example, countries such as Greece, India, and Turkey were beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, and the Philippines of the Plan IV Program, putting them in a relationship of dependency with the United States. Only the showcase destined for the United States, which is twice the size of other countries, includes a section on the country’s background on the peninsula. There, it is highlighted how, before the war, the country left a “group of 482 military advisers” and that they later entered the conflict with the support of the UN. Expressed as a “group of advisers,” the United States’ presence is portrayed at the Memorial as an act with no intervention in local politics. This way of stating the role that the establishment of the United States Army Military Government in Korea had after the end of World War II inhibits

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the debate on the very process of building the South Korean nation. Before the Korean War, it was characterized by the constant influence of other countries, as well as discussions about the possible continuities between the Japanese colonial model and administrative structures in the regimes that followed liberation (Ruoff 2017). The countries that participated in the conflict are described in the Korea Room of the Military Museum in Bogotá in a similar way to the Memorial. In a video, the members of the UN are presented as part of a united block. The standardized information for each of the countries does not allow recognizing the particularities of each one of the members, neither the reasons for entering the war nor their cultural differences.6 According to a source within the museum, the information with which this piece was made was a book selected by the Korean Embassy in Colombia, which sponsored the renovation of the room in 2013 (Informant 2, conversation on January 22, 2020). With the presentation of the beginning of the conflict as a decision of the UN, the Korea room in Bogotá avoids addressing the motives of Colombian participation. In the narration, it is not explicit that the decision was taken within the framework of a state of siege, that it got into debt with the United States, and that at that time the period of La Violencia in Colombia had begun.7 The Sacrifice The act of dying for one’s country plays a leading role in the War Memorial. Sacrifice is represented in each of the display cases through the number of men wounded and killed in combat. The number of deaths in action helps to consolidate the representation of the cost in human lives that it took for the UN countries to fight alongside the Korean people to counter the attack by North Korea and China. However, the account of lives lost in the war varies between the different armies. This is the case of US soldiers killed in action, who are not only counted but also exalted, emphasizing their relationship with the military and political elites. Of the more than 30,000 American deaths, Generals W. Walker and B. Moore stand out, for they were killed in action, as well as the son of General J.  Van Fleet, 6  Unlike other armies, the majority of Colombian soldiers could not read, drive, or read maps. 7  La Violencia refers to the period between 1946 and 1958, characterized by political and social conflict in rural areas and cities.

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commander of the United States Eighth Army. These deaths are exalted and infused with an altruistic nature when it is stated that they occurred within the framework of a “noblesse oblige” that led them to participate in the war. In the Colombia showcase, there are 213 fallen and 448 wounded. These are in dialogue with other exhibition spaces of the Memorial such as the plaques and the monument accompanied by the statement “Colombia is proud of its heroes, soldiers, and marines who fought alongside the nations of the world for the freedom and democracy of the people of the Republic of Korea.”8 However, the number of disappeared persons or war prisoners is not considered, issues that were in fact published in newspapers at the time.9 At the Military Museum, the names of the fallen are displayed in a digital reproduction of a pagoda-shaped monument donated by the Korean Embassy to Colombia in the 1970s. The monument was located north of Bogotá and later on transferred to the Military University. The change of setting to a private sphere shows the political tensions in the country in the early 1980s.10 The digital reproduction of the monument is a way of evoking its symbolism without the need to explain its transfer, silencing the political disputes that were stoked by its location in a public setting. Although the names of the fallen are written on the panel, they are not complete. Many visitors come in to look for their relatives with no success (informant 1, conversation January 2020). Unlike the Memorial, which counts 213, this panel only records 131 and does not include the missing or injured. The Korean ambassador to Colombia himself recognized that the number of participants is an issue that still needs to be investigated (UniAndes 2020) (Fig. 10.1). Who Are the Heroes? At the Memorial, military actions are highlighted as epic actions. Through a timeline, the development of the military actions is shown as successive decisions of the US commanders, such as Douglas McArthur, characterized as the “hero of the Incheon landing operation,” and Mathew Ridgway, 8  “Colombia se siente orgulloso de sus héroes, soldados y marinos que lucharon junto a las naciones del mundo por la libertad y la democracia del pueblo de la República de Corea.” Own translation. 9  See Diario El Espectador (Ca.1953). 10  Guerrilla groups such as the M-19 operated in the cities, and there was deep social discontent over the violence of the military forces under the security statute.

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Fig. 10.1  Fallen in Combat Panel, Military Museum. (Thanks O.M. for the photographs)

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who carried out “strategies to lead the counterstrike forces to success.” This construction of the figure of the hero stands in contrast to other more critical views of the leadership of McArthur, who was dismissed from his position due to his intention to take the confrontation forward to Chinese territory (Halberstam 2008). Despite the fact that there are no emblematic cases of deaths that stand out in the space dedicated to Colombia, it is evident that only some of the actors have been selected as spokespersons representing the country’s participation. Most of the objects exhibited in the Colombia showcase belonged to military elites of the Colombia Battalion, such as Colonel Francisco Caicedo’s journal and the uniform of Commander Álvaro Valencia Tovar. This hierarchy of war testimonies is reaffirmed with other objects, such as an altarpiece of insignia donated by the Colombian army in 2015 and the written memoirs and uniforms of the officers—scenography that privileges the voice of the high command against that of the soldiers. At the Military Museum, arranged from the lowest to the highest rank, the insignia and decorations on display reward actions in battle. Along with the decorations, the battle of Kumsong, known as “The Baptism in Blood,” stands out. This was the first time that the Colombia Battalion entered the battlefield and was recorded by Lieutenant Puyana, war correspondent, on August 6, 1951 (Quiroga 2015). Years later, when ex-­ commander Ruiz Novoa wrote his memoirs of the combat, he stated that the baptism had been on August 7, the day of the Battle of Boyacá.11 The readjustment of the date between the first action in Korea and the Battle of Boyacá framed the justification of the battalion’s participation as the continuation of the actions of the independence heroes of the nineteenth century. This analogy operation served to create a collective hero that concealed class differences between the officers and the soldiers that made up the battalion.12 Unlike the soldiers, the military elites went on to hold important positions in national life when they returned to Colombia,13 showing that their participation in the Korea War had been calculated within their military careers. However, most of the low-rank soldiers were recruited by voluntary conscription and their participation did not link them to the army. On the battlefield, they received a salary of $39, and upon their return, they  A battle that consolidated the process of independence from the Spanish crown.  See Diario El Frente (Ca.1951). 13  See Diario El Tiempo (Ca.1953). 11 12

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were civilians again. The motivation of many farmers and young men from the cities to go to war was the possibility of fleetingly escaping poverty: “Since I didn’t have a job, well I thought this is the solution” (Vergara 2019).14 For former soldiers, the medals would change their original meaning to help face the difficult situations in which they found themselves upon arrival in the country. Unemployed and sometimes branded as “mentally unbalanced,” many had to look for other ways to find a livelihood, as told by Gabriel García Márquez (1954) in his account of how an ex-soldier pawned his decoration in order to survive. In this way, both at the Memorial and in the Museum, the hierarchical relations within the military institution are replicated in institutional memory. The memory of Korea is that of the military, those who always belonged to the institution and who continue to remain the visible voices of the war. The sources of objects such as uniforms and medals are donations from the high command of the battalion that circulate between Korea and Colombia. The Arsenal A separation between weapons and human beings stands out in the staging of weaponry at the memorial. Although there are photographs showing men wearing their equipment, the exhibition of original weapons tends to be done separately. This sanitized showcasing, where the weapon is completely stripped of its context of use (Scott 2015), has an important consequence when showing the impacts of the war. Exhibiting weapons as sets of objects and not as technologies for the destruction of lives shows the careful intention of the curatorial narrative in the face of the consequences of war and the protagonists of such warfare actions. For example, the assembly of a showcase of rifles suspended in the air creates a representation of the armament where no person is accountable for the deaths. Likewise, the fact that the weapons fire to the north in an orderly manner without receiving counterattacks inhibits the understanding of the full dimension of the conflict and the response capacity of the North Korean and Chinese army. Finally, this sanitization inhibits the realization of deaths and injuries. The effects of war are shown in devices like sound booths. One, titled “Atrocities,” invites the audience to “close their eyes and feel the moment.” Likewise, a diorama shows the physical destruction  “Cómo no tenía trabajo pues yo pensé: esta es la solución.” Own translation.

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of cities and towns and the support of the military forces in their reconstruction. In the latter case, the display of the soldiers in the reconstruction of cities and towns stands in contrast with individual testimonies from the war that describe the indiscriminate attack on villages by members of the Korean army.15 Exhibiting weapons as a language that is separate from the decisions of political and military leaders, and from orders executed by flesh and blood individuals, gives war technology supremacy over the human dimension. This relationship creates an ambivalence within the Memorial since, although war is commemorated, the fact that it has not yet concluded and that the tension of nuclear weapons continues to be a subject of debate questions the sense in establishing an account of the war based on the armament. Similarly, the Military Museum exhibits weapons ordered by origin and year of production. The showcase was sponsored by the Korean Embassy and the Samsung company. The order of the weapons and their arrangement in some way describe the sides facing each other in the war, as one member of the museum narrates: “Every time I guide a group visit, I imagine that this line between the two weapons is the 38th parallel” (Informant 1, conversation on January 2020).16 At the same display a flamethrower, a mine identifier, and a landmine, all US-made, are exhibited. As in the Memorial, the weapons are exhibited without hinting at the fact that they are all manipulated by men. The showcase is the only one in which the pieces have an identification card that describes firing speed and cadence, which may imply that their exhibition is aimed at specialized staff. The fact that weapons are almost at the end of the room creates a reading about the effects of participation in the war for the Colombian army, which coincides with the interpretation that the military elites have offered of the effects of the war. Colombia’s justification in Korea was recorded in the autobiographies and statements of Commanders Valencia Tovar and Ruiz Novoa, who made donations to museums in Colombia and South Korea and who insisted that Colombia’s participation in Korea allowed Colombia to modernize its army (Fig. 10.2).

15  “The South Korean police and marines are brutal. They murder just to avoid the work of leading prisoners to the rear: they murder civilians just to get them out of the way and they don’t bother to interrogate them” (John Osborne 1950). Own translation. 16  “Cada vez que hago una visita a un grupo imagino que esta línea entre las dos armas es el paralelo 38.” Own translation.

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Fig. 10.2  Military Museum armament showcase

Conclusion The tour of the War Memorial in South Korea and the Military Museum in Bogotá exhibitions shows how, at these institutions, the official version of memory is intended to become hegemonic (Candau 2002). This institutional memory draws on the memories of the military elites to articulate the issues around which the war is accounted for: the participation of the UN, the sacrifice, the heroes, and the armament. These thematic cores articulate three narrative axes about the war: democracy, modernization, and militarization, which are introduced in each country’s national narrative (Pease 1997). This articulation allows both Colombia and South Korea to construct a version of the war’s past in order to maintain military and diplomatic relations with the centers of power in the Global North such as the United States. The way in which the blocks in dispute are arranged in the exhibitions, as homogeneous groups of countries, reproduces a vision of the world order in which Western nations represent the way forward (Bennet 1995), denying the historical relationships of dependence among them and inhibiting the understanding of the geopolitical reasons that led them to enter

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the conflict. The fact that the weapons are displayed separately (Scott 2015) releases weaponry from its function as a lethal instrument, and the militarization of nations is framed as a step toward their modernization. This was evident with the militarization of these two countries and the nations of the Global South during the Cold War period. In South Korea, the participation of the allied armies is framed as an event that, not without efforts, drove the start of an accelerated process of economic modernization of the country, evident in the strengthening of the ROK military forces. With this uncritical vision of the allied countries (Morris-Suzuki 2009, 1–24), the Memorial mobilizes a national narrative that seeks to include South Korea within the group of Western and democratic nations of the Global North. However, the successive presence of authoritarian governments until the late 1980s, the economic and military relationship with the United States, the nuclear threat, and the non-­ termination of the war, all question the process of modernization and construction of democracy (Ruoff 2017) and the role of the UN (Braveboy-Wagner 2016). In this sense, the objective of the Memorial as an institution where, through memory, it is sought to understand what happened, strengthen democracy, and prevent actions of this type from being repeated (Sodaro 2018) becomes questionable, since the narratives reproduce the same relations of military and diplomatic dependency between countries. In Colombia, participation in Korea is narrated as the beginning of the modernization process to counter the internal war against the guerrillas. Militarization is seen as a starting point to counteract the internal conflict that also involves paramilitary groups, drug trafficking, and the armed forces. The creation of the Military Museum and the renovation of the Korea Room account for the updating of an institutional memory on the war, which operates as a way of affirming a relationship of dependency between the internal security policy of Colombia and the United States, evident in programs such as Plan Colombia and in the declaration of the guerrillas as terrorist groups after September 11. From the Military Museum, the institutional memory of the Korean War cancels the understanding of the reasons for La Violencia in Colombia and the role played by the army. This fragmented memory allows the museum to ideologically direct the armed forces while maintaining its esprit de corps and to address the general public by updating a fight against communism in a context other than that of the Cold War. The dynamics of the donation of pieces between the military elites of the two countries build an official narrative

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that excludes individual memories. In these, it is evident that the definition of the sides in dispute during the war was not clear for many soldiers (Vergara 2019). Likewise, the trajectories of many former Colombian veterans cast doubt on the role of war in modernizing nations and its justification against trauma, poverty, and individual suffering. These differences between individual and institutional memory confirm that the creation of museum narratives of the Korean War and their integration into the country’s timeline operate under the rationales of a specific political agenda and its alignment with the logics imposed by the Global North. In this sense, curatorial narratives are not only places of memory (Nora 2009), they can also be considered as epistemologies of the Global North in the national narratives of the Global South. Given that these narratives are not created and circulated exclusively within the boundaries of the nation-state but through the donation of pieces, financing, and diplomatic relations, the study of the institutional memory of the Korean War could be enriched by being read as a soft power strategy (Braveboy-Wagner 2016, 11), which, in a political use of memory, shows the blurred line between the Global North and South, adapting the narratives of the past according to the geopolitical dynamics of the present. The progressive assumption of South Korea as an influential country in Latin America has been evident in its role during the recent pandemic. Colombia was selected by South Korea as one of the four rated countries to receive international cooperation with a generous $5 million project. Immediately, a virtual exhibition was inaugurated at the War Memorial of Korea.17 In it, a diary of one veteran of the Colombia Battalion during the Korean War is displayed. The gallery allows us to imagine a new economic and political frame between both countries in which the institutional memory of the participation of Colombia in the Korean War is now introduced.

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CHAPTER 11

This Coronavirus Shit Is Real: Racialized People, Vulnerability and Intersectional Care in Virtual Social Networks During the Pandemic Núria Canalda Moreno and Andrés Vargas Herreño



Introduction

The message on the American, European and African continents is one: Black lives matter. A position that Latinos, indigenous people and Asians have supported, understanding that a body can be punished for looking different from that of the majority of population. (Ye 2020)

N. Canalda Moreno (*) Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] A. Vargas Herreño Rosario University, Bogotá, Colombia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_11

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The coronavirus pandemic has had the perhaps unintended effect of intensifying a perception of world affairs through the scientific gaze. Every social scientist is also a social actor and the virus is a common issue. We, therefore, need to include not only “expert voices” but also “non-expert” voices in our public conversations to contribute to the discussion of how the effects of the virus impact on society. The epistemology of the virus has a multi-social, situational, gendered, racialized, generational, and multicultural approach, so as social actors and scientists, we also need to approach coronavirus from the perspective of public anthropology. In this chapter, we focus on analyzing the genesis of the category ‘systemic racism’ (Feagin 2006) and the racist discourses directed toward different ‘racialized’ communities at a local and global level. Jokes and warlike speeches regarding, on the one hand, the ‘Chinese virus,’ and, on the other, on so-called Venezuelan ‘biological weapons’ have been violently invented and disseminated online to construct an otherness whose phenotype and origin seem to be understood as the metonymy of the virus. The fear of this invisible virus, but whose effects are nevertheless very tangible, has intensified racism in many parts of the world. In Latin America, the fear that the virus could become more contagious in tropical climate regions was one of the biggest fears at the beginning of the pandemic, although we will see that its spread is more related to inequity, corruption, and survival in the Global South. People most affected by frameworks of violence and structural racism develop mechanisms of resistance and intercultural solidarity. To investigate the link between the coronavirus, racism, and xenophobia, we approach this issue from a decolonial perspective and from the anthropology of care, analyzing ‘vulnerability’ as a research category. In a conference titled “Caring as we would like to be cared for,” philosopher Francesc Torralba (Torralba Roselló, Francesc 2016) defined the philosophical current of ethics as “(…) what care is based on is the experience of vulnerability, a word whose etymology is vulnus—injury—and therefore refers to the susceptibility of being injured, since everyone is vulnerable, but within that vulnerability there is a gradation” (2016).1 Following these words, we developed the category of ‘intersectional care,’ also inspired by the work of nurses and 1  “En lo que se basa el cuidado es en la experiencia de la vulnerabilidad, palabra cuya etimología es vulnus -herida- y por tanto se refiere a la susceptibilidad de ser herido, ya que todos somos vulnerables, pero dentro de esa vulnerabilidad hay una gradación” (own translation).

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anthropologists Florence Nightingale and Madeleine Leininger, who identified care not only as biological but also as ‘cultural’, understanding the development of human beings according to their environment and personal needs. The coronavirus and the prolonged confinement have revealed that those who are institutionally and socially more vulnerable are more exposed to the disease. Meanwhile, the authorities and the media have established a temporality category called the ‘new normal’ to explain what the future will hold at a socio-economic level when the virus is under control, and also to reformulate our ‘normality.’ We cannot deny the social impact of the undoubted changes that the ‘de-escalation’ has entailed and our social experience exposed to this virus, nor can we ignore that normality is rather an empty term. This ‘new normal’ will surely affect even more those already subalternized by racism. Therefore, this ‘new normal’ appears coupled from the margins with solidarity campaigns and networks of mutual care disseminated online, the only places where people are allowed to ‘meet’ and share experiences during the lockdown (Ahijado 2020, pp. 22–23). We try to answer why, during the pandemic, acts of citizenship, resistance mechanisms, and intercultural solidarity were carried out in virtual social networks as strategies against systemic racism.

 Vulnerability and Intercultural Care in Virtual Social Networks Omnes vulnerant. Postuma necat. (Gaiman 2013)

In its origins, the health sciences tended to have a rather biologicist instead of a social understanding of patients (Huercanos Esparza 2010). It was the nursing professor Marie Françoise Collière who categorized nursing care as “invisible care”:2 “The most important care tasks that nurses do are ‘invisible’, in the sense that knowing the person and their environment, supporting them towards the achievement of their objectives and promoting their internal possibilities are acts that, on many occasions, are not performed in a visible way” (Huercanos Esparza 2010). Nurse Florence Nightingale was the forerunner in theorizing about professional nursing care with her work Notes on Nursing: What It Is and What It Is not 2

 Cuidados invisibles.

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(1989). Following Nightingale’s work, Madeleine Leininger founded the so-called cross-cultural nursing, a type of global medical care. Leininger understands that care is related to culture, so some of her main characteristics are empathy and community nursing. What is health or how should we take care of others? According to anthropologist Jorge Mínguez (2000), “the Pan-American Health Organization defines Community Nursing as that type of care that has the global community as the subject of care and its actions are directed to the population as a whole […] people in their own cultures are defining what they understand by health […] It looks for a framework called social support networks that is nothing other than the set of community resources available for individual and group development” (p.102).3 In an article from journalist Alia Dastagir, according to Alisha Moreland, director of the Avel Gordly Center for Care at the Oregon Health and Sciences University, “racism has a great emotional and psychological impact […] The attacks remind racialized people that they are insufficient, that they are not citizens and that humanitarian treatment is not something that is applied to them” (Dastagir 2020). As sociologist Ervin Goffman indicated, stigma is a negative social categorization of a person due to a condition or characteristic that goes against established cultural norms and causes a negative reaction in others (Goffman 2006). This reaction is relational, since it is opposed to the idea of ‘normality’ that exists in a social context. Ethnicity is one of the parameters that can create this stigma, and therefore psychological stress. Following Goffman’s categorization, Monica Williams, professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa, affirms that “racism is associated with psychological consequences that include […] post-traumatic stress and other mental illnesses” (Dastagir 2020). Vulnerability is anthropological because it affects all human beings equally, but it must be intersectional because not all humans are equally vulnerable. According to Williams, one of those forms of care is through validation and recognition of intersectional exposure to forms of violence. This is why it is important to acknowledge the institutionalization of 3  “La Organización Panamericana de la Salud define la Enfermería Comunitaria como aquel tipo de cuidado que tiene a la comunidad global como sujeto de cuidado y sus acciones están dirigidas a la población en su conjunto (…) las personas en sus propias culturas están definiendo lo que entender por salud (…) Buscando un marco llamado redes de apoyo social que no sean más que el conjunto de recursos comunitarios disponibles para el desarrollo individual y grupal”

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racism and the role of social systems that promote it to motivate understanding of human beings who suffer from it. Therefore we could consider social actions, solidarity, and cyberpolitcs in social media forms of intersectional and community care. In a traditional way, migrant social networks are forms of care because they function as transnational social connection methods, but in pandemic times virtual social networks have represented spaces of invisible intercultural connection and care, sharing messages of solidarity and anti-racism.

Coronavirus and the Virus of Racism Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses. (Rage Against the Machine 1991)

The Internet and virtual social networks have functioned as a means of social and emotional connection with others, but they also have shown the disease’s relation to symbolic violence and systemic racism. The virus has blurred the boundaries between the East and the West (Said 2002, p. 57), and the contagion has uncontrollably spread worldwide. This is why all of us who have the privilege of living under a roof with basic supplies found ourselves semi-confined and waiting for the institutionally branded ‘new normal’ to arrive. The lockdown has intensified class and gender differences, violence, racism, and institutional violence. For some, that past that we evoked as ‘normal’ was rather its antonym, and the novelty does not bode well for injustice. The pandemic and the confinement have confirmed for instance the difficulties that migrants go through. Political authorities offered migrants – for example, the strawberry field workers in Andalusia (Berger 2020)  – a certain legal and economic security while Spain’s state of alarm lasted, but without assuring long-term guarantees. In response, migrants and racialized people organized the campaign #regularizacionya (#regularizationnow) on Instagram to request a non-law proposal that would change the Spanish Organic Law 4/2000 of January 11 (also known as Immigration Law) and could help regularize the situation of migrants and refugees due to the health emergency (Regularizacionya.com 2020). On March 16, 2020, Donald Trump published a statement on Twitter showing his support for the airlines and transportation companies affected by “the Chinese virus” against which the North American nation was going to “keep fighting.” President Trump’s statement directly linked a

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human phenotype to the virus and, following his speech, numerous jokes about eating bats and terms based on stereotypes such as “kungflu” started appearing on social networks (Trump 2020). Different initiatives based on self-managed dissemination sources were created as tools of cyberactivism that were reacting to this narrative. In the Global North, there were several manifestations of resistance. One of them has been the publication of the online magazine Pai Pai Mag, created and managed by Asian-­ descendant Spanish women. They identified that Chinese people were the first to suffer from symbolic violence related to the expansion of the coronavirus (Zhang Yim 2020). The public dissemination of hegemonic racist messages dramatically increased attacks against Asians and people of Asian descent. Trump approached the virus from a historical and geolocated perspective, giving the concept of “yellow peril” yet another contemporary iteration (Trump 2020).4 Massimiliano Martigli Jiang, an Italian of Asian descent, took to the streets of Florence carrying a sign that read: “I am not a virus, I am a human being, free me from prejudice” (Chen 2020). With his initiative, the global solidarity action campaign #iamnotavirus started on Instagram, turning social networks into spaces where Asian and Asian-descendant people could share their experiences related to racism, xenophobia, and discrimination. Some of the pioneers in spreading this campaign in Spain were the intercultural facilitator Antonio Liuyang, the designer Quan Zhou, the activist Simbo Zhang, and the artist Chenta Tsai Tseng, who translated the hashtag as #nosoyunvirus. This initiative was broadly shared on Instagram, revealing a level of intercultural solidarity between diverse groups of racialized communities. Its humanizing message creates a counter-­discourse to a narrative that urges citizens to fight against a virus that has a “yellow” face and oblique eyes. The weight of history led many people to recognize themselves as racialized in social contexts where whiteness is present, and the current situation has brought those people to support each other online, as one, against the virulence of systemic racism around coronavirus.

4  Yellow peril was used in the nineteenth century as a tool to spread fear of a possible Asian invasion in Western countries.

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Genealogy of Systemic Racism

Where do symbolic violence and the institutionalization of racism socially place racialized people? Racialization is a concept that operates as a device to consider that those who are identified as non-normal (for instance, white in a Western country) occupy a more vulnerable position in terms of social and civil rights than those deemed racially normalized. The use of stereotypes and other devices that are embedded in language are mechanisms used to elaborate an essentialized image of those considered non-­ racialized, complicating their access to work, politics, and health, among others. So, to continue perpetuating systems of social imbalance, some people are made more vulnerable to be controlled. Sociologist Joe Feagin categorized ‘systemic racism’ as a historical and political concept that allows xenophobic acts to be perpetuated. In an effort to oppress and exploit non-white alterity, colonialists opted for ethnocentric and eugenic social and scientific models to continue to achieve benefits for their colonies. Institutions chose to exclude racialized people through the legislation of that oppression (Feagin 2006, pp. 1–53). As Stuart Hall theorized: “race is a floating signifier” insofar as it socially raises differences between people. Race is therefore a sociocultural construction relevant in social contexts where there are still hierarchical, institutional, and symbolic differences that affect people because of their phenotype or origin (Hall, S. 2015, pp. 9–23). Michel Foucault theorized that power builds forms of intolerance to such a degree of normalization that they are almost imperceptible (Foucault, M. 2012, pp. 1–384). Max Weber also understood that the government authorizes certain individuals and organizations to legitimize that violence, such as ethnic violence against Uyghurs or Tibetans in China, or with the migration policies of the Colombian and Venezuelan governments in Latin America (Weber 2016, pp.  1–58). Feagin’s concept can be linked to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of systemic violence. Bourdieu analyzed that social systems of power asymmetry are constructed based on parameters such as class, gender, and race. Political oppression is linked then to an asymmetry of power between white and racialized people in different contexts (Bourdieu 2001, pp. 9–39). The pandemic has been an example of how racism has been operationalized in the form of violence. Thomas Siu was the first Asian person to end up in hospital in Madrid after an attacked that was accompanied by cries of “coronavirus” and “Chinese” (Guerra 2020). As the virus started

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to be linked to precariousness and people with no access to health resources, other groups of migrants and racialized people were also the target of aggressions. They became like Murnau’s Nosferatu, stranger creatures who portend nothing but plagues and deaths, with the coronavirus as the plague du jour.

The Heirs of Biological Irrigation Rage a plague of diseases that conspired to corrupt your senses and suck your common sense. Terror got the better of you and in panic you went to the leader […]. He promised you order, he promised you peace and all he asked in return was your silent and obedient submission. (Moore and Lloyd 2015)

Despite the diversity within Latin America, the different local governments in the reion followed similar decision-making patterns around the pandemic, which affected different individuals in similar ways. At the end of 2019, protesters began to “march en masse to express discontent, claiming governments for economic stagnation, corruption, inequality and national problems” (CNN 2019). Some media, as explained by Colombian journalist Ricardo Angoso (2019), began calling this phenomenon the “Latin American spring,” comparing it to the ‘Arab spring.’ The nonconformity of Latin American citizens with their local governments was highlighted by social sectors that have been historically and socially delayed on the authorities’ agendas. Malamud (2020), political scientist and researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, stated that three elements have contributed to the flourishing of protests throughout the continent: 1. Social and democratic inequalities, linked to limited access to social services such as health, education, housing, and transportation 2. Failed processes of industrialization and the production of inputs on a global scale, where the continent is not registered as the world’s raw material pantry 3. Economic volatilities such as the socialism of the twenty-first century proposed by Hugo Chávez for Venezuela and the neoliberal economic reforms elaborated by Macri in Argentina

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This is how “the South American countries became more prone to popular protests and social upheaval. The succession of political-economic cycles of expansion and structural and constant crisis” (Malamud 2020, p. 4). The twilight of the Latin American spring ended with the arrival of coronavirus. Many governments closed their borders, suspended flights, and applied extensive lockdowns. Due to the confinements and the culmination of work sources, the inequality gap within countries increased again. People without economic resources and who lived off the informal economy were stigmatized as those responsible for social disobedience. Amid this scenario, Venezuelan migrants became the ‘unwanted siblings’ of the continent. In 2015, two years after the death of Hugo Chávez and the continuous devaluation of the oil barrel, the Venezuelan economy began to deteriorate and many Venezuelans migrated to countries of the Global North. As the months went by, the situation in Venezuela began to worsen, with restrictive economic policies, the devaluation of Bolivar in international markets, and the increase of crime. This situation created an environment of uncertainty that pushed thousands of Venezuelans to migrate. This migratory flow was not desired but rather caused by forced displacement, a humanitarian crisis, an escape from a political system that forced almost 3.9 million people to leave Venezuela and settle in different Latin American countries, Colombia sheltering most of them (UNHCR 2019). Venezuelan diaspora has been linked to an increase in xenophobia and criminalization toward young people. In public discourse they became directly associated with crimes, as explained by the professors of the Universidad del Rosario de Colombia, Juan Thomas Ordóñez and Hugo Eduardo Ramírez (2019a). Newspapers, newscasts, and social networks pushed this narrative by publishing the disintegration of numerous young Venezuelan migrant gangs dedicated to theft, extortion, and drug trafficking (Semana sf). Migrants tend to seek refuge in the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods of the main Colombian cities, which exposes them to situations of risk, inequality, violence, and poverty, allowing criminal gangs to easily recruit them. During the outbreak of the pandemic, Venezuelans have begun to be perceived in Latin America, similar to the Chinese population around the world, as a menace that helps to spread the virus (Taraciuk Broner and Page 2020).

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With the closure of regional borders, uncertainty in the face of a precarious economic outlook, and political discourses of discrimination, many Venezuelans decided to return to Venezuela. The same way the virus was branded as “Chinese”, some leaders began referring to the Venezuelan population as “biological weapons” for which they could not offer solutions. The mayor of Bogotá stated that “local resources should be provided and directed to improve the economic situation and the sanitary conditions of the national population, but not for the migrant population” (Torrado 2020).5 These hateful messages led many Venezuelans to be expelled from their homes, as they did not have the economic resources to pay their rent and also because of the difficult and overcrowded conditions in which they lived, making them a potential breeding ground for the illness. Although some local governments issued decrees prohibiting tenants to evict anyone from their homes, like Colombia did in Decree 579 of April 15, 2020, many Venezuelans still decided to return to Venezuela. Some countries enabled ‘humanitarian’ flights and provided means of land transportation to carry Venezuelans back to Venezuela. With the prolongation of the quarantines and the design of ‘new normalities,’ governments and the media launched a campaign about how people had to break the quarantine to earn a living. In this way, Venezuelans were described as containers and diffusers of the disease. Implicitly, nationality, economic resources, and job stability determined who were the carriers of the virus. As Ordóñez and Ramírez (2019b) state, health and hygiene have been central governance issues within migration policies, in which systems of control and classification are built according to cultural practices and living conditions. Political speeches are being xenophobically designed to create protection measures against people who spread the disease and do not comply with the confinement. An apparatus to discriminate and exclude certain racialized bodies has been created, focusing on their phenotypic, linguistic, and even geolocated characteristics, but also transgressing the economic sphere. People who cannot be in confinement  Original declaration “Ya pagamos la comida, ya pagamos el nacimiento, ya pagamos el jardín, ya pagamos la escuela, ya damos empleo. Que. pena que lo único que no podemos cubrir, es el arriendo. Y para eso pedimos un poquito de ayuda del Gobierno Nacional. Un peso aunque sea, uno. Porque todas estas cosas las pagan los impuestos de los bogotanos sin chistar. Llevamos tres años pagando eso, a 450,000 personas de Venezuela.” 5

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because they lack economic resources are branded as promoters of social disorder and the main cause of the spread of the virus in the region. Some leaders use the discourse of discrimination toward racialized people to justify how they have dealt with the pandemic. Bolsonaro assures the virus does not exist and Maduro believes deported Venezuelan citizens might infect Venezuela (Taraciuk Broner and Page 2020). Against all odds, many Venezuelans arrived at the Venezuelan border to find the dire restrictions that allowed only 400 people per day, three days a week, as returnees were considered a potential health risk (Pardo 2020). This restriction measure was implemented by Maduro as a form of containment against migrated Venezuelans, under the premise of preventing the entry of new coronavirus cases. A segregating and stigmatizing discourse began to be legitimized by the Venezuelan government about returnees, who were pigeonholed as spreaders of the disease. Social networks opposed discrimination with campaigns such as #yourcausemycause in Peru and Colombia, helping the defense of the Venezuelan population in these countries. These initiatives, supported by international organizations such as the International Organization for Migration, US Agency for International Development, and the UN Refugee Agency sought to provide ties of solidarity and non-stigmatization towards the Venezuelan population.

Hegemonic Speeches and Dissident Speeches. “The Chinese Virus” and the “Venezuelan Biological Weapons” Versus “I Am Not a Virus” Branding coronavirus as the plague du jour is not causal, as this is not the first time in history that Asian or Asian-descendant people have been linked to a virus. In the nineteenth century, during the construction of the San Francisco railroad, Chinese cheap labor workers were associated with the spread of smallpox and were confined to specific areas of the city to avoid mixing with the rest of the population, which led to the creation of “Chinatowns”. (Zhang Yim 2020). Public discourse tends to create links between viruses and ethnicity. Following Foucault’s approach concerning domination, linguist Luisa Martín Rojo warns: “The power that these discourses possess have turned them into forms of social domination that are internalized when we assume the image that we project of them as

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something ‘normal.’ The first step is usually the objectification of an individual by means of its categorization” (Martín Rojo, L. 1996).6 Foucault cautioned that normalization occurs through subjectivation and the objectification of individuals, through the use of demonyms or racial terms such as ‘Chinese’ for example, but they can also be deconstructed by alternative discourses generating tension with the hegemonic discourse. As theorized by linguists Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the meanings of words are fixed in historical-social structures, such as Trump’s speech on “the Chinese virus” and the counter-discourse #iamnotavirus (Laclau and Mouffe 2004). According to Bourdieu’s epistemological position, there is a linguistic market where the meanings of words come into competition. We accept discourses according to the position of symbolic power in which we place whoever gives those discourses (Bourdieu 2001). Speeches are interpreted in relation to structures of symbolic dominance. Language allows structuring a hierarchy between “us” and “others” – according to the Weberian conception  – through a social order between those who produce hegemonic discourses and those who abide by them. This way, an imaginary subaltern social order is agreed upon through discourse. As Bourdieu stated: “there are as many racisms as there are groups that want to elaborate their own discourse of superiority” (Bourdieu 2001, pp. 16). When Bourdieu conceptualized racism, he did not do so by linking it to a phenotypic difference but to class. In the same way, Foucault, in his work Genealogy of Racism, affirmed that there are institutionalized forms of oppression toward the subaltern linked to power. These oppressions are constructed in certain social contexts based on the differentiation with otherness. This premise outlined the idea of institutionalized racism, a racism linked to power that generates differences between different ethnic groups (2006, pp. 7–220). Martín Rojo warns that in the role of discourse there is a persuasive and legitimizing transmission of ideologies. “Chinese virus,” “kungflu,” or “biological weapons” play with racialization and place of origin to essentialize Asian, Asian-descendants, and Venezuelans. In the discourse on “the virus is Chinese and, therefore, the Chinese are the virus” and “the 6  “El poder que estos discursos los han convertido en formas de dominación social que se interioriza cuando asumimos la imagen que proyectamos de ellos como algo ‘normal’. El primer paso es construir para objetivar a un individuo categorizándolo.”

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Venezuelan are biological weapons,” the metonymy has a racist bias that legitimizes violence because, according to this statement, Asians and Venezuelans are “naturally” carriers of the virus (Martín Rojo 1996, pp. 27–37). The counter-discourse with which racialized people are deconstructing this “hegemonic” discourse on the virus illustrates that people from other parts of the world are also infected and, therefore, neither the origin nor the racial phenotype has a direct relationship with this coronavirus (Zhang Yim 2020). As Martín Rojo states: “the discourse imbricates itself in situations and social structures but also shapes and affects them, questioning or consolidating them. Some discourses remain as hegemonic and others as subordinate due to order or social distribution.”7 Behind #iamnotavirus there is a campaign confronting the hegemonic discourse that links Chinese people with the virus. Although the position of Asian people could be considered as “privileged” over other racialized groups because of China’s current economic situation, until the global economic situation changes, if authorities such Trump or Javier Ortega Smith (a representative from the far-right Spanish party VOX who claimed on his Twitter account he was fighting “the Chinese virus with his Spanish antibodies” (Ortega Smith 2020)) keep making speeches of a racist nature, these discourses will be accepted at a social level and reproduced in the form of violence and exclusion. Linguist George Lakoff (2007) considered ‘frames’ as the mental structures that determine the way people see the world. Because the disease has been used as a mechanism to make a difference with otherness, the name ‘Chinese’ and ‘Venezuelan’ have become a metonymy for the virus. A certain way of speaking and behaving and particular ‘cultural’ traits allow the rest of the world to feel superior to them and consider these people as carriers of disease to justify the violence towars them. Political elites practice institutional racism, which helps to shape a collective identity around stereotypes about groups who identify themselves as migrants or racialized. The outcome of living in a society where hegemonic and subaltern discourses coexist can strengthen one’s discourse, as shown by violence receivers in social networks (Canalda Moreno 2020, pp. 9–10).

7  “El discurso se imbrica en situaciones, estructuras sociales pero también las moldea y las afecta, cuestionándolas o consolidándolas. Hay discursos que quedan como hegemónicos y otros como subordinados por orden o distribución social.”

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Invented Traditions. The ‘Unwanted Siblings’ and ‘Yellow Peril’

What’s true about all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. (Camus 2002)

As discussed above, the way discursive and symbolic universes represent the “other” has been a transcendental issue in social sciences. Authors such as John Tchen and Dylan Yeats (2014) described how “the West” conceives and represents “Asians” as exotic, competitive, and threatening ‘others,’ that is, as perils. These authors define yellow peril as a systemic fear formulated in the course of history to build a formative “us” against “others,” where what is ‘Eastern’ is antagonistic to ‘Western.’ As these authors point out, yellow peril is usually linked to desease: Regularly, some Asiatic flu, or an Asian beetle or supposedly Asian originated fish nibbling up America’s natural resources ratchets up U.S. anxieties. The SARS scare made coughing DWA (dangerous while Asian). Indeed, Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011) exploits these associations with Asia as the origins of disease, when Gwyneth Paltrow carries the deadly virus from a Hong Kong restaurant to the Midwest, infecting and killing thousands of heartland Americans. (Tchen and Yeats 2014, p. 15)

The link established between coronavirus and the ‘Chinese’ is that of a phenotypic and geolocated metonymy that rekindles the historical fear of yellow peril. Authors such as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1992) consider that traditions are ‘invented,’ as they are built around relatively recent events and consolidate themselves using symbolism and elements of the past. The appearance of diseases such as SARCS, H1N1, and recently coronavirus, has been related to the Asian continent and it has helped to create an ‘invented tradition.’ The function of this ‘tradition’ is to artificially generate a recent past to prove the relationship that exists between what is considered ‘Asian’, and the creation of pandemics through fear spread by the media, as well as through those speeches that are part of a political strategy, such as Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’ (Lindaman and Viala-­ Gaudefroy 2020).

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Therefore, the ‘tradition’ around the ‘Asian’ and pandemics has created the perfect scenario where fear and terror are the main promoters of systemic racism and what Charles Mills (1999) called the racial contract, ways in which white people try to manipulate non-white people for their own benefit. In the Latin American context, the equivalent of yellow peril is the so-called ‘Unwanted siblings,’ a way of branding Venezuelan migrants in countries such as Colombia and Peru. Those ‘Unwanted siblings’ have become the excuse for some governments to promote xenophobia, and also to hide their negligence in dealing with the pandemic; as their fear has made Venezuelan migrants become into a racialized and virus diffuser ‘otherness.’ China and Venezuela have shared a bilateral strategic association for forty-six years based on socialism and the strategic blockade of the United States, and since the pandemic started, China has cooperated with Venezuela sending medicine. Although at first a link between coronavirus, Chinese communities abroad, and Venezuelan migration seems disjointed, the common element is the instrumentalization of the disease. Certain symbolic and discursive elements have articulated the creation of discrimination against racialized and geolocated bodies, turning them into the villains who seek to end the health and democracies of Western countries.

 Intercultural Solidarity and Acts of Citizenship in Virtual Social Network According to Joe Feagin, white people have historically had easier access to social networks, resources, and information than racialized people (Feagin 2006, pp. 1–53) But as seen during the worldwide confinement, social networks have not only been used as to disseminate racial discrimination but have also become spaces to fight against it. Social networks are contributing to the breakdown of racial stereotypes through a dialectical opposition with resistance toward the subordination of racialization. The message behind the #iamnotavirus campaign breaks with the new stereotype that has arrived under the arm of the ‘new normal’. In regions such as Latin America, migrants and racialized people are perceived as sources of contagion because of their living conditions, which perversedly make them much more vulnerable to the virus. Migration needs to be approached once again as a problem to be eliminated rather than a situation to be regularized (Cervilla 2020).

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To understand how racialized people exercise politics in social networks, we must understand how they work. Anthropologist Javier Ávila believes that links in virtual social networks are established through a socio-emotional union of recognition between people who are considered part of the “otherness.” This identification pushes these groups to take action. As psychologist Robert Brown theorizes, racialized people carry out various strategies to confront stereotypes like counter-discourses, cyberactivism, and cyberpolitcs as forms of dissemination and intercultural solidarity (Brown 1998, pp. 1–336). Sociologists Zakaria Sajir and Myriam Aouragh (2019) believe that social network posts acquire an emotional component that arises socio-political mobilization and solidarity. Here, solidarity is related to civil movements, a form of resistance that appears from a sense of disempowerment. Solidarity actions can lead to dissuasive policies to avoid rejection or to change legislation focusing on the needs of certain social groups. This was the case, for instance, of worldwide demonstrations after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020, where people around the world showed solidarity toward Black people. Kaarina Nikunen, professor of communication sciences at the University of Tampere, recognizes that groups of people in unfavorable social situations who have access to technological dissemination mechanisms can organize themselves according to their social action values. Intercultural or intergroup solidarity happens through the empathy toward other groups who suffer similar types of violence and social marginalization, so solidarity in social networks “is collective or common rather than connective” because “what unites migrant or racialized people is not only an identity or similarity, but a similar sense of justice” like a shared socio-­ affective experience related to transnational identity, ethnicity, or the lack of civil rights (Nikunen, K. 2018, pp. 10–31). In a study on the behavior of users in social networks, sociologists and professors of communication sciences Enrique Herrera, Juan Bernabé, Carlos Porcel, and María de los Ángeles Martínez affirmed that hashtags (#) are mechanisms used to gain popularity and disseminate political material concerning communities with ad hoc interests and aspects of identity. Cyberactivists translate these hashtags  – as in the case of Instagram’s #nosoyunvirus (#iamnotavirus) or #martesnegro2020

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(#blackouttuesday2020)8 – to create a sense of community. Thanks to the wide reach of these platforms, solidarity campaigns can be organized beyond the virtual world (Herrera Viedma et al. 2015). Berber-descendant cyberactivist Safia Eladdam organized through her Instagram account the campaign #compraantiraracista (anti-racist shopping) during the pandemic with volunteers who shopped for migrant people without economic resources. These are examples through which people who suffer institutional violence can resignify and decolonize these social networks and become organizers and agents of their own change. In theorizing acts of citizenship, political scientist and sociologist Engin Isin warned that there are many ways of being a citizen. It not only implies the legality granted by the authorities but it is also part of “social, cultural and symbolic political practices” (Isin and Nielsen 2008). These movements that are carried out through daily practices, such as the use of social networks, are mechanisms that can determine the condition of citizenship of a subject who might or might not legally be considered as such. Acts of citizenship are defined accordingly “as collective or individual actions that break socio-historical patterns.” Migrants who might be considered de facto citizens but not legal citizens represent one of the most relevant groups who fight for social recognition and people’s or worker’s rights globally. “Many organize themselves in self-representative social action networks to fight and show solidarity toward local or global issues through campaigns or demonstrations like #regularizaciónya or #yourcauseismycause” (Isin and Nielsen 2008). The so-called migrant descendants do enjoy institutional rights as legal citizens, but they suffer systemic racism. This is why they have created intercultural resistance spaces showing solidarity towards different groups of racialized, migrant, and transnational people. Resistance mechanisms like counter-discourses, politics of care, and solidarity have been relocated in a virtual environment during the pandemic (Isin and Nielsen 2008).

8  A campaign created on June 3, 2020 as a way to vindicate the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and several other Black people. Instagram users who wanted to show their solidarity against racism and colorism had to post on their accounts, under the hashtag #blackouttuesday, a Black backgrounded picture to illustrate the mourning and recreate the ethnic phenotype of the deceased.

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Conclusions Some scars never heal. (Himura Kenshin 1999)

This chapter originated from a commitment to better understand empathy that emerges around the wounds that systemic racism makes on people. Like Italian artist Piero Manzoni, who sold his canned excrements for USD 300,000 showing that “shit turns to gold,” by analyzing those wounds we too have tried to turn the pain into something productive. That is why we believed, in relation to the striking title of this work, that ‘the coronavirus shit’ can also be addressed, as Jordi Serrano-Muñoz (2020) told us “with a constructive perspective, that seeks to go beyond how bad we do it to how good it can be done.” The contingency allowed us to make social networks our fields of participant observation, to recognize vulnerability, to apprehend from other people’s experiences, and to understand intersectional care. We believe that researchers should participate actively in social networks, to hear what these “other” voices have to say about institutional violence and racism. As stated by anthropologist and nurse Siles González (2009, pp. 102–106): “caring […] is probably the essential factor that most assisted man in his cultural evolution, although it is one of the elements of less social consideration.” Part of the care work that is happening consists of the deconstruction of certain hegemonic discourses through the dissemination of dissident narratives, managed by people who identify themselves as part of racialized and transnational collectives and who stand in solidarity and demand intercultural forms of political action. Listening to these communities and analyzing their statements, one realizes the importance of transmitting a public message that leads us to divest ourselves of our privileges and realize how some people face day after day the virulence of coronavirus and also the violence of systemic racism (Siles Gonzáles and Solano Ruiz 2009). Despite strains of great technophobia toward virtual social networks, during this pandemic, when time in the ‘real’ world seemed to stop, these platforms have also been tools to allow social connection with others globally and locally. Due to the imposition of confinement measures we have learned of the immense relevance of taking care of ourselves and others, despite physical distance. Social networks give the chance to create messages with autonomy, and by utilizing them, racialized people have achieved a space that allows for caring of individual and community desires and needs. As María Isabel Álvarez states, “social networks are essential

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tools for human development through communication, especially in sectors of the so-called global south where the space for people whose message is not hegemonic can elaborate their own discourse” (González Álvarez 2013, p. 699). If caring for someone requires skills beyond the knowledge of how to be concerned for others, we should find enough time and space to review what is happening around us, how empathy and involvement with the community around us can lead us to build the ‘new normal’. If caring is ‘cultural’ and intersectional, then the social consensus should be, without a doubt, the alternative to racism, the relay that could create a truly ‘new normal’ that is finally fair for everyone.

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Migrantes Y Refugiadas Ante La Emergencia Sanitaria. Regularización Ya, April 13. Available at: https://www.idhc.org/es/actualidad/regularizacionya-­ demanda-­urgente-­por-­la-­regularizacion-­las-­personas-­migrantes-­y-­refugiadas-­ ante-­la-­emergencia-­sanitaria.php Isin, Engin, and Greg Nielsen. 2008. Theorizing Acts of Citizenship. In Acts of Citizenship, 1st ed., 1–44. New York: Zed Books. John Kuo Wei Tchen, and Dylan Yeats, eds. 2014. Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear. Editorial Verso Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe Chantal. 2004. Hegemonía Y Estrategia Socialista. Hacia Una Radicalzación De La Democracia. 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Fondo de cultura económica. Lakoff, George. 2007. No Pienses En Un Elefante. Lenguaje Y Debate Político. 1st ed. Madrid: Complutense. Lindaman, Dana, and Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy. 2020. Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese Virus’: The Politics of Naming. The Conversation, October 31. Available at: h t t p s : / / t h e c o n v e r s a t i o n . c o m / d o n a l d -­t r u m p s -­c h i n e s e -­ virus-­the-­politics-­of-­naming-­136796 Malamud, Andrés. 2020. ¿Por qué estalla Latinoamérica? Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica 20: 2–8. Available at: https://repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/10451/43131/1/ICs_AMalamud_Por.pdf. Martín Rojo, Luisa. 1996. El Orden Social De Los Discursos. Discurso Otoño de 1996 y Primavera de 1997 (1): 1–37. Available at: http://ru.iis.sociales.unam. mx:8080/jspui/bitstream/IIS/5548/2/01_rojo.pdf Mills, Charles. 1999. The Racial Contract. 1st ed, 1–192. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mínguez Arias, Jorge. 2000. Antropología De Los Cuidados. Cultura De Los Cuidado Año IV 07–08 (1): 102–106. Available at: http://rua.ua.es/dspace/ handle/10045/5090 Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd. 2015. V for Vendetta. 6th ed., 101. Barcelona: ECC Ediciones. Nikunen, Karina. 2018. From Irony to Solidarity: Affective Practice and Social Media Activism. Studies of Transition States and Societies 10 (2): 10–21. Ordóñez, Juan Thomas, and Hugo Eduardo Ramírez Arcos. 2019a. (Des)orden nacional: la construcción de la migración venezolana como una amenaza de salud y seguridad pública en Colombia. Revista Ciencias de la Salud 17: 48–68. Available at: https://doi.org/10.12804/revistas.urosario.edu.co/ revsalud/a.8119 ———. 2019b. At the Crossroads of Uncertainty: Venezuelan Migration to Colombia. Journal of Latin American Geography 18 (2): 158–164. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2019.0020 Ortega Smith, Javier. 2020. Twitter, March 13. https://twitter.com/Ortega_ Smith?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

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Pardo, Daniel. 2020. Crucé todo un país a pie para nada: los venezolanos que intentan regresar a su país y cuyo gobierno ahora les restringe la entrada. BBC News Mundo, June 10. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ noticias-­america-­latina-­52988879 Rage Against the Machine. 1991. Killing in the Name of. CD.  Los Angeles: Epic Records. Said, Edward. 2002. Orientalismo. 3rd ed. Barcelona: De bolsillo. Sajir, Zakaria, and Aouragh Myriam. 2019. Solidarity, Social Media, and the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Engagement Beyond Affect. International Journal of Communication 13 (1): 550–577. Semana. 2020. ¿El delito también migra? ¿Cuál es la realidad de la delincuencia generada por los migrantes? August 19. Available at: https:// w w w. s e m a n a . c o m / n a c i o n / a r t i c u l o / c u a l -­e s -­l a -­r e a l i d a d -­d e -­l a ­delincuencia-­generada-­por-­los-­migrantes/673453 Serrano-Muñoz, Jordi. 2020. Comunicación Personal, May 17. Siles González, José, and María del Carmen Solano Ruiz. 2009. Antropología Educativa De Los Cuidados: Una Etnografía Del Aula Y Las Prácticas Clínicas. 1st ed. España-Alicante: Marfil. Taraciuk Broner, Tamara, and Kathleen Page. 2020. Varados En La Frontera Venezolana Con La Amenaza De Covid-19. Human Rights Watch, June 15. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/es/news/2020/07/15/ varados-­en-­la-­frontera-­venezolana-­con-­la-­amenaza-­de-­covid-­19 Tiempo, Casa Editorial. 2020. Pese a restricciones de Maduro, venezolanos buscan regresar a su país. El Tiempo, June 8. Available at: https://www. eltiempo.com/politica/gobierno/maduro-­a umento-­l as-­r estricciones­en-­la-­frontera-­con-­colombia-­504488 Torrado, Santiago. 2020. La alcaldesa de Bogotá agita el debate sobre la xenofobia contra los venezolanos en plena pandemia. EL PAÍS, April 3. https://elpais. com/internacional/2020-­0 4-­0 3/la-­a lcaldesa-­d e-­b ogota-­a gita-­e l-­d ebate-­ sobre-­la-­xenofobia-­contra-­los-­venezolanos-­en-­plena-­pandemia.html Torralba Roselló, Francesc. 2010. Hacia Una Antropología De La Vulnerabilidad. Revista Forma 02: 25–32. ———. 2016. Primero las personas: Cuidar como nos gustaría ser cuidados – Conferencia Dr Torralba en la Fundación la Caixa. YouTube video, June 30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lqvlHG67Uk Trump, Donald [Donald J.  Trump] (@DonaldTrump). 2020. Trump Calls COVID-19 the ‘Chinese Virus’ Despite WHO Warning the Term Fuels Stigma. Twitter, March 16. https://twitter.com/i/events/1239764412128358400 UNHCR. 2019. R4V América Latina y el Caribe, refugiados y migrantes venezolanos en la región – Diciembre 2019 [ES]. UNHCR Operational Data Portal (ODP). https://data2.unhcr.org/es/documents/details/72763

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CHAPTER 12

Latin America as a Catalyst to Restore Japanese Culture: Tsurumi Shunsuke’s Post-­Mexico Philosophy Matías Chiappe Ippolito

Tsurumi Shunsuke’s Post-US Experience and Early Contacts with Latin America Philosopher, historian, and political activist Tsurumi Shunsuke (1922–2015) was born in the Azabu district of Tokyo, though he traveled away from Japan very early in his life. In 1937, abiding by his father’s will and followed soon after by his sister, Tsurumi moved first to Australia and then to the United States (US), where he finished his high school studies and proceeded to Harvard University. In 1942, however, while still finishing his program, he was arrested amid the rising anti-Japanese sentiment of the early World War II years. Later in his life, Tsurumi would describe his detention in the US as an act of injustice, yet one in which he was

M. Chiappe Ippolito (*) Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8_12

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treated fairly and with respect. In a 2004 interview, he even contrasted it with his return to Japan after being deported: “I felt I was walking into a much worse prison when I returned to wartime Japan to find the nation completely in the grip of emperor-worshipping totalitarianism” (Tsurumi 2004). Such an ambivalent position toward the US, that of seeing the country simultaneously as the enemy that imprisoned him and one with more respectful political means than the Empire of Japan, would condition Tsurumi’s postwar philosophy and would alter his perspective on other regions of the world, including Latin America. Tsurumi would find it difficult to readjust to life in Japan because of not only the political and social situation of the ongoing war but also the impossibility to settle in and participate in intellectual debates. He only did so after Japan’s defeat, after founding the journal Shisō no kagaku (Science of Thought, 1946–1996) with several other intellectuals that were neither conservative nationalists nor extreme left-wing representatives. This group comprised political theorist Maruyama Masao (1914–1996), sociologist Tsurumi Kazuko (1918–2006), Christian activist Takeda Kiyoko (1917–2018), Marxist economist Tsuru Shigeto (1912–2006), and medical specialist Taketani Mitsuo (1911–2000). Through the journal, these intellectuals sought to import currents of thought from Europe and the US to introduce democratic theories into Japanese society by means other than the policies of the Occupation Forces. The group advocated for a “philosophy of the common people” (hitobito no tetsugaku) as opposed to an academic understanding of philosophy, hence laying less emphasis on logical and theoretical thinking than on everyday praxis. They claimed that this could help build up new forms of empathy and solidarity that could in tandem restore the Japanese people back together into a common experience and history after the fragmentation of the defeat in the war. As several critics have shown, this “philosophy of the common people” was the result of the travels abroad and foreign influences of the group members, though the defense of national unity was a domestic interpretation (Avenell 2008, 2015; Sugawara 2008). This would drive them further away from US-aligned political thinking, as they assumed a form of cultural nationalism or even national essentialism that went against the multicultural and anti-nationalist perspective that was being promoted on behalf of the victors of the war. The group and Tsurumi would take an anti-US position following the Anpo Tōsō protests (Anti-Japan-US Security Treaty Protests) of 1960, as well as the student’s movements of the next decade. Though they did not closely relate to radical student

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factions such as the Zengakuren nor to groups openly espousing communist and socialist programs, they did turn to the so-called New Left in search of directing the flow of domestic civil movements as far as possible away from the US’s sphere of influence. Led by Tsurumi, many scholars of the original group established think tanks of political dissidence. Such was the case of, for instance, the 1960 peace group Koe naki koe no kai (Association of the Voices Without a Voice) and the 1965 antiwar movement Beheiren (Betonamu ni heiwa wo! Shimin rengō, Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam). In parallel, it was also between the late 1950s and 1960s that the Shiso ̄ no kagaku group and Tsurumi started showing interest in Latin America. First, this was due to the enduring impetus of the Cuban Revolution and its eventual victory in 1959, something that exerted a direct impact on radical left-wing student protesters (who saw in it a knockout blow to US imperialism) but also on New Left intellectuals (who instead saw in it as an alternative form of world order that could transcend the US-USSR Cold War polarization). Second, Japanese intellectuals found it easier to get in contact with colleagues from all over the world thanks to the Afro-Asian Writer’s Conference, first held in Tashkent in 1958. With the objectives of promoting and strengthening literary activities and political debate, the conference helped develop institutional cooperation between regions that had not been aligned to either the US or the USSR, hence setting what would later be known as the Third World or Global South Movement. Japanese writers such as Ishikawa Tatsuzō (1905–1985) and Hotta Yoshie (1918–1998) rapidly got involved with other participants of the Afro-­ Asian Writer’s Conference, establishing a domestic version of the latter that was held in Tokyo in 1961, convoking writers from twenty different countries (Mizutamari 2014). In 1967, the original conference was held in Beirut, inviting first-time writers from Latin American nations. In 1981, and following Hotta’s proposal, an Asia, Africa, and Latin America Cultural Conference was held at Kawasaki City, calling upon many Latin American and local writers, including the New Left and the Shisō no kagaku group. This was, perhaps, an instance of profound confluence of many Japanese and Latin American intellectuals. Though Tsurumi was not an organizer of the domestic version of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Conference and involved himself with them only in a tangential manner, he did capitalize on the momentum of the Third World or Global South Movement through his academic activity. On the one hand, he showed proximity with the Cuban Revolution through his

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translation of Charles Wright Mills’ 1960 book of reportages after his travel to Habana, Listen Yankee: Revolution in Cuba (translated into Japanese as Kyūba no koe, Voices of Cuba, 1961). Through his translation, Tsurumi not only helped present the events of the revolution to the general reading public but also introduced Mills to Japanese intellectuals, a writer also conditioned by an ambivalence of feeling that included both an acknowledgment of US education and a harsh critique of its capitalist economy and politics. On the other hand, Tsurumi would also help develop the field of Latin American studies in Japan by organizing conferences about the significance that South America had had for the Meiji government and about the utilization of migrant communities by the Empire of Japan during the 1900s colonization enterprises. Although the methodology of using Latin America to reprove the empire had been used before (e.g., by the aforementioned Tatsuzō, who after his trip to Brazil in 1930 wrote the travel account Saikin nanbei o ̄raiki [1931] and the novel Sōbō [1935], both critical of the empire), it was Tsurumi who would propose a deep-­rooted fraternal affiliation between Japan and Latin America, which, at the same time, could bend US imperialism and reinforce domestic culture. One specific connection that Tsurumi established with Latin America distinguished him from other members of the Shiso ̄ no kagaku group and from the Japanese intellectuals of the period: his 1972 trip to the Mexican university El Colegio de México, where he served as a visiting professor. In 1964, following the growing interest and development of regional studies so typical of the 1960s Cold War era, this Mexican institution founded the Section of Oriental Studies, renamed as Center of Oriental Studies in 1968 and, after the impact of Edward Said’s critique of the concept of “Orient,” as Center of North African and Asian Studies in 1974. The center was renamed yet again in 1980 as Center of African and Asian Studies, the name it has today. Tsurumi managed to travel to the center sponsored both by the Mexican government and by one of the Official Development Assistance (ODA) programs of the government of Japan. These schemes were prevalent after Japan’s rapid economic growth in view of strengthening the image of the country as an important international player. That is, it used culture for political purposes, something that would be widely employed by the Japanese government throughout the next decades in its recurrent soft-power strategies (Matsuda 2007, 64). As a visiting professor at El Colegio de México from September 1972 to June 1973, Tsurumi taught Japanese postwar intellectual history and

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literature to Mexican students, shedding light on the countercultural currents of thought that he had helped create and which greatly contrasted with canonical views of Japanese culture that were dominant in Latin American circles as inherited by US scholars. During that year, he also directed the master’s thesis of one of his students, art philosopher Agustín Jacinto Zavala (b. 1941), a mentorship that would turn into an enduring bond between student and professor during the following decades. Before departing from El Colegio de México, Tsurumi also made arrangements for the publication of one of his works in Spanish. In 1980, a compilation of fragments of his 1968 books series Sengo nihon shisō (Ideology of Postwar Japan) was published by El Colegio de México’s editorial house under the title Literatura e ideología en el Japón moderno (Literature and Ideology in Modern Japan). This translation included not only fragments of the original book series but also parts of the classes he had imparted at the institution. Finally, Tsurumi helped several Mexican scholars establish institutional links with Japanese universities, editorial houses, and cooperation agencies, reciprocally helping Japanese scholars to further take advantage and develop the programs with which he had traveled to Mexico. While analyzing the 1970s oeuvre of his mentor, former El Colegio de México student Zavala has shown that Tsurumi was performing a simultaneous application and relativization of the philosophical principles that he had learned in the US in an attempt to relocate Western philosophy in the Japanese context. As stated by the Mexican author, the work of Tsurumi during the period was characterized by the following features: pragmatism and fallibilism as its fundamental philosophical principles; a universalistic view of philosophical thinking; a valorization of peripheries and marginal personalities; a conceptualization of identity as a plural construction; an appraising of mass culture; and an everlasting commitment to pacifism (Zavala 1995). The “simultaneous application and relativization” of the education that Tsurumi received in the US, identified by Zavala, was surely accelerated by his political activism and his tangential participation in the Third World or Global South Movement. Now, this chapter will provide evidence that his travel to Mexico was equally decisive for Tsurumi. This trip was consequential in his search for new models in regions of the world different from the US-USSR Cold War polarization, while it also allowed him to explore ways to restore the Japanese national unity, a quest he had long started when being a founding member of the Shiso ̄ no kagaku group. It must be highlighted that Tsurumi’s trip to Mexico is framed within the 1970s Japanese academic trend toward historical revisionism. This line

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of thought was born, according to sociologist Oguma Eiji, after Japan’s support to the US in the 1955–1970 Vietnam War. This was a moment in which many Japanese had to acknowledge that the country was playing the role of aggressor in the conflict. Furthermore, the Vietnam experience, expands Oguma, made them come up against their past as aggressors in World War II, an issue that had remained in silence during the previous decades (Oguma 2015, 18). This means that the trip to Mexico was presented to Tsurumi as a perfect opportunity to establish a new standpoint from where to reinterpret Japanese history. To understand the weaving together of said 1970s “aggressor consciousness” (Oguma) and Tsurumi’s 1972–1973 visit to Mexico, this chapter analyzes three particularities surrounding his trip. First, it examines the influence that Tsurumi’s uncle, playwright Sano Seki (1905–1966), a former left-wing activist who sought asylum in the USSR in the 1930s and Mexico in 1939, had on him and his interest in Latin America. Second, the chapter covers the different aspects of Latin American culture that Tsurumi analyzed and condensed in his travel book Guadaru ̄pe no Seibo (The Virgin Guadalupe, 1976). Third, it discusses the legacy that Tsurumi left on other Japanese writer-travelers to Latin America (personalities such as Mita Munesuke, Ō e Kenzaburō, Yamaguchi Masao, and Katō Shuichi), all of whom made explicit or implicit references to the works and public statements of the former.

Tsurumi’s Post-Mexico Philosophy: Empathy and Restoration Tsurumi’s experience in Mexico was decisive for him to accelerate the detachment from his former US education and to establish transnational connections with other regions of the world that could transcend the specific context of the 1960s. A key figure in his family, however, would turn pivotal for his understanding of Latin America in particular: that of his uncle, actor, playwright, and choreographer Sano Seki. Born in Japanese-­ controlled Tianjin in China as the grandson of the Taishō and Shōwa politician Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), Sano was a globetrotter who came to be known in Latin America as the “Father of Mexican Theater.” Drawing on the many influences that he gained through his travels, which included theater masters such as Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), Stella Adler (1901–1992), and Lee Strasberg (1901–1982), Sano designed not only new forms of theatrical representation but also new ways of training actors. This in itself transformed him into a symbol of transnationalism.

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Sano would, however, end up being known for his political activism as well. He became involved in left-wing politics in his youth in mainland Japan, when he supported the Kyodo publishing house strike of 1930, presented US and European plays from left-wing artists, and translated the famous communist anthem The Internationale for the first time into Japanese. This background forced him into exile when the Empire of Japan’s anti-communist policies turned harsher at the beginning of the 1930s. He settled in Moscow, but as Stalin’s purges turned harsher there as well, he had to leave the USSR too. He then traveled through Europe, where he took part in anti-Nazi movements until finally going to the US, where he was committed to an immigrant center at Ellis Island. After applying to the asylum program of Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas in 1939, he was able to travel to Mexico, where he resided until the end of his life in 1966. As Sano’s travels show, the influences that he picked up throughout his life are bound together to his getaway from political persecution, hence transforming him not only into a symbol of transnationalism but also into one that shows the situation of left-wing activism during the interwar years. Sano continued his anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese Empire activism after arriving in Mexico in 1939, though he engaged more deeply with Mexican social issues in the afterwar period. From 1945, his aesthetics changed from experimental theater to psychological dramas. His theatrical quests gradually shifted to introducing lesser known Japanese traditions of kabuki and Noh into the Mexican context. These transformations have been interpreted by critics as attempts to simultaneously renew Mexican theater, emancipate the local public, and transform his own identity (Tanaka 1994, 1998; Furukawa 2009). Michiko Tanaka suggests that he intended for an equal transformation on the Japanese side, attempting to utilize Mexican history, culture, and theater to influence Japanese artists—a quest, however, that he was unable to fulfill (1994, 61). Whichever the case, it is beyond doubt that Sano Seki stands as a milestone in the relationship between Japan and Latin America, one that blends art, identity, politics, and travel. Associating Sano to his own past of unjust imprisonment and deportation from the US, Tsurumi also called upon his uncle and to the figure of political exiles as representatives of the relationship between Japan and Latin America. In fact, Tsurumi opened Guadalupe no seibō, the book he published in 1976 narrating his 1972–1973 experience in Mexico, with a laudatory chapter on the Mexican history of giving asylum to political

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exiles and refugees. He mentions not only the case of Sano and of the persecution the latter suffered on behalf of Japan, the USSR, and the US alike but also the cases of important political leaders such as Leon Trotsky and Fidel Castro. He is equally eulogistic about El Colegio de México’s history, in itself linked to the Mexican tradition of political asylum. Founded in 1939 by Spanish scholars fleeing from Spain after the rise in power of military dictator Francisco Franco (1892–1975) and by a group of Mexican scholars who were heirs of the 1910 Revolution and statesmen of aforementioned President Cárdenas, El Colegio turned into a political haven for intellectuals all over the world, especially for those coming from the USSR in the 1960s and from the rest of Latin America, following the concatenation of military coup d’états during the 1970s. This topic fascinated Tsurumi throughout the decades, as shown by his 1979 essay titled “Bōmei nitsuite” (About Exiles), later compiled in his 2012 book Shiso ̄ wo tsumugu hitotachi (People Who Weave Ideology).1 In Guadalupe no seibō, Tsurumi went much further than making a eulogy of exiles and political asylum, though. He used such figures to rethink Japanese history and mythology, specifically finding fault in the historiographic currents that claimed that the original inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago had no connections with communities in continental Asia. In this direction, he stated in his 1976 travel account: The Fudoki, Kojiki, and Nihon Shoki suggest that the experience of exile is deep-rooted in Japan’s nation-building. Whether in legendary times or in historical times, the large-scale exile of people from Baekje [one of the three kingdoms of Korea together with Goguryeo and Silla] had a great impact on the formation of the Japanese state and shows that in ancient times it was wise to receive exiles and make them part of the social conformation. (Tsurumi 1976, 25)2 1  In the essay, Tsurumi summarized his stance toward political exiles as follows: “I do not want to affirm that one cannot face the authority of the state without going into exile. I am just taking them into consideration, without making martyrs out of them, in order to preserve their views about criticizing the nation” (Tsurumi 2012, 89). 「亡命しなければ国家 権力に抵抗できないと言うつもりはない。ただ、殉教のみを理想化せず、亡命者を考 慮の裡に置いて国家批判を考えていくという見方を保ちたい」89頁. All translations from the Japanese are mine. 2  「風土記、古事記、日本書紀は、このように亡命体験が日本の国づくりに深くかか わっていることを暗示しているという。伝説の時代から史実の時代にくだっても、大 規模な百済人の亡命は日本の国家の形成に大きな影響をあたえており、亡命者をうけ いれて社会形成に参画してもらうという知恵が古代にあったことがわかる。」25頁

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The extent of the Baekje influence on Japan has been a topic of debate among historians throughout Japanese historiography. In facing the military attacks of Goguryeo and Silla, the former regions united and fought together, though the level of coercion on the Japanese side is unclear. Furthermore, as Baekje was a colony of the Empire of Japan during the 1910–1945 period, historical data have been manipulated by politics. By putting his emphasis on the people of Baekje and specifically on the groups that ended in Japan after military events of both ancient and contemporary times, however, Tsurumi is putting said contradictions of Japanese historiography under the spotlight, effectively deconstructing and rewriting the history of his country. He would utilize this example to suggest that in modern, post-Meiji Japan, there was an alteration of the category of exile (bo ̄mei) to the category of runaway (tōmei), something which completely erased the fraternal nuance in receiving asylum. According to Tsurumi, Mexico, on the other hand, retained the original meaning of asylum (26–27). Tsurumi mentions many other political exiles in Guadalupe no seibo ̄, seeing in each one a source of inspiration and learning. Despite admitting having had conflicts with religious education, something that he traces back to his own youth, he praises the figures of Sergio Méndez Arceo (1907–1992), a Mexican Roman Catholic bishop and human rights activist who collaborated on the reception of political exiles after the Spanish Civil War, and of Ivan Dominic Illich (1926–2002), an Austrian Roman Catholic priest and philosopher who faced the Vatican for his left-wing inclinations, something that brought him and his followers to Mexico (98, 119). Another personality that he analyzes in depth in Guadalupe no seibō is Francisco Julião (1915–1999), the leader of the Peasant Leagues of Brazil who sought an agrarian reform only to end up also in exile in Mexico after being persecuted by the military government, henceforth joining forces with the followers of Emiliano Zapata that had survived since the revolution. Tsurumi highlighted the virtues of each of these activist and political figures, quoting them as role models for the Japanese but also as examples of the malfunctioning of the US democracy, as each of them had to seek refuge in Mexico after being denied protection by the US government. To further describe the bond implied in providing political asylum, Tsurumi utilizes the term kyo ̄kan (empathy, shared emotion), one he had already defined academically during his stay in the US and which he developed during the immediate postwar period in Japan. By it, he basically

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understood the affinity that individuals feel toward otherness and difference. In Guadaru ̄pe no seibo, he further described the Latin American scholars with whom he interacted as the epitome of such a sentiment. In fact, he uses an expression that includes the aforementioned term, kyōkan nōr yokusha (people with empathic ability), and a furigana-written Spanish version of it, simpático (literally, people with empathy, though its actual meaning varies throughout the Spanish-speaking world). The strong emphasis that Tsurumi puts on the category of kyo ̄kan makes it possible to understand his book as a history of the connections between Mexico and Japan grounded on such sentiment, one that mentions not only the scholars he met at El Colegio de México but also personalities from a past that he claims has been erased by both Western historiography and the Empire of Japan’s nationalist historians. In such an attempt, he traces the connections between the two regions back to the problematically so-called “Christian Century of Japan” (1549–1650), mentioning figures such as Hasekura Tsunenaga (1571–1622), leader of the 1613 diplomatic mission that traveled from Japan to Spain traversing by land via New Spain, and the Catholic missionary Phillip of Jesus (1572–1597), the only one of the twenty-six Nagasaki martyrs who had been born in New Spain. Specifically, Tsurumi explains the bond of kyo ̄kan that Japan and Mexico have come to share, as well as the tendency of their people to embrace tolerance (kanyō) and solidarity (rentai), through the fact that they are two countries that were able to grow out of having been defeated and conquered by Western powers. Yet, he also admits: The Japanese have not been as scarred as Mexicans when it comes to the reception of European culture. This is probably because Mexican culture has a more unique intensity than Japanese culture and was built upon a deeper spiritual injury product of the confrontation between Western and Mexican indigenous cultures. (1976, 180)3

Tsurumi praises again and again the capacity of Mexicans to have made their culture survive despite the strength in arms of the Spanish Empire during the Spanish Conquest of 1519–1521. In contrast, he further claims that the Japanese had given in much of their indigenous culture to the 3  「日本人は、ヨーロッパ文化をとりいれるについて、メキシコ人ほどの傷をうけて いない。メキシコの文化が、日本にくらべて異様なはげしさをもっているのは、西欧 の文化と土着の文化の対決にさいしてうけたその精神の傷の深さによるものだ ろう。」180頁

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incorporation of Western forms. Tsurumi finds in this trait of Mexican culture something from which the Japanese can learn, specifically in the context of the rapid economic growth of the 1970s that, according to him, was eroding even further the origins of Japanese culture and national unity. Remembering and embracing the scars and injuries of history left by Western powers in indigenous culture is, therefore, the quintessential processes that the Japanese historian and philosopher claimed to have learned from Mexico. The symbol that condensed this learning for him was Diego Rivera’s mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central (1947–1948), a representative of the revolutionary muralismo artistic movement and of the introduction of Latin America into the international cultural stage. This 5-meter-tall and 15-meter-long art piece, painted between 1946 and 1947, depicts famous persons involved in Latin American history at different moments in time, such as conqueror Hernán Cortés, nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, revolutionary and writer Francisco Madero, and even the Catrina skeleton (the famous characterization of death popularized by artist José Guadalupe Posada, who also shows up in the mural), among a hundred more personalities. All of them are visiting the Alameda Central square dressed in their best clothes to enjoy a relaxing Sunday. Rivera’s idea was to present all of history at once, in a simultaneous and mosaic form, something that Tsurumi interpreted as a remembrance of the scars that the past leaves on the present and as an acknowledgment that the history of a nation is made up even of obscure fragments that historians want to hide (228). Additionally, Tsurumi found an endless array of similarities between Mexico and Japan that he used to support his theories about kyōkan and to put into question the dichotomic West/Japan paradigm that had dominated the Japanese intellectual field for centuries. He compared the sonority of Mayan instruments with that of songs and poems by Miyazawa Kenji, the figure of Mishima Yukio with that of a torero (bullfighter) common in Mexican culture, the concept of death in the Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration with the Buddhist concept of accepting death, among many other examples. Some comparisons posit Mexico yet again as a source of learning and inspiration for Japan. One such case is Tsurumi’s fascination with the term malinchismo (82), common in Spanish only in Latin American contexts. The term describes the attraction that people from one culture develop for another culture, giving rise to a disdain for their own culture and roots. Tsurumi found in it a precise description of

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what had occurred in Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the Allied Occupation of 1945–1952, also praising the tendency of transpacific connections and translation to teach certain countries about re-­ interpreting their own cultures and pasts. The notion of kyōkan is, however, one that presupposes that two different cultures meet and learn from each other, implying a split between the Self and the Other. Some historians highlighted that, in using such a term, Tsurumi was also proposing a reaffirmation of a Japanese national essence. Indeed, many of his statements on the topic do fall back into such a philosophical stance: “Now it is time to fashion a new national essentialism [kokumin shugi] by knowing the Self and knowing the Other” (quoted in Avenell 2008, 717). Tsurumi justified his essentialist, almost nationalistic, stance by saying that it is precisely the reaffirmation of the Self and the bonding with the Other via empathy, tolerance, and solidarity that will help develop societies. He sets up his stance, therefore, on a “restoration” of the Self and of national essence, grounding it precisely on influences of difference and otherness. In such a pursuit, an unexpected-Other to the Japanese people such as Mexico could play a decisive role. In a lecture titled “The Meaning of Latin American Culture for the Japanese” (Nihonjin ni totte raten america bunka no imi) that he gave at the Third Conference of Latin American Studies in Japan in 1983, Tsurumi stated: Latin American culture can be a catalyst to restore Japanese culture. That is the time to come. The war experience, the atomic experience, the Occupation experience, the experience of the Korean people living in Japan after being called upon by us, all of those experiences, detached from us now, can be assembled back into our essence by learning from the various paths of Latin American culture. I have the feeling that this is a new dilemma that we will be facing from now on. (1983, 18)4

This text, delivered in front of a group of scholars defending the only recently formed yet booming in the 1980s field of Latin American studies, constitutes perhaps the zenith of Tsurumi’s post-Mexico philosophy, 4  「日本文化をとりもどすための触媒としてラテンアメリカ文化がある。そういう状 況がいまきている。われわれにとっては、ラテンアメリカ文化のさまざまの流儀を学 ぶことを通して、われわれにとって切りはなされかかっている戦争体験、原爆体験、 日本にひき寄せられてここに生きている在日朝鮮人の体験、占領体験、それらをもう 一度われわれの本質として組立てるという別の問題をいま突きつけられている、とい うような気がするんです。」18頁

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that of learning from otherness through empathy. It presents the case of political asylum in Latin America of the aforementioned Sano Seki but also of Amano Yoshitarō (1898–1982), a traveler expelled from the US amid the anti-Japanese fever of World War II, and Ogita Masanosuke (1898–1975), a Japanese immigrant to the Americas turned poet and travel writer. As with Sano, Tsurumi described the latter two as crucial in developing cultural ties between Japan and Latin America and in showing the Japanese alternative lifestyle models to the postwar, US-driven, capitalist lifestyle. The historian and philosopher also took the opportunity of the lecture to praise Ōe Kenzaburō’s literature (who had traveled as visiting professor to El Colegio de México in 1976), invoking Japanese writers of the new generations to seek out connections with as many cultures of the world as possible. Finally, Tsurumi built upon the idea of “catalyst” (using also the metaphor of “spectacles”), by which he meant that Latin America could be used to revise, reconsider, and eventually rewrite Japanese history. The 1983 lecture stood like a banner for other Japanese scholars and writers who had traveled to El Colegio de México as visiting professors after Tsurumi did, also under the sponsorship of Mexican and Japanese governments as well as of the UNESCO. The group included not only the aforementioned writer Ō e Kenzaburō, who served at the Mexican university as a visiting professor from 1976 to 1977, but also sociologist Mita Munesuke (whose stay at El Colegio spanned between 1974 and 1975), anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao (who stayed there between 1977 and 1978), and literary critic Katō Shūichi (who stayed there in1986). After their respective visits and for their writings about Mexico, these intellectuals drew heavily on the ideas that Tsurumi had developed and on many of the examples he had used in Guadaru ̄pe no seibo, particularly recurrent being that of Rivera’s mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central. Interestingly, Ō e, Mita, Yamaguchi, and Katō were all scholars somehow linked to Tokyo University who had shared participation in political demonstrations and peace movements during the 1960s and 1970s, the epicenter of which had been precisely that university and its scholarly circles. It seems that the 1980s Japanese interest in Latin America is the result of a lengthy pursuit for alternative political and societal models that were born not only in the academic sphere but also in the practical and political one.

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Conclusions: Lessons from Another-Other This chapter discussed, first, Tsurumi Shunsuke’s life during the last years of World War II, when he was living in the US as well as the shift in his philosophy after he returned to Japan and formed the Shiso ̄ no kagaku group and developed the notion of “philosophy of the common people.” Then, it covered the initial interests that Tsurumi showed toward Latin America, resulting from his affiliation to the group and his links with the New Left, but also tangentially due to the impact of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Conference and the envisioning of a Third World or Global South comprehensively connected. The chapter further demonstrated that, following his trip to Mexico from 1972 to 1973, where he served as a visiting professor at El Colegio de México, the Japanese historian and philosopher delved into the connections between Japan and Latin America. From that moment onward, he assembled a complex network of significations between the two regions that expanded the category of kyōkan (empathy) he had conceived during the previous decades. The two texts that stand as representative examples of such post-Mexico philosophy of the intellectual are his 1976 travel book Guadarūpe no seibo (The Virgin Guadalupe) and his 1983 lecture “The Meaning of Latin American Culture for the Japanese” (Nihonjin ni totte raten america bunka no imi). Tsurumi understood that turning his gaze toward Latin America could help the Japanese restore their culture and history, something that in postwar Japan had been shoveled down by the rapid economic growth and by cultural and educational political changes that had erased the military past of the country during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on the aforementioned category of kyōkan, he found examples of a longstanding history of fraternity between Japan and Mexico (and in corollary Latin America). Whether in the distant past, in the form of the Hasekura Mission or the figure of Phillip of Jesus, or in present times, in the form of common cultural traits that shared a continuance despite the advent of Western conquest and modernity, Tsurumi tried to put on stage an alternative geopolitical relation, one in consonance with that proposed by the intellectuals of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Conference, though less grounded on political affiliation as on human sentiment. Furthermore, the sentimental bond with the Other that was Latin America (a different form of Other from “The West” and the US) would, according to the historian and philosopher, translate into a deeper understanding of the Self. Seen under this light, Tsurumi was proposing a

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new understanding of the dichotomy between Self and Other, envisioning instead the need of a third party that could alter how the former related but also understood themselves. He was thinking about Latin America as Another-Other. Different from mere otherness, a concept defined mainly by difference and enmity, anotherness is defined by similarity and cooperation. Following Tsurumi, it is a notion that presupposes empathy, asylum, mutual learning, and self-reflection. Like Tsurumi before them, other Japanese scholars who traveled to Mexico also thought of Latin America as a third space, as a novel standpoint from which to reinterpret Japan’s past and its position in the global arena. This chapter briefly mentioned Mita Munesuke, Ō e Kenzaburō, Yamaguchi Masao, and Katō Shūichi, all scholars who drew heavily on Tsurumi and whose works can be analyzed in the same terms as those used in the present analysis. There are, however, many other Japanese postwar writer-travelers who have also turned their gazes to Latin America (and to other regions of the so-called Third World or Global South) precisely in search of that Another-Other or anotherness. It is the ultimate intent of this chapter to leave the door open for further research on such authors and on the twenty-first century legacy of such transpacific connections.

References Avenell, Simon. 2008. From the “People” to the “Citizen”: Tsurumi Shunsuke and the Roots of Civic Mythology in Postwar Japan. Positions. East Asia Cultures Critique 16 (3): 711–742. ———. 2015. Transnationalism and the Evolution of Post-National Citizenship in Japan. Asian Studies Review 39 (3): 375–394. Furukawa, Emiko. 2009. Koronbia engekijin no rainichi wo megutte. Aru shimin gurūpu ni yoru kokusai kōr yū no kokoromi, moshikuha bōken. Gakuen. Kenkyū essei 2 (821): 161–166. Matsuda, Takeshi. 2007. Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency. Chicago: Stanford University Press. Mizutamari, Mayumi. 2014. Hotta Yoshie to Ajia Afurika sakka kaigi: daisan sekai no deai [Encounters with the Third World: Hotta Yoshie and Afro-Asian Writers’ Association 1]. The Annual Report on Cultural Science. 144 (25/11): 73–104. Oguma, Eiji. 2015. Japan’s 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil. The Asia-Pacific Journal 13–12 (1): 1–27. Sugawara, Minoru. 2008. ‘Yamabiko gakkō’ no seiritsu to sono hankyō. Okayama daigakuin kyōikugaku kenkyū-ka kenkyu ̄ shu ̄roku 138: 67–74.

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Tanaka, Michiko. 1994. Seki Sano and Popular Political and Social Theatre in Latin America. Latin American Theatre Review 27 (2): 53–69. ———. 1998. Seki Sano y el teatro tradicional japonés. In Encuentros en cadena: las artes escénicas en Asia, África y América Latina, coordinated by Michiko Tanaka, 131–154. Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México. Tsurumi, Shunsuke. 1976. Guadaru ̄pe no seibo. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. ———. 1983. Nihonjin ni totte no Ratenamerika bunka no imi. Nihon Rantenamerika Gakkai. http://www.ajel-­jalas.jp/nenpou/back_number/ nenpou003/pdf/tsurumi1983.pdf. Accessed 02 Nov 2020. ———. 2004. ‘War Is the Mother of Civilization’: Reflections on the United States and Japan. The Asia-Pacific Journal 2 (7): Article ID 1574. https:// apjjf.org/-­Tsurumi-­Shunsuke/1574/article.html. Accessed 02 Nov 2020. ———. 2012. Shisō wo tsumugu hitotachi. Tokyo: Kawadeshobō. Zavala, Agustín Jacinto. 1995. La otra filosofía japonesa: antología. Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán.

Index

A Abya Yala, 15 Abyssal lines, 10 Academia, 47 Accumulation, 45 Acosta, Alberto, 95 “Action Plan for the Integration of South American Infrastructure” 91 Adat forest, 128 Affect, 37 Africa, 100 Afro-Asian Writer, 253 Afro-Colombian, 125 Afro-Cuban, 195 Afrocubanism, 187 Ahmed, Sara, 23 Ainu, 27 Andalusia, 231 Andean Pact, 92 Anglo-America, 20 Anthropology of care, 228

Anti-globalization, 45 Anti-hegemonic, 3 Antillean Black experience, vii Antilles, 151 Anuarios Estadísticos de Pesca y Acuacultura, 75 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 32 Area studies, vi, 5 Argentina, 93 Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB), 104 Asia-Pacific, 80 Atlantic Slave Trade, vii B Bachner, Andre, 6 Backheuser, Everardo, 98 Baja California Sur, 70 Banzer, Hugo, 98 Batista, Fulgencio, 198 Beijing Consensus, 102

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. Olivieri, J. Serrano-Muñoz (eds.), East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74528-8

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Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), vi, 104 Bengkayang, 129 Berber, 243 Bioceanic corridors, 91 Biological weapons, 228 Biotopes, 73 Body-politics, 52 Body-territory, 129 Bogotá, vii Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), 94 Bolivia, 95 Bolsonaro, Jair, 97 Bourdieu, Pierre, 233 Bourgeoisie, 96 Boutang, Moulier, 58 Brasilia, 91 Brasilia Communiqué, 91 Braudel, Fernand, 45 Brazil, vi, 90 Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), 96 Buddhism, 165 Burakumin, 38 C Cabnal, Lorena, 119 Cáceres, Berta, 123 Cairo Conference, 213 Capitalist modernity, 3 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 34 Caribbean, 68 Cartesian dualism, 118 Castellanos, Rosario, 22 Catholicism, 165 Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste (CIBNOR; Center for Biological Research of the Northwest), 71 Chávez, Hugo, 235

Chen Duxiu, 140 Chiapas, 22 Chicano, 164 China, v, 27 CHINATOWN, 193 Chinese May Fourth, vii Chineseness, 50 Chinese virus, 228 Chinita, 196 Chino Wong, 187 Chonghwa, Lee, 22, 28 Chow, Rey, 24 Cinegetic metabolism, 70 Cisernos, Natalie, 21 Cixous, Hélène, 33 Clark, Paula C., 16 Climate crisis, 1 Cochabamba, 94 Cochimi, 72 Cold War, 4, 20 Colombia, vi, 116 Colonialism, 9 Coloniality, vi Coloniality of knowledge, 53 Coloniality of power, 53 Coloniality of territories, 69 Colonial modernity, 12 Colonization, vi Comfort women, 29 Comitán, 33 Commodities, 83 Common Pool Resources (CPR), 69 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), 93 Concept, 207 Confederation of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), 94 Conflict, 12 Confucianism, 149 Cono Sur, 15 Continental Social Alliance, 94

 INDEX 

Convention 169, 94 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), 80 Coolie Trade, vii Coronavirus, 15, 228 Coronavirus pandemic, 228 Cosmovisions, 161 Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), 123 Criollo, 187 Cristina Kirchner, 102 Critical area studies, 20 Cuba, vii Cuban Revolution, 253 Cyberactivism, 232 Cyberpolitcs, 231 D Dayak, Hibun, 125 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 8, 161 Death, 161 Decentering, 9 Decolonial, 2 Decolonial feminisms, 117 Decolonial-transpacific model, vi Decolonization, 3 Deng Xiaoping, 99 Development, 108 Díaz, Porfirio, 33 Dirlik, Arif, 4 Dogfish, 75 Du Bois, W. E. B., 37 E East Asia, v Ecosystem, 126 Ecuador, vii Egan, Michael, 154 El Colegio de México, 254

269

Emigration, 57 Emilio Ruiz, 187 Environmental history, 83 Environmental racism, 68 Epistemic justice, 2 Epistemic oppression, 3 Epistemicide, 4 Epistemologies of the South, viii, 8 Erber, Pedro, 6 Escobar, Arturo, 68, 69 Espiritu, Yên Lê, 5 Ethnocentric, 50 Ethnocentrism, 8 Eurasia, 106 Euro-American, 24 Eurocentric, vi Eurocentric epistemologies, 2 Extractive policies, 11 Extractive violence, vi Extractivism, vi F Fanon, Frantz, vii, 44 Feagin, Joe, 233 Feminist, 21 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 91 Financial Fund for the Development of the River Plate Basin (Fonplata), 92 Foucault, Michel, 233 IV Summit of the Americas, 93 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), 92, 93 French Empire, vii G Galeano, Eduardo, 89 Gangkou, 81 Geopolitics, 52 Globalization, 7

270 

INDEX

Global North, 9 Global South, vi, 12 Goguryeo, 259 Golbery do Couto e Silva, 98 Gonçalves, Carlos Walter Porto, 108 Green Revolution, 73 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 14 Guatemala, 33, 123 Guaycuras, 71 Gudynas, Eduardo, 95 Guha, Ranajit, 14 Guo Moruo, 140 H Hall, Stuart, 26, 233 Han, 27 Han Yong-un, 31 Havana, vii Hegemony, 27 Helly, Denise, 184 Heteronormativity, 24 Heteropatriarchy, 24 Hidalgo, Checa, 10 Hong Kong, 82 Hoskins, Janet, 5 Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, 184 Human Rights Watch, 129 Husserl, Edmund, 22 Hydraulic model, 48 I Ianfuseido, 30 Identity, 7, 152 Imperial Japan, 139 Imperialism, 140 Indigeneity, 22 Indigenous, 125 Indigenous Confederation of Indigenous Organisations (CAOI), 94

Indonesia, vi, 82, 104 Industrialization, 90 Industrial metabolism, 70 Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), 90, 91 Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL), 92 Integration and Development Axes (IADAs), 91 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 91 Interdependence model, 48 International Labour Organization (ILO), 93 International Organization of Migration, 46 Inter-oceanic canal, 103 Intersectional, 230 Intersectional care, 228, 244 Invented tradition, 240 Itaipu Treaty, 98 Itaú, 97 J Japan, v, 47 Japanese Imperial Army, 29 Japan studies, 27 Jesuits, 72 Jineteras, 198 Jineterismo, 198 K Karatani Kojin, 38 Katō Shūichi, 263 Kazakhstan, 104 Kehoe, Alice, 162 K’iche’, Maya, 34, 35 Kim, Junyoung Verónica, 21

 INDEX 

L La Guajira, 125 La Violencia, 214 Laclau, Ernest, 238 Lakoff, George, 239 Latin America, v Latin American Development Bank (CAF), 92 Lee-DiStefano, Debbie, 21 Leininger, Madeleine, 229 Li Dazhao, 140 Liang Qichao, 140 Literature, 115 López-Calvo, Ignacio, 7, 184 Lorde, Audre, 25 Los Cabos, 73 Lowe, Lisa, 5 Lu Xun, 140 Lula da Silva, 96

Marini, Ruy, 98 Maruyama Masao, 252 Material and Energy Flow Accounting, 69 May Fourth youths, 139 McArthur, Douglas, 215 McLane-Ocampo Treaty, 165 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), 107 Memory, 30 Memory studies, 204 Meneses, Maria Paula, 13 Mesoamerica, 162 Mestizaje, 185 Mexico, v, vii, 33 Miami, 93 Middle East, 90 Middle Passage, vii Mignolo, Walter, 51 Mills, Charles Wright, 254 Mita Munesuke, 263 Miyazawa Kenji, 261 M-19 guerrillas, 212 Modern/colonial, 8 Mohanty, Chandra, 51 Morales, Evo, 94 Morris-Suzuki, Teresa, 205 Motobu, 167 Mouffe, Chantal, 238 Mulata, vii

M Macri, Mauricio, 102 Maduro, 237 Manchuria, 140, 209 Manila Galleons, v Mao Zedong, 79 Maori, 54 Marie Françoise Collière, 229 Marine ecosystems, 67 Marine extractivism, 67

N Naha, 163 Nakagami Kenji, 38 Narratives, 6 National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), 95 National Commission on Violence Against Women, 124 National narratives, 204

Kim Yang-Sam, 211 King, Tiffany Lethabo, 28 Kirchnerist, 95 Klein, Christina, 193 Knowledge, 15 Knowledge production, 55 Komnas Perempuan, 124 Korea, vii Korean War, vii, 13, 203

271

272 

INDEX

Nayarit, 74 Negro, 144 Neoclassical economic approach, 48 Neo-extractivism, 95 Neoliberal, 4 New BRICS Development Bank, 95 New economics of migration, 48 New “Green” Silk Road, 104 New mobilities paradigm, 49 New Spain, 163 New Zealand, 47 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 5 Nicaragua, 103 Nightingale, Florence, 229 Nixon, Richard, 79 Nnoko-Mewanu, 129 Nonencounter, 21 North, 3 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 93 Northwest Pacific, 81 O Oases, 73 Odebrecht, 96 Ō e Kenzaburō, 263 Okinawa, vii Okinawan, 27, 161 Old Ryūkyū, 161 One Belt One Road Initiative (OBOR), 104 Oppression, 116 Organic or agrarian metabolism, 70 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 97 Organization of American States, 97 Orientalism, 193 Ospina, Mariano, 210 Ossa, Luisa Marcela, 184

P Pacific, 4 Pacific Islands, 15 Pacific Ocean, 155 Pacific Rim, 4 Panama Canal, 103 Pan-Americanism, 192 Paraguay, 93 Paraná River, 98 Park Nohae, 31 Pastrana, Juan Jiménez, 184 Patagonia, 102 Peasant Leagues of Brazil, 259 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 90 Pericues, 71 Periphery, 45 Peru, vii, 237 Petrobras, 96 Philippines, 16, 163 Places of memory, 205 Pluriverse, 69 Postcolonial studies, 5 Potsdam Conference, 213 Pratt, Mary Louise, 29 Pre-Hispanic, 161 Public memory, 205 Q Q’eqchi, Maya, 123 Qian Xuantong, 140 Quijano, Aníbal, 8 Quito, 94 R Race, 7 Racialized, vi Rancheros, 73 Raw materials, 89 Recognised Seasonal Employer, 47 Rhee, Syngman, 211

 INDEX 

Rita Montaner, 186, 188 Rivas, Zelideth Maria, 21 Rojas Pinilla, 212 Rouseff, Dilma, 97 Rumba, 185 Russia, 97 S Said, Edward, 10 Sakai, Naoki, 4, 25 Sanggau District, 125 Sano Seki, 256 Satsuma Clan, 165 Sayad, Abdelmalek, 44 Secretariat of the Technical Coordination Committee (CCT), 92 Secretary of Environment and Nature (SEMARNAT), 78 Segato, Rita Laura, 117, 127 Segmented labor market theory, 48 Seko, 124 Semunying Jaya, 129 Seoul, vii, 204 Sexual violence, 124 Shark, 75 Shina, 147 Shu-mei Shih, 26 Shunsuke, Tsurumi, vii–viii, 251, 256–263 Silk Road Economic Belt, 104 Silla, 259 Sinaloa, 74 Singapore, 82 Social inequality, 70 Social justice, 2 Social media, 231 Social networks, 232 Soft power, 100 Solidarity, 242 Song Ki-won, 31

273

Sonora, 72 South American, 91 South American Council for Infrastructure and Planning (COSIPLAN), 94 South American Defence Council, 97 Southeast Asia, 162 Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), 92 Southern Cone, 101 South Korea, 32 South(s), 3 South–South connections, v Soviet, 45 Soviet Union, 92 Spain, 82 Spanish Crown, 72 Stalin, Joseph, 210 Structuralism, 44 Subaltern, 146 Summit of the Americas, 93 Sustainability, 67 Sütsuin Jiyeyu Wayuu (Wayuu Women’s Force), 127 Syncretism, 165 Systemic racism, 228, 244 T Taiwan, 15, 82 Tanaka, Michiko, 257 Technical Intern Training Program, 47 Temer, Michel, 97 Third World, 253 Tibetans, 233 Tokyo, 140 Tolosa, Ramos, 10 Torralba Roselló, Francesc, 228 Torres Rodríguez, Laura, 21 Transatlantic, 8 Transhumanism, 161 Transnational paradigm, 49

274 

INDEX

Transpacific, 2 Transpacific exchanges, v Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 100 Trasvassos, Mario, 98 Trauma, 151 Treaty of Guadalupe, 165 Truman, Harry S., 210 Trump, Donald, 100, 231 Tsang, Martin, 184 Turbay, Julio César, 212 Turtle, 76 Tzeltal, 34 U Ukai, Satoshi, 30 Ulloa expedition, 72 UN geoschemes, 8 The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), 92, 93 United Nations (UN), 203 United Nations Security Council, 100 Urquía, Lesbia Yaneth, 123 Uruguay, 93 US Federal Reserve, 99 US imperialism, viii Uyghurs, 233 V Vargas, Getúlio, 96 Vasconcelos, José, 36 Venezuela, 93 Venezuelan immigrants, vii Vietnam, 253 Vietnam War, 256 Violence, 116 Vizcaino Valley, 73 Vulnerability, 228

W Walker, Gavin, 25 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 8, 44 War, 205 Washington Consensus, 102 Wayuu, 126 Weber, Max, 233 West Africa, 96 West Kalimantan, 125, 129 World-system, 8, 49 World Trade Organization (WTO), 82, 92 WWF, 105 Wynter, Sylvia, 26 X Xenia López, 183 Xi Jinping, 104 Xisha, 81 Y Yala, Abya, 116 Yamaguchi Masao, 263 Yellow peril, 232 Yemen, 82 Yoneyama, Lisa, 5, 20, 27 Yoo, Hyon Joo, 4 Younghan, Cho, 15 Yu Dafu, vii, 140 Yukio, Mishima, 261 Yun, Lisa, 184 Z Zapata, Emiliano, 259 Zhou Zuoren, 140 Zibechi, Raúl, 99 Zone of being, 53 Zone of non-being, 53