More than 120 years have passed since the popularity of the houses made of branches and grass until the brick houses currently inhabited by Wichi residents of Misi & oacute;n Nueva Pompeya and El Sauzalito, in Chaco, Argentina. Our objective is to analyze the circulation of knowledge related to brick production in these localities, between 1900 and the present day. The work is part of an ethnographic research initiated in 2012. We found that building construction with bricks constitutes a manifestation of relationships between Wichi residents and indigenist agents. We see that knowledge travels with people, is transmitted through doing, and makes sense in terms of use. In this context, the "sale", of work, bricks, and houses proves to be useful to reconcile uses that initially seem contradictory.
Two decades of flourishing relations between China and Latin America are just one indication of a changing world order that requires us to rethink the theoretical frameworks we use to understand transregional relations. This article describes how a transpacific analysis can help us better understand the conceptual and material relations between Latin America and Asia by asking the question: What happens when we shift our emphasis from comparing what have long been understood as separate "areas" to questioning their material and intellectual co-constitution? The analysis draws on my original ethnographic research in Central America and engagement with the fertile field of transpacific scholarship to suggest that a transpacific analytics can transcend the geographies of difference and traditional transdisciplinary critical points that have defined area studies to offer a robust transregional approach. Incorporating a longer and more complex history of relations across the Pacific and using a translocal methodological approach, I argue that a transpacific framework can shed light on contemporary relations between China and Latin America, focusing less on them as a battleground for global hegemony and more as a space for invoking new worlds.
This article revisits the author's proposal of "Asia-Latin America as method" to reflect on the Asian-Latin American scholar's precarious position in United States academy that hinges on the intersections of survival, community, and accountability. By narrating the author's personal journey, the article highlights the importance of centering theories and knowledges derived from bodily and fleshy lived experiences, thereby calling our attention to the need for a pedagogy and academic praxis based on ethical responsibility and accountability to Asian Latin American communities. This theory in the flesh segues into an encapsulation and expansion of the key arguments made in the initial conceptualization of "Asia-Latin America as method" and ends with a proposal to take seriously the thick livingness of Asian diasporas in Latin America that defies the hegemonic regime of disciplinary knowledge production. The complex diasporic livingness, which cannot be extracted, commodified or captured by structures of neoliberal multicultural imperial nationalism, calls for pedagogies of rebellion that unearth insurgent kinships and fabulate queer futurities.
In this article, I argue in favor of using a transregional theoretical approach to study Sinophobia in the Caribbean, specifically in Jamaica. In addition to integrating postcolonial and ethnic studies, I use the theories of multiple triangulations and racial capitalism to situate the postcolonial contexts that facilitate modern interethnic conflicts in Jamaica. Through the transregional theoretical approach, I restructure the intimacies and disagreements surrounding the presence of the Hakka Chinese in the Caribbean within a global framework to refocus on the broader violence of capitalism and the colonial legacies on which the blame truly lies. Along with the expansion of the People's Republic of China's influence into the emerging markets of the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, and its reconnection with post-indentured labor communities, new exchanges (or the renewal of old ones) have become more common and have complicated our ideas of race, ethnicity, and identity. This article situates itself at the intersection of these exchanges and provides a framework for transregional analysis by addressing the complex transregional and South-South exchanges that these implications generate.
