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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 Oliveri · 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 differ-
ent 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 south-
south 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 lit-
erature. 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 Jordi Serrano-Muñoz
Department of Anthropology CEAA, El Colegio de México
University of Toronto Mexico City, Mexico
Toronto, ON, Canada
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
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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 pres-
ence of East Asia in the Latin American and Spanish imaginaries. With the
twentieth-century re-emergence of Japan and China as economic and geo-
political 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 stud-
ies, 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 specifi-
cally, they propose to address South–South connections without necessar-
ily 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
vi Foreword
rather than conceiving this huge region as a mere passive object of study
(an area studies leftover).
The following chapters challenge Eurocentric and Orientalist stereo-
types 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, compara-
tive 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 exploita-
tion. 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 coedi-
tors argue, will enhance epistemic justice, thus offsetting previous obso-
lete, 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 migra-
tions 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, includ-
ing 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, pro-
moted 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 junc-
ture of coloniality and patriarchy in a comparative study of its impact on
racialized, indigenous women in Colombia and Indonesia.
Foreword vii
In the field of literary studies, we find shared experiences of colonial-

ism: 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 episte-
mological 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 histori-
cal—albeit erased—connections with China. It demonstrates how, by per-
forming 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 post-
colonial 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 participa-
tion of Colombian troops (the only ones from Latin America) in the
Korean War has been, for the most part, forgotten among Colombian citi-
zenry, it is, by contrast, prominently represented in South Korean muse-
ums 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, spear-
headed by Venezuelan immigrants in Peru and Ecuador who were being
accused of spreading coronavirus. The chapter exposes these groups’ resis-
tance 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
viii Foreword
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 collabo-
ration 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
x Acknowledgments
Life, both academic and personal and specially during these very dis-
turbing times, would have been more dispassionate without our signifi-
cant 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
xi
xii Contents
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.
xiii
xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
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 interna-
tional 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 Fallen in Combat Panel, Military Museum. (Thanks O.M. for
the photographs) 216
Fig. 10.2 Military Museum armament showcase 220
xv
List of Tables
Table 5.1 Financing channels of BRI 105

Table 5.2 South American countries that have signed an MoU with
the BRI and relevant projects 107
xvii
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 environ-
ment. 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: jordi@serranomunoz.com
C. Olivieri
Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: olivieric@ugr.es
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

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
2 J. SERRANO-MUÑOZ AND C. OLIVIERI
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 epis-
temologies. They demand a reconceptualization of spaces, connections,
narratives, and experiences that brings to the forefront marginalized epis-
temologies 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 con-
sequences. In this book, we wish to frame the transpacific using decolo-
nial 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 understand-
ing, we believe that some ideas need to be explored by adopting an expan-
sive approach to their comprehension. This has been our approach when
discussing the transpacific—not presenting it as a territory to be con-
quered, 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 con-
tradicting 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 enuncia-
tion. 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
1 WHEN EAST IS NORTH AND SOUTH 3
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 epistemici-
dal 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 dia-
logues, and anti-hegemonic projects, coming from many peripheries. By
adopting this stance of plurality, we can fight against structures of knowl-
edge 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 oppres-
sion 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
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 understand-
ing 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 pros-
perity (1998). Dirlik’s criticism of “Rim” focuses particularly on those
narratives that have framed the Pacific as a space of exchange of commodi-
ties. 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 limi-
tations 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 reinterpre-
tation of Pacific connections—that is, through an embrace of critical trans-
pacific 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 reformu-
late the subject of area studies, free from the political inheritance of
Western Cold War needs, and into the twenty-first century, writing par-
ticularly 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 epis-
temological barriers of area and disciplines (a question of continuous con-
cern 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
Imagination shows a quite North-centric grasp of agents in the transpa-

cific, 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 fan-
tasy” (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 epistemologi-
cally 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 con-
ceptspace beneficial for the reevaluation of our larger modes of knowledge
production. Lisa Lowe and Lisa Yoneyama have worked either indepen-
dently 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 pow-
ers, 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 preda-
tions, 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 epis-
temic negligence for non-Eurocentric research, the noble shortcomings of
postcolonial studies, and the crisis and revamping of so-called area studies
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 natural-

ized relationships by being open to patterns of analogy, contemporaneity,
parallelism, uneven dialogues, and failed encounters. Uncovering, explor-
ing, 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 con-

sider 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 consid-
ered 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 under-
standing 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 understand-
ing of the transpacific. We do not want “transpacific” to become a buzz-
word, 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
designing a house with only one window. The authors bring their reflec-
tions, 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 complex-
ity 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 problem-
atic 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 empha-
sizes 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 transpa-
cific. 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
hegemony. The lessons brought forward by the transpacific can—and per-

haps 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 dif-
ferent, 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 trans-
pacific, 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 impor-
tance 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 epis-
temologies of the South, the objective is not the replacement of hege-
mons; “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 com-
plexity, 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 dif-
ferences 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 polit-
ical 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: ethno-
centrism. 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
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 differ-
ences in a non-centered world is important. We don’t believe that decen-
tering 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 con-
scious and constant work to make it so. As it stands, it nevertheless signi-
fies 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 “coloni-
zation” and “colonialism” from a narrow Eurocentric matrix. This essen-
tial 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 designa-
tions, 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 “deco-
lonial” 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 auto-
matically turn it into decolonial research. Decolonizing transpacific studies
means for us to deeply examine our own role both as academics and as
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 decolo-
nial 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 pro-
moting 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 decolo-

nial 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 educa-
tion. 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 pensamento
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.
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 previ-
ous 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 theo-
retically 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 communi-
ties as peripheral, secondary, nothing resembling universality. In this sense,
they are considered below the abyssal line. The effects of this hierarchiza-
tion 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 neces-
sary prominence back to the exchanges, influences, and mutual enrich-
ments generated between Pacific coasts. Migrant knowledges, mobile and
fluid, arise within the South and need to be understood as part of a differ-
ent way of apprehending migration, as seen in Chap. 3, free from the nar-
row—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
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 com-
mon 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 enforc-
ing 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 scaf-
fold 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 strate-
gies of resistance and empathy through identifying shared struggles. In
this sense, working through a paradigm of the decolonial(izing) transpa-
cific not only exposes situations of conflict but can also inform our meth-
ods to combat it.
In this book, we acknowledge two types of identifying and working
with transpacific connections in ways that serve the purpose of
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 pro-
cesses 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 connec-
tions in Chap. 9 and Chap. 12 respectively. Their pieces uncover the role
of these relationships in the formation of the cultural and intellectual iden-
tity of Latin America.
The second type of work is those connections that are yet to be discov-
ered and highlighted. The sharedness or discrepancy between communi-
ties, 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 partici-
pation 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 differ-
ent stories, revelations, and modes of being and doing. We have not dif-
ferentiated between the two in this book. They coexist as part of a shared
conversation. We attempt to challenge both the univocal character of stat-
ist discourses and the hierarchical organization of dominant struggles, as
Maria Paula Meneses suggests:
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 dis-
ciplinary horizon, to just one form to conceive the alternative.2 (2011, 33)
Dialogue, within the chapters of this book, is established as in a con-

stant 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 com-
mands. […] 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 expe-
riencias 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.
precariousness, uncertainty, and distress. The pre-COVID world had

made us used to contact immediacy, to feel close despite the physical sepa-
ration, 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 experi-
ences, 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 research-
ers 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 inter-
national 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 decoloniza-
tion 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, represen-
tative show of all the different ways in which we can do work on transpa-
cific 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 communi-
ties of Abya Yala (especially in the Cono Sur), Taiwan, the Pacific Islands,
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 transpa-
cific 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 com-
piled 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:
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Hoskins, Janet, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, eds. 2014. Transpacific Studies: Framing
an Emerging Field. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
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para un encuentro de las historias. Paper Presented at the Formas-Otras: Saber,
nombrar, narrar, hacer, Barcelona. https://www.cidob.org/en/media2/pub-
licacions/monografias/iv_training_seminar/meneses Accessed 2 Dec 2020.
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.
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de Granada.
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(3): 13–17.
Sakai, Naoki, and Gavin Walker. 2019. The End of Area. Positions: Asia Critique
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———. 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies
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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: anm015@UCSD.EDU
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

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
20 A. MENDOZA
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 trans-
national 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 partici-
pating 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 con-
tinually 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, histo-
ries, 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 cre-
ated by the imagined boundaries of communities and bodies. A critical
transpacific phenomenology, I argue, is a reorientation of the way we lis-
ten to and understand the conditions of the world.
2 CONFRONTING “THE ENDS” OF AREA: MURMURS TOWARD… 21
To begin this process, we must recognize that the theoretical frame-

work 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 philoso-
phizing 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 phe-
nomenology begins as a feminist practice that critically confronts the fore-
closures 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 cul-
tural 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 com-
parative 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 connec-
tions 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 phe-
nomenological question. I begin with an overview of what is commonly
referred to as the “crisis” of area studies. I argue that a transpacific phe-
nomenology 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
22 A. MENDOZA
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 possi-
bility 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, cru-
cially, 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, indige-
neity, and nationalism from a standpoint I identify as transnational femi-
nist 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 phe-
nomenological 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 fol-
lows 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
seriously, as Sara Ahmed (2006) does in her conception of queer phenom-

enology, I view a transpacific phenomenology as a framework for bringing
to attention, turning toward, “fields of perception” that mobilize inter-
connected experiences, knowledges, and worlds that have been foreclosed
by dominant disciplinary paradigms. A critical transpacific phenomenol-
ogy confronts, in fact, the limits, the ends, of disciplinary shapes and for-
mations 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 depar-
ture 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 desig-
nation 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 pan-
demic 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 phenome-
nology allows me to problematize the pursuit of area-based models that
render geographic and political spaces into representable objects of knowl-
edge about people, histories, and cultures. If we understand the transpa-
cific 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
24 A. MENDOZA
each other, I explore the transpacific as a tendency toward, a future direc-

tion, 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 cri-
tique 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 argu-
ment 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 con-
nects 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 intel-
lectual 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.
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 stud-
ies—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 stud-
ies, 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 schol-
arship 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 num-
ber 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).
26 A. MENDOZA
which epistemologies are retroactively rendered “natural” or “inherent”

to nationalized contexts (Walker and Sakai 2019, 21). In my own formu-
lation, I employ the phrase “ends of area” to refer to not merely the rei-
magining 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 possibili-
ties 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 pos-
turing 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 civili-
zational 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 stra-
tegic 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 rea-
son, any formulation of transpacific studies that brings together the histo-
ries 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 trans-
formed 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
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 “authenticat-
ing” 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 relation-
ship 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, rein-
force 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 cul-
tural 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”
28 A. MENDOZA
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 “rac-
ism” as a problem for scholarship. On the other hand, I argue, this disen-
gagement 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 disintegra-
tion 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 knowl-
edge 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 trac-
ing of the unthought. Following Tiffany Lethabo King’s (2019) theoriza-
tion 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).
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 depar-

ture 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, poli-
tics, 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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“If they were not, I’d give you a black eye!”
“Go ’way!” said Ready. “I think you’re horrid!”
Frank’s rooms were crowded now, and a chatter of conversation
arose. Of course, Merry was the center of interest, but he found an
opportunity to draw back and look around. These were the loyal
friends he had made—the dear friends of his school and college
days. They had clung to him through thick and thin, and he felt his
heart swelling with affection toward them all. Even Dade Morgan was
included, for Morgan had tried his best in these final college days to
prove that he was repentant for the past and ready to do anything in
his power to make atonement.
Memories of old times came rushing upon Frank in that moment. He
thought of his first meeting with Hodge at Fardale, and of the
adventures, struggles, and triumphs that followed. He thought of his
coming to Yale, of his freshman struggles, of the enemies who
seemed to rise around him as he toiled upward and onward, of the
friends who were here and who had remained firm in every change
that befell him.
Oh, those grand days of toil and pleasure at Yale! He felt that he
would give much to live them all over again. But the end had come,
and now he was going out into the world—going to bid Yale farewell!
This thought brought him a feeling of unspeakable sadness. It
seemed that he was leaving the only home he knew. Home—yes, it
was home for him. In truth, he had no other. Life lay before him, and
he was to set his course toward a high goal when he received his
sheepskin and turned his back on his alma mater. But he felt that he
was being parted from the happiest portion of his life.
Then his eyes fell on the girls. Bart had found Elsie and was talking
to her, his dark face flushed, his eyes glowing. She smiled and
nodded as he was speaking.
“They are happy,” said Frank, to himself.
He did not know that at that moment Hodge was praising him to the
skies, telling what a remarkable game he had played and how he
had covered himself with glory in the battle against Harvard. He did
not know that somehow such praise was the pleasantest thing Elsie
Bellwood could hear.
He saw Inza, and she looked toward him. She smiled, and he felt his
heart throb.
Home! Yes, Yale had been his home; but now before his vision there
seemed to rise the picture of another home and he hastened to
Inza’s side.
CHAPTER II.
ANTON MESCAL.
A dark-faced, Spanish-appearing man stopped Roland Packard on

the steps of the Tontine Hotel.
“Get out of the way!” snarled Roland, who had been drinking.
“Wait,” said the man, in a soft, not unpleasant voice. “I wish to speak
to you. It is important.”
Roland was in anything but a pleasant mood. He had seen Frank
Merriwell cover himself with glory in the game against Harvard, and,
having foolishly bet that the Cambridge men would win the
championship, he had taken to drink immediately after the game.
“It’s got to be cursed important!” he snapped, looking the stranger
over. “I don’t know you. What’s your name?”
“Anton Mescal.”
“Never heard it before. Are you one of these blooming old grads who
are overrunning the town?”
“No.”
“Then what in blazes——”
A group of men came out of the hotel and descended the steps.
They had gray hair about their temples, and some of them were bald
beneath their hats. They carried canes, their faces were flushed, and
they looked hilariously happy. They were a group of “old grads,” and
they had been celebrating Yale’s victory. With them the celebration
had just begun; it would extend all through the night. As they rolled
down the steps, clinging to one another’s arms, they were talking
excitedly:
“He’s the greatest pitcher Yale ever produced!” asserted one.
“Come off, Smithy, old man!” cried another. “You know the class of
’Umpty-six had the champ. This fellow——”
“Don’t talk, Sluthers!” interrupted another. “Baseball was different
then. Whoever heard of curves? This Merriwell——”
“Is a marvel!”
“He’s a dandy!”
“’Rah for Merriwell!”
“Let’s all cheer! Yow! I feel just like cheering! Cheer for Merriwell!”
Then they bumped against Roland Packard, who snarled at them.
One of them grasped him; others followed the example of that one.
They bore him down the steps to the sidewalk.
“What’s the matter with you?” the grad who had grasped him first
demanded. “Are you a sorehead? Well, by thunder, I want to hear
you cheer for Merriwell!”
“You’ll want a long time!” declared Roland, savagely. “Let go of my
collar!”
“Boys,” said the old fellow fiercely, “here’s a chap who won’t cheer
for Merriwell.”
“Shoot him!” advised another, who was rather unsteady on his feet.
“Don’t bother with him! Shoot him on the spot, Bilton!”
“What spot?” asked Bilton.
“Any old spot.”
“All right,” said the one who had Roland by the collar, “I’ll do it.”
He was just intoxicated enough to be reckless, and he actually took
a revolver out of his hip pocket.
“Brought this to celebrate with,” he declared. “Loaded it for that
purpose; but I guess I’ll shoot this fellow.”
Then he fired straight at Roland’s breast.
Packard fell back with a gasping cry, and the dark-faced man caught
him. The other old grads were appalled by the act of their
companion, who himself was rather dazed, not having intended to
fire the revolver; but he quickly recovered, saying:
“He isn’t hurt, gentlemen! The danged thing is loaded with blanks.”
Packard threatened to call for the police, not one of whom happened
to be near.
Not wishing to get into trouble on account of the reckless act of their
companion, the old grads hastened away.
Anton Mescal, the man with the dark face, laughed a little, as he
said:
“Is this the East? Why, I didn’t suppose men were so careless with
their guns here. For a moment I fancied I must be at home.”
Packard swore.
“Infernal old fools!” he muttered. “I’m going to follow and have them
arrested! I’ll put that drunken idiot in the jug for this! Why, he would
have shot me dead if the thing had been loaded with a ball
cartridge!”
“Better let them go,” urged Mescal. “I want to talk with you about
something important.”
“But I don’t know you.”
“I introduced myself just before those men attempted to stampede
us.”
Packard seemed in doubt. He wanted to follow and make trouble for
the man who had been so reckless with his revolver, and yet
something was urging him to listen to the stranger, who claimed to
have important business with him.
“If we stay here,” he said, “we’ll get bumped into again by these
gray-haired Yale men of other days.”
“Yet I must stay here. Let’s get off the steps, where we can watch
both entrances. I am not going to be given the slip again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something I will explain if you prove to be the man I think you are.”
“You are from the West?”
“That’s right, partner. Come down here.”
They moved aside on the walk, where they took pains to avoid the
groups of hilarious men who were circulating in that vicinity.
“You do not like Merriwell,” said the man who called himself Mescal.
“You refused to cheer for him, even when that man drew a gun on
you.”
“I didn’t suppose the howling chump was crazy enough to shoot.”
“Still you refused to cheer for Merriwell, and everybody else is
howling for him.”
“What of that?” asked Packard suspiciously. “Haven’t I got a right to
refuse?”
“Of course. The very fact that you did refuse convinced me that I had
made no mistake in my man. You dislike Merriwell, when everybody
else seems wild about him. You seem to be his only enemy here.”
“That’s right. There were enough of them once, but I’m the only one
left.”
“What has become of them all?”
“He has triumphed over them, and they have bowed down to worship
him. They are howling themselves hoarse over him to-night.”
“You mean——”
“They have become his friends, or else they have been driven out of
college.”
“How does it happen that you have not succumbed?”
“Because I will not!” panted Roland fiercely.
“He has never defeated you?”
Packard hesitated about answering, for he knew that in everything
that had brought about a contest between himself and Merriwell the
latter had been victorious.
“Only temporarily,” he asserted. “I never give up.”
“Good!” exclaimed Mescal. “I am more than ever satisfied that you
are the very man I want.”
Packard now demanded a full explanation. His curiosity had been
awakened. Still Mescal, the soft-spoken man from the West, was
rather cautious.
“Would you like to strike Merriwell a last blow?” he asked.
“Would I?” said the medic. “Ask me!”
For a moment the Westerner knitted his brows. He had asked
Packard, and the slang of the East bothered him. But the expression
on Packard’s face demonstrated his meaning, and Anton Mescal
nodded.
“I thought so,” he said. “I may be able to give you the opportunity.”
“But you have not explained,” insisted Roland.
“I will. It takes a little time.”
“Then let’s go in here and get a drink. I’m dry and tired.”
Mescal shook his head, grasping the student by the arm.
“Stay here,” he directed. “It is necessary if you wish to strike
Merriwell.”
This surprised Roland.
“What are you coming at?” he growled. “Think I’m going to hit him
with my fist?”
“No. I am watching for a man who is in that hotel. I must not miss
that man when he comes out.”
“How is he connected?”
“I have followed him pretty nearly three thousand miles, trying to
watch him night and day. Four times he has given me the slip, and
four times I have picked up his trail again. I have tried in every
possible way to accomplish my purpose before he could reach this
place, but thus far I have failed.”
This was interesting, and yet Packard failed to see how it was
related to Merriwell.
“I’ll explain,” said the Westerner. “This man is the bearer of an
important message to Frank Merriwell.”
“Ah! that’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can’t stop him now unless you kidnap or kill him.”
“I don’t want to stop him.”
“What, then?”
“I want to get hold of that message.”
“You wish to know what it is?”
“I know now.”
“Hey? Then why do you wish to get hold of it? Why the dickens have
you put yourself to so much trouble?”
“Because I do not wish it to reach the hands of Merriwell.”
“The bearer——”
“Hasn’t the least idea what the message is.”
“Oh-ho!”
“He is simply a messenger—nothing more. He has been instructed
to deliver an oilskin envelope to Merriwell. He knows absolutely
nothing of the contents of that envelope. If he were to lose it, he
would fail utterly in his task.”
Packard nodded, and made a motion for the man to go on.
“This message,” said Mescal, “is of the utmost importance to
Merriwell. It will do him great damage not to receive it. Get it and
place it in my hands, and you will strike Merriwell a terrible blow.
Besides that, I will give you five hundred dollars in cold cash.”
“Five hundred dollars?” gasped Packard doubtingly.
“Just that. I mean it, and here is the money, to convince you that I
can keep my word.”
The Westerner displayed a roll of bills, the outside one being for the
amount of five hundred dollars.
Now, Roland Packard was involved in debt, and knew not how to
clear himself. Of a sudden, he fancied he saw a way to wipe out his
debts and strike a blow at Merriwell at the same time, and his
bloodshot eyes shone greedily.
“How am I to do this?” he asked.
“That is for you to settle.”
“You mean that——”
“That you are to find a way. I am at the end of my resources, else I
would not have applied to you. It was by chance that I heard you
spoken of as the only enemy of Merriwell remaining in Yale, and it
was by chance—a lucky one—that you happened along and were
pointed out. I lost no time in stopping you right here, hoping you
might be the man to do this work.”
“I’ll do it if possible; but how is it to be done?”
“Again I say that is something for you to find out. I will point out to
you the man who has the message, and you are to follow him and
get it if you can. If you succeed, the money is yours the moment you
place that oilskin envelope in my hands. Are you ready to try it?”
“You bet! When——”
“Now!” whispered Mescal, as he stepped behind Packard, so that the
student was between him and a man who was descending the steps
of the Tontine. “There goes the man with the message!”
CHAPTER III.
THE MYSTERIOUS MESSAGE.
The man with the message was smooth-faced and shrewd-

appearing. He stepped out from the Tontine briskly. He was dressed
in a plain gray suit of clothes.
“After him!” whispered Mescal. “He has the message! Get it
somehow—anyhow! Get it before Merriwell reads it!”
“I’ll do my best,” promised Packard. “Where’ll I find you?”
“Here—at this hotel.”
Without another word, Roland Packard started after the man in gray.
Up Chapel Street went the man, with Roland not far behind.
The student was trying to think of some way to secure the message.
He was desperate, and desperate schemes flitted through his brain.
He thought of attacking the man on the street and trying to go
through his pockets; but New Haven was thronged with visitors, old
and young, and Packard found no opportunity, knowing full well that
all chances of success were against him. Desperate though he was,
he had no relish for arrest on the charge of assault and robbery. But
Roland’s eyes were open, and he was on the watch for an
opportunity. Still, something told him that the man was going directly
to Merriwell, and he felt that his show of accomplishing his purpose
was becoming smaller with every step.
Already preparations were being made for a hilarious time in the
vicinity of Osborne Hall that night. Packard knew there would be
speeches, cheering, red fire, and all that, but he gave it no thought
now.
“All New Haven has gone daffy over Merriwell!” he muttered to
himself, as he heard Frank’s name spoken many times by passing
men. “Anybody would think there was nothing else to talk of!
Merriwell eclipses class day, senior prom, graduation, everything.
Oh, if I could get a last crack at him right in the height of his glory!
And to make five hundred plunks at the same time. I must do it
somehow!”
But how?—that was the question. He ground his teeth as he saw his
chances diminishing. The campus was reached, and the man in gray
made directly for Vanderbilt.
“Going straight to Merriwell’s room!” thought Roland. “Perhaps I’ll
have a chance on the stairs.”
No one paid much attention to Packard. Everybody seemed
hilariously happy. He was close behind the bearer of the message
when that individual entered Vanderbilt; but the opportunity did not
come. It seemed that a perfect stream of men was making for
Merriwell’s room or coming from it.
“Just pouring congratulations on him,” said the medic. “Oh, he’s the
king-pin here!”
He saw the messenger reach the door of Frank’s room, which was
standing wide open. Within that room there seemed to be a mass of
happy students.
“No use!” grated Packard. “I didn’t get a chance!”
Just then Oliver Packard and Hock Mason came out and descended
the stairs. Neither of them observed Roland.
“He has been there,” muttered Merry’s enemy, looking after his twin
brother, whom he so closely resembled in outward appearance,
although otherwise there was not the slightest similarity.
Then a sudden thought came to him. In the past he had been
mistaken for Oliver a score of times, and again he might perpetrate
the deception. No one would expect him to boldly enter Merriwell’s
room. If any one had observed the departure of Oliver, it might be
fancied that Oliver had returned, if Roland were seen.
“I’ll do it!” he muttered, and he boldly followed the messenger into
the room.
He saw Frank in the midst of his friends. He would have given ten
years of his life to win such homage from that admiring throng. Yet
he could not help seeing that Frank Merriwell bore himself with
perfect modesty, as if feeling himself no better than his humblest
friend. Merry’s position was most difficult, and only a man of
remarkable tact could have filled it without seeming to pose. It was
this atmosphere maintained by Frank at all times that had made him
so popular. He did not betray exaltation, and yet in no way did he
lower himself by his quiet, unaffected manners.
The man in gray slowly pushed forward till he could touch Frank’s
arm. In a moment when Merry was not engaged, the stranger spoke,
saying:
“Mr. Merriwell, I beg your pardon for bothering you now, but my
business is most important. I will trouble you only a minute, if you will
kindly step aside.”
Frank was surprised, but his courtesy was sufficient to enable him to
betray it only by a slight lifting of the eyebrows. Then he excused
himself to those immediately about him and stepped apart with the
man.
“I would not have bothered you now,” said the stranger, “but I am the
bearer of an important message to you, and I wish to get it out of my
hands without delay, as there is danger that I may lose it. I shall not
feel easy till I have turned it over to you, when my task will be
completed.”
“A message?” said Frank. “From whom?”
“I do not know. I know nothing, save that I have been paid a large
sum of money to bring it to you, and to guard it with my life till it is in
your hands.”
Such a statement as this was calculated to arouse interest.
“And you do not know whom the message is from?”
“I do not. It was not my place to make inquiries. All I know is that I
have been pursued from Colorado to this city by a man who has
seemed determined to rob me of it.”
This added to the interest.
“But he did not succeed?”
“No, sir. I am here, and I have the message, which I will now hand
over to you.”
From an inner pocket the man took an oilskin envelope, which he
gave to Frank, who looked at it curiously. On the envelope were
traced these words:
“To Frank Harrison Merriwell; not to be opened until the day after he
graduates from Yale.”
The moment Frank saw that writing, which was wavering and
unsteady, he uttered a little exclamation, his face paling.
“It’s from my father!” he murmured. “I wonder what it can be!”
The messenger now presented a receipt for Frank to sign, having
produced a fountain pen.
Merry signed the receipt, although for some reason which he himself
did not fully understand his hand was not as steady as usual.
“There,” said the man, “I thank goodness that my task is
accomplished!”
“Who gave you this?” asked Frank.
“My chief.”
“Your chief? You mean——”
“I am in the employ of the Great Western Detective Agency, of
Denver, and my chief placed this in my hands. He stated that I was
to receive two thousand dollars if I delivered it into your hands. He
had been asked to name a man who was reliable, and I was chosen.
The man who sent the message fixed the remuneration I was to
receive. What he paid the chief I do not know.”
Strange thoughts ran riot in Frank’s brain. He had not heard from his
father for some time, and he had not seen Mr. Merriwell since they
parted in Florida. The last letter had assured Frank that his father
was safe and comfortable, and, knowing the peculiarities of the man,
he had not worried much for all of the period of silence. But now
something told Merry that strange things were soon to happen.
“You have performed your duty well,” said Merry, as he returned the
pen to the man in gray.
“Thank you,” said the stranger quietly. “And now I will bid you good-
by.”
Then he quietly departed, leaving the mysterious message, and
Frank stood there studying the oilskin envelope, wondering what it
contained. For the time he forgot his surroundings, forgot the friends
who were present, forgot the triumphs of the day, and gave himself
up to vain speculation.
His father was a most mysterious man, seldom doing anything in a
conventional manner. Yet somehow it seemed to Merry that this did
not account for the care and expense to which Mr. Merriwell had
gone in order to have the message safely delivered into the hands of
his son.
Of course Frank had no thought of opening that envelope before the
time set—the day after graduation. He wondered if it could be that
the envelope contained a check for a large sum of money which he
was to use in starting out in a business career. Anyhow, it was
certain, Merry thought, that the contents must be valuable.
He was not aware of a pair of greedy eyes fastened upon him. He
was not aware of a person who moved cautiously toward him without
attracting attention.
Roland Packard was desperate. The message had been delivered,
but as yet Merriwell knew nothing of its import. Packard reasoned
that this was his last chance to earn that alluring five hundred
dollars.
Reaching a favorable position, Roland glanced round toward the
door, observing that, for the present, the coast was clear.
Then he turned, and, like a flash, his hand went out, his fingers
closing on the envelope, which was snatched from Merriwell’s grasp.
Without a word, without a sound, the desperate student leaped
toward the door.
Merry, who had thought himself surrounded by friends, who to the
last man were constant and true, had been taken utterly by surprise,
but he quickly recovered.
“Stop, Packard!”
With that cry, he sprang after Roland, who was vanishing through the
door. In a moment there was great excitement in the room.
Hans Dunnerwurst had seen the envelope snatched from Merry’s
fingers, and he tried to overtake Roland, shouting:
“Come away back mit dot! Id dit nod belonging to you!”
In his rush for the door he collided with Ephraim Gallup, who likewise
had leaped after the thief, and they went down heavily in the
doorway, locked fast in each other’s arms.
“Gol ding a fool!” spluttered the youth from Vermont.
Merry was compelled to leap over them both, which he did, dashing
out after Packard. Half-way down the stairs Frank clutched Oliver,
who was calmly returning to Merry’s room.
“Give it up!” commanded Merry sternly.
Oliver was astounded.
“Give what up?” he asked.
“The message.”
“What message?”
“You know. This is no time for joking, and it is a very poor joke, at
best.”
“Joke?” said Oliver wonderingly. “What are you talking about,
Merriwell? I know nothing of any joke.”
Frank held him off and looked at him sternly. Merry’s friends were
swarming to the head of the stairs.
“Frank’s got him!” they cried.
“Yaw!” shouted Hans Dunnerwurst. “Dot vos der lobsder vot didded
id! Holdt him onto, Vrankie!”
“Shut yeour maouth, yeou dinged Dutch chump!” came from Gallup.
“Yeou come nigh fixin’ it so he couldn’t git him.”
“Roight ye are, Gallup, me bhoy,” put in Mulloy. “Thot Dutch chaze is
foriver in th’ way.”
To the eyes of Merry the look of amazement on Oliver Packard’s
face seemed genuine.
“What has happened?” Oliver asked. “I heard the sudden
commotion, and then you came leaping down here at me.”
“Make him give it up, Merry!” cried the students above.
“I’ve got nothing to give up,” protested Oliver, his face, which had
turned pale, now flushing hotly. “What do they mean?”
Frank Merriwell was doing some swift thinking just then. He had not
seen Oliver leave the room in company with Hock Mason, and he
had not observed Roland’s face fairly as the latter whirled with the
snatched envelope in his grasp; but he realized that Oliver’s actions
in the past had stamped him as in no respect likely to perpetrate
such a trick, while it was very much like his brother.
But it did not seem that Roland had been in the room. That he would
dare come there in the midst of Merry’s friends seemed utterly
beyond reason, and not worthy of consideration. Yet Frank asked
Oliver a question:
“Where is Roland?”
Again Oliver’s face paled.
“Roland?” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Didn’t he pass you just now on these stairs?”
“He did not.”
Frank’s face was hard and grim.
“Come up to my room,” he commanded.
Oliver did not demur. He saw Frank’s friends regarding him with
looks of accusation, but, knowing he was not guilty of any wrong-
doing, he quietly ascended the stairs and entered Merriwell’s room.
At that moment, panting, yet trying to still his breathing and his
thumping heart, Roland Packard was listening behind the closed
door of another room near Merriwell’s, into which he had darted. He
had seen the door slightly ajar, and had leaped in there as he fled
with the stolen message.
As Oliver, surrounded by Frank’s friends, entered Merriwell’s room,
Roland opened the door the least bit and cautiously peered out. His
ears had told him something of the truth, and he chuckled to think
that his brother had appeared just in time to fall into the hands of the
pursuers.
“He’s all right,” thought the young scoundrel. “And he turned up at
just the right moment to divert suspicion from me long enough for me
to get away. My last blow at Merriwell will be effective, and I’ll make a
ten-strike at the same time.”
He saw Merriwell’s door closed by some one who meant to make
sure that the captured suspect should not break away and escape.
Then Roland stole swiftly out from the room and hastened down the
stairs, chuckling with evil triumph.
Oliver Packard was in a bad scrape, and somehow his face seemed
to indicate that he felt guilt. Still he persisted in being told what had
happened. When he heard the story, he firmly said:
“This is a mistake, Merriwell—I swear it! I left this room ten or fifteen
minutes ago in company with Hock Mason, as I can prove. I left
Mason outside and came back. I was just in time for you to rush out
and grasp me on the stairs. This is the truth, as Heaven hears me!”
There were murmurs of doubt on all sides. Many of Merry’s friends
had never trusted Oliver fully, being inclined to judge him by the
conduct of his brother. Some of them had remonstrated with Frank
for his friendliness with Oliver. These were the ones who now
muttered their incredulity on listening to the words of the suspected
student.
Oliver turned pale as he heard that muttering.
“Search him!” said somebody.
“Search him!” was the cry.
“Yes, search me!” panted Oliver. “I demand to be searched!”
“No,” said Frank, as his hand fell on Oliver’s shoulder. “I believe you!
I am satisfied that you speak the truth. It is a mistake.”
“But we saw him with the envelope in his hand,” said Dade Morgan.
“It was not I!” asserted Oliver.
“No, it was not you,” agreed Merriwell, “but it was one who hates me
and who looks so much like you that we were all deceived.”
“My brother!” muttered Oliver huskily.
“It must have been,” nodded Frank. “He has stolen that message,
which is of great value to me.”
“Merriwell,” exclaimed Oliver Packard excitedly, “I’ll recover the
message for you! Trust me to get it. I will restore it to you, if I live!”
CHAPTER IV.
THE FALSE MESSAGE.
Roland Packard was exultant as he hastily left Vanderbilt. Safe in his

pocket was the precious message.
“I have it! I have it!” he laughed, as he hastened away. “Oh, that was
a piece of luck! Let Oll fight it out with them. He’ll get off somehow,
and they never can prove I did it.”
He seemed utterly regardless of the shame and humiliation he had
cast upon his brother by his rascally act. Having sunk lower and
lower, Roland’s conscience no longer gave him much trouble, no
matter what he did.
“Five hundred dollars!” he muttered. “All mine! That will clear me of
every debt.”
He was hastening to find Anton Mescal, when, of a sudden, he
stopped.
“If that man is willing to pay five hundred dollars for this message the
old envelope must contain something of great importance.”
That set him to thinking, and soon he softly exclaimed:
“I’d like to know what is in that envelope! It might be worth much
more than five hundred dollars to me.”
He was on Chapel Street, opposite the green. Glancing around to
make sure he was not watched, he took the envelope from his
pocket and examined it.
“Sealed!” he muttered, in disappointment. “Too bad! But for that, I
might——”
He grew silent, examining the seal.
“This is luck!” he finally laughed. “The seal was struck with a ring
made to represent the symbol of one of the old freshman societies.
The man who struck that seal may have received the ring from
Merriwell himself. I know where to find another ring exactly like that.”
Packard thrust the envelope into his pocket and hastened straight to
a jeweler’s shop, where he soon purchased a ring which he knew
would strike a seal exactly like the one on the envelope.
From the jeweler’s store he went to a stationer’s, where he
purchased a stick of sealing-wax like the wax used on the oilskin
envelope.
Then came the hardest thing to obtain, an envelope like the one in
his pocket; but, after much search, Packard secured just what he
wanted.
“Now, I am going to know what the message is!” he exulted.
At first he started for his own room, but he did not go far.
“Oliver may be there,” he thought, “or he may come before the job is
done. I must not go there.”
In a moment he thought of a place, and then he proceeded straight
to a little club-room, where some of the reckless Yale men often
gathered to play cards.
The club-room was deserted now, as everybody seemed out to take
part in the gay time that night. Roland knew there was little danger
that he would be disturbed, for it was not probable that any Yale man
would care to play cards on such a night.
The place had been lighted by ordinary kerosene-lamps, and Roland
had one of these burning in short order. Then he set to work to open
the envelope. At first his hands trembled, which caused him to stop
and wait for his nerves to become steadier. He took a silver flask
from his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and drank from it.
“There!” he said; “that will fix me.”
Slowly and cautiously he worked with his knife, removing the seal
from the envelope. When this was done he found some trouble in

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East Asia, Latin America, and the

Decolonization of Transpacific Studies

East Asia, Latin

About the series editors:

More information about this series at

East Asia, Latin

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia

In the field of literary studies, we find shared experiences of colonial-

Shunsuke, including his understanding of a relationship that could develop

Merced, CA, USA Ignacio López-Calvo

1 When East Is North and South 1

2 Confronting “the Ends” of Area: Murmurs Toward a

3 Decolonial Notes on How to Do Research on

4 Ocean Narratives: Fluxes of Commodities Across the

5 From IIRSA-COSIPLAN to the Belt and Road Initiative:

6 The Feminization of Extractive Violence: A Comparative

7 China’s Lost Connection to the Global South: A

8 Worshipping Ancestors: A Decolonized Epistemology on

9 The Vedette China on Havana’s International Cabaret

10 Between North and South: Colombia in Korean War

11 This Coronavirus Shit Is Real: Racialized People,

12 Latin America as a Catalyst to Restore Japanese Culture:

Gennaro Avallone holds a PhD in sociology and social research and is an

Ashley Liu is a lecturer of modern Chinese literature at the University of

Table 5.1 Financing channels of BRI 105

When East Is North and South

Jordi Serrano-Muñoz and Chiara Olivieri

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

as easily compartmentalized subjects. This paradigm of cross-sectional

Debating the Idea of the Transpacific

institutionalized, North-centric understanding of knowledge production

Imagination shows a quite North-centric grasp of agents in the transpa-

by mark of decolonial-like criticism pave the way for a more encompassing

to think about intercultural exchange and transregionalism beyond natural-

This is a good point in which to make our statements on what we con-

hegemony. The lessons brought forward by the transpacific can—and per-

Questioning What It Means to Do Decolonial Work

exercise to vivify and dignify experiences arisen from disqualified peoples,

social actors, to acknowledge our place of enunciation, and to promote

It is hence necessary to epistemologically situate and position a decolo-

Methodologies of Action in Investigation

The idea of a non-plural History is an attempt to broaden modern social

Dialogue, within the chapters of this book, is established as in a con-

Contradictions, Absences, and Promises

precariousness, uncertainty, and distress. The pre-COVID world had

and the Philippines. On the latter, Paula C. Park’s “Transpacific

Park, Paula C. 2018. Transpacific Intercoloniality: Rethinking the Globality of

Confronting “the Ends” of Area: Murmurs

Dig into the earth trace the footsteps of memory

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

To begin this process, we must recognize that the theoretical frame-

seriously, as Sara Ahmed (2006) does in her conception of queer phenom-

each other, I explore the transpacific as a tendency toward, a future direc-

On the Stakes of “Area”

Area studies, in other words, has its own phenomenology. It has an

which epistemologies are retroactively rendered “natural” or “inherent”

project, according to the preface by the volume’s translation’s co-editor

The multiplicity of Lee’s oeuvre serves as an instructive point of depar-

A dark-faced, Spanish-appearing man stopped Roland Packard on

The man with the message was smooth-faced and shrewd-

Roland Packard was exultant as he hastily left Vanderbilt. Safe in his

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Merced, CA, USA Ignacio López-Calvo

1 When East Is North and South 1

2 Confronting “the Ends” of Area: Murmurs Toward a

3 Decolonial Notes on How to Do Research on

4 Ocean Narratives: Fluxes of Commodities Across the

5 From IIRSA-COSIPLAN to the Belt and Road Initiative:

6 The Feminization of Extractive Violence: A Comparative

7 China’s Lost Connection to the Global South: A

8 Worshipping Ancestors: A Decolonized Epistemology on

9 The Vedette China on Havana’s International Cabaret

10 Between North and South: Colombia in Korean War

11 This Coronavirus Shit Is Real: Racialized People,

12 Latin America as a Catalyst to Restore Japanese Culture:

Table 5.1 Financing channels of BRI 105