Please join us for a seminar with the Gerszten Family Visiting Professor, Ignacio López Calvo. "An Asia-Latin America epistemology and Transpacific Studies," on Friday, Feb. 4, from 3:30-5 pm (EST). Please click here to register: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEqf-ChpjkoHdynZFqpg1gC0v90zIwk8RT_.
In this seminar, I will theorize transpacific literary and cultural production as considered from the perspective of Latin American studies. For the last few years, a group of researchers from different academic disciplines has been studying transpacific cross-cultural experiences between Asia and Latin America from a new perspective or framework: rather than seeing Asia-Latin America as a region to be studied (as is typical in Area Studies), it has been reconceived as an epistemological position, that is, as a lens through which to analyze and compare these sophisticated networks. This transdisciplinary methodological approach involving populations in movement, diasporic and transnational processes, and negotiations among different knowledge systems challenges fixed categories, established divisions and theorical issues, including those dealing with the performance of national and diasporic belonging, citizenship, and identities.
Ignacio López-Calvo is University of California, Merced Presidential Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Latin American literature. He is the author of more than ninety articles and book chapters, as well as nine books on Latin American and U.S. Latino literature and culture: The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance. Vanderbilt UP, forthcoming); Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei Cultural Production (U of Colorado P., 2019); Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Tusán Literature and Knowledge in Peru (Arizona UP, 2014); The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (U of Arizona P 2013); Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety (U of Arizona P 2011); Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (UP of Florida, 2007); “Trujillo and God”: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (UP of Florida, 2005); Religión y militarismo en la obra de Marcos Aguinis 1963-2000 (Mellen, 2002); Written in Exile. Chilean Fiction from 1973-Present (Routledge, 2001). He has also edited the books Hydrohumanities: Transforming Currents for Uncertain Futures (Coedited with Kim De Wolff and Rina Faletti, U of California P, forthcoming); The Oxford Handbook of the Latin American Novel (co-edited by Juan E. De Castro, Oxford U.P., forthcoming); The Cambridge History of Chilean Literature (Cambridge U.P., forthcoming); Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez (coedited with Gene Bell-Villada, Oxford U.P., forthcoming); The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth, co-edited with Christina Lux (Northwestern UP., 2018); Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion (Co-edited with Victor Valle, U of Nebraska P., 2018); The Humanities in a World Upside Down (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017); Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Salem Press 2017); Critical Insights: Roberto Bolaño (Salem Press, 2015), Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays (Palgrave, 2015), Magical Realism (Critical Insights) (Salem Press, 2014), Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic World and "the Orient" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012), One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009), and Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007), and co-edited Caminos para la paz: literatura israelí y árabe en castellano (Co-edited with Cristián H. Ricci, 2008). He is the co-founder and co-executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, the Palgrave Macmillan book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia,” and the Anthem Press book series “Anthem Studies in Latin American Literature and Culture Series.”
Professor López Calvo's lecture and seminar are sponsored by the Gerszten family. To see a list of previous Gerszten Family Visiting Professors, please click here.
