Reorienting Latin America through a transpacific analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35588/jy5sh850Keywords:
China, Latin America, Central America, translocal, transregional, transregional relationsAbstract
Two decades of flourishing relations between China and Latin America are just one indication of a changing world order that requires us to rethink the theoretical frameworks we use to understand transregional relations. This article describes how a transpacific analysis can help us better understand the conceptual and material relations between Latin America and Asia by asking the question: What happens when we shift our emphasis from comparing what have long been understood as separate “areas” to questioning their material and intellectual co-constitution? The analysis draws on my original ethnographic research in Central America and engagement with the fertile field of transpacific scholarship to suggest that a transpacific analytics can transcend the geographies of difference and traditional transdisciplinary critical points that have defined area studies to offer a robust transregional approach, as proposed by the authors Monson and Shankar. Incorporating a longer and more complex history of relations across the Pacific and using a translocal methodological approach, I argue that a transpacific framework can shed light on contemporary relations between China and Latin America, focusing less on them as a battleground for global hegemony and more as a space for invoking new worlds.
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