In the text “An Afro-Chinese Author and the Next Generation,” Professor Lisa Yun examines the history of Cuba in the late 19th Century through the lens of Antonio Chuffat Latour, an Afro-Chinese author born in Cuba in 1860. Chuffat was part of the second generation of the rising Chinese presence in Cuba who witnessed a […]
“Asia” in Portugese Colonial History, Art, & Politics
In “The ‘Orient’ in the ‘New World,’” Jorge Lúzio discerns a Portugese-Asian presence in “the cultural genesis of colonial Brazil” via South/east Asia. In tracing Asian cultural influences in “baroque imagery, gastronomy, commercial relations, and customs,” Lúzio discusses the presence of Asianness in colonial Brazil prior to the 19th-century immigration of Asian subjects (35). For […]
Asian Brazilian Art
Jorge Luzio offers an interesting way to think about Asian influence during colonial times in the New World, especially in colonial Brazil. His text illuminates how pieces of art can be connected with everything, from different types of social networking to commerce, history, and culture. As Luzio explains, during colonial times the Portuguese Empire used […]
memory + mapmaking
I was quite interested in this week’s discussion on the relationship between personal and collective memory, and the role art plays in contesting both because of the dialogic way memory works. Machida emphasizes the way in which memory is not “stored” but rather constituted through sociability, “Remembering, therefore, is necessarily dialogic, as it involves a […]
Asian American Identity
The reading “Unsettled Visions” by Professor Margo Machida opened my eyes to issues of immigration and the process of identity formation in a new country. Machida gives us a detailed description of how Asian American art has long been used as a way to invoke cultural similarities among Asian Americans and create a social presence […]
Mapping Beyond the National Bourgeoisie
Reading Lesser and Fanon together can be a way of thinking about Fanon’s argument as a framework to think through the locally specific ways in which the national bourgeoisie continues power relations from colonialism and prevents the creation of an “authentic national culture.” In other words, Lesser is the local speaking to the universals about […]
National Consciousness, Immigration and Brazil
In “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” Frantz Fanon argues that newly independent nations often fail to activate the so desired national consciousness, promoting mass repression instead. In order to explain his argument, Fanon gives us a psychological analysis of post-colonial societies, blaming the wealthy class as the major source of repression and […]
Torres Garcia’s “Inverted Map”
Myths of Continents raised the issue of power in relation to the ways in which space is imagined/constructed. In particular, the reading historicizes geographical categories for dividing the world (East, West, Asia, America, Africa, etc…) in order to point out their relative elasticity and how this trait comes to function in relation to (nationalist) ideology. […]
Gendered Developmentalism in Eurocentric Cartography
Today’s introductory readings from Lewis & Wigen explore, as well as critique, Orientalist cartographic discourses of East vs. West, epistemological object vs. rational mind. In mobilizing the map as not only image but also metaphor, the authors dismantle, while not entirely rejecting, this Cartesian dualism and its Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge and reason. For Lewis […]
Why Boundaries?
Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen in “The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography” address important questions regarding the world’s geography and the way in which it shapes people’s understanding of the world. Despite being commonly accepted principles, geographic divisions of the world such as countries and continents can be incredibly misleading. Thus, these spatial concepts […]