Lisa Yun, in her final chapter on the “Afro-Chinese author,” employs archival, textual, and visual methods to examine Antonio Chuffat’s biographical narrative. The narrative, which she describes as an “autobiography within a biography of the Chinese community,” presents a “critical narrative of liberalism” (Yun 187). Yun, who speaks from a Cuban context, corrects Lesser’s emblematically […]
Representations
The personal problem I had when reading “The Queen of the Chinese Colony”—that as a self-identified member of the Chinese diaspora, I did not feel like either Miss Honduras or Miss Costa Rica could represent me—however trivial or idiosyncratic, is indicative of a larger dilemma in studies of diaspora: the inadequacy of representation. As Lok Siu explains, […]
Siu on Chinese Diasporic Performance
In the 2005 Memories of a Future Home, Lok Siu defines “diaspora,” a contested concept in postcolonial studies, Latin American studies, and ethnic studies, as “both a methodology and an epistemological framework in which to understand citizenship in a transnational context that accounts for geopolitical dynamics and people’s situated and simultaneous commitments to different cultural-political […]
Mapping Diasporic Citizenship
In Tendencies, Eve Sedgwick considers the linguistic subtleties in various translations of queer – the Indo-European root twerkw (across), “which also yields the German quer (traverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart… across genders, across sexualities, across genres, across ‘perversions’” (Tendencies, xii). Thus, the word queer indicates a process or relation that is “multiply transitive… […]
language + gender in relation to diasporic identity
Siu’s text uses the theoretical framework of diasporic citizenship in order to explore the Chinese-Panamanian community and how individuals who fall within this category interact not only with one another, but also with other Chinese-Central Americans, with Panama, China, Taiwan, the U.S and the history of imperialism and economic development that envelops these countries. In […]
Afro-Chinese in Cuba
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 […]
Material Objects Speak
Jorge Lúzio’s article on the Orient in the New World draws together two spheres of the European imaginary through an analysis of the dissemination of religious figurines made in Goa to Brazil via the Carreira da India and the diverse economic and cultural interactions facilitated by this same route. I’m interested in bringing Lúzio’s piece […]
“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 […]
Indo-Portuguese Iconography in the New World
In Jorge Lúzio’s essay “The Orient and the New World: The Carreira da India and the Flows between Asia and Portuguese America,” he traces the movement of Asian cultural objects, mainly religious ivory carvings, to colonial Brazil. Rather than mapping the flows of Asian immigrants, Lúzio focuses on the way art objects, which preceded the […]
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 […]