The Imaginaries of Asia and Latin Americ

For centuries, the transatlantic has been a space of forced labor migrations, mercantilism, colonial and capitalist extraction, imagination, resistance, and resignification. The transpacific, too, has long been a space of imperial imaginaries and conquests, and subaltern protagonisms. In this seminar, we will examine the restructuration of the gradual end of African slavery and the shift to new forms of involuntary labor, or what sociologist Dale Tomich calls, the second slavery. We will examine the relationship between political economy and aesthetics with a focus on Asiatic labor and Asiatic racial form to understand ways that colonial stereotypes about Asian laborers were curated to facilitate the restructuration of the global division of labor. Focusing on the aesthetics of Chinese exclusion in mediating debates about labor, we will examine hemispheric American debates that reconfigured Transatlantic slave relations with eugenics and scientific racism to new forms of transpacific labor. We will question how visual cultures that circulated ideologies about racial capital, miscegenation, and economic liberalization shaped racialized nationalisms and immigrant restriction policies. While we will focus primarily on the Brazilian context, we will also examine the way these discourses took shape in other Latin American countries to interrogate the hemispheric circulation of the ways eugenic ideas about racial mixing shaped deliberations of political life, citizenship, and national belonging.