Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean ed. by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano

Abstract

Reviewed by: Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean ed. by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano Vanessa K. Valdés Ossa, Luisa Marcela, and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, editors. Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lexington, 2019. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-1-498-58708-2. With Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, editors Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano have provided us an admirable collection of innovative and forward-thinking scholarship that destabilizes and therefore enlivens the disciplines of Latin American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Asian Studies. As Lisa Yun reminds us in her introduction, global Afro-Asian studies began in 1955 with the Bandung Conference; yet it has been marginalized within studies about the Americas. The contributions of peoples of African and Asian descent to Latin American and Caribbean nations have long gone ignored within regional imaginaries; this volume goes a long way to correcting this systematic erasure. The editors divide the collection into three parts, “Identity and National Discourses,” “Contact Zones, Solidarity, and Syncretism,” and “Bodies, Genders, and Identities,” with three essays in each and an interlude by Kathleen López introducing each section. López explains that the essays in the first part “reinterpret concepts of mestizaje to emphasize Afro-Asian centrality to nation-building, influence in national cultural icons, and cross-racial and transnational solidarities” (3). With the first essay, “Afro and Chinese Depictions in Peruvian Social Discourse at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Debbie Lee-DiStefano reminds us that Black and Asian presence in the Americas stems from their common histories in having “served as a commodity of labor to be used at the behest of others who sought economic gain at their expense” (7). She goes on to examine José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928) to reveal how he privileges the indigenous over Black and Chinese populations in his proposal toward socioeconomic equity in the Peruvian nation. Mey-Yen Moriuchi convincingly argues for more scholarship emphasizing both the Asian and African heritages simultaneously of renowned Cuban artist Wifredo Lam in “Locating Chinese Culture and Aesthetics in the Art of Wifredo Lam.” In “Afro-Asian-Caribbean Connections in Transnational Circulation: The Harlem Ashram as Chronotope,” Malathi Iyengar calls our attention to a brownstone on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue as a critical site of South Asian, African American, and Puerto Rican political activism in the 1940s. The focus of the second section of the volume is representative cultural production resulting from Afro-Asian synthesis in the region. Examining four Japanese-Brazilian novels written in both Portuguese and Japanese within an almost sixty-year span, beginning in 1950, Zelideth María Rivas debunks the stereotype of Asian insularity within the Brazilian nation, focusing instead on representations of Afro-Asian intimacies and exchanges in “Merging the Transpacific with the Transatlantic: Afro-Asia in Japanese Brazilian Narratives.” Luisa Marcela Osso explores the parallel histories and fictionalized interactions of the Afro- and Sino-Cuban communities through the novels by Cristina García and Mayra Montero in “Parallels and Intersections: Afro-Chinese Relationships and Spiritual Connections in Monkey Hunting and Como un mensajero tuyo.” With her essay “Erased from Collective Memory: Dreadlocks Story Documentary Untangles the Hindu Legacy of Rastafari,” producer-director Linda Aïnouche reflects on the inspiration behind her 2014 documentary as well as highlights understudied influences of Hinduism on Rastafarianism in Jamaica. The third and final section interrogates stereotypes of the hypersexualized mulata and the non-sexual Asian male in the Caribbean. Dania Abreu-Torres’s “Body of Reconciliation: Aida [End Page 287] Petrinera Cheng’s Journey in Como un mensajero tuyo by Mayra Montero” contends that the portrait of the protagonist destabilizes the fetishized categorization of the mulata and is therefore suggestive of new renderings of gendered and racialized women within Cuban literature. In her essay “‘I Am Like One of those Women’: Chinese Masculinity as Feminist Writing Strategy in Three West Indian Novels,” Anne-Marie Lee-Loy puts forth that the effeminized representations of Asian masculinity in Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus (1994/Trinidad); Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999...