Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean explores the connections between people of Asian and African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although their journeys started from different points of origin, spanning two separate oceans, their point of contact in this hemisphere brought them together under a hegemonic system that would treat these seemingly disparate continental ancestries as one. Historically, an overwhelming majority of people of African and Asian descent were brought to the Americas as sources of labor to uphold the plantation, agrarian economies leading to complex relationships and interactions. The contributions to this collection examine various aspects of these connections. The authors bring to the forefront perspectives regarding history, literature, art, and religion and engage how they are manifested in these Afro-Asian relationships and interactions. They investigate what has received little academic engagement outside the acknowledgement that there are groups who are of African and Asian descent. In regard to their relationships with the dominant Europeanized center, references to both groups typically only view them as singular entities. What this interdisciplinary collection presents is a more cohesive approach that strives to place them at the center together and view their relationships in their historical contexts.

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. . . . This is a much-needed volume, one that opens lines of inquiry and research possibilities for students and scholars of the Americas, Asia, and Africa alike. Within the academy, it is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students who will find scholarship that builds on the legacies of Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio Lopez-Calvo, and Kathleen Lopez, among others. It is a generative and provocative collection, one that has the potential to serve as a foundational text for more work in the studies of the Americas., By bringing global Afro-Asian studies to the forefront, this volume proposes an innovative historical and literary approach in Latin American and Caribbean studies. It explores new epistemologies emerging from the transatlantic and transpacific cross-cultural relations and solidarity between people of African and Asian ancestry throughout the hemisphere. In particular, it addresses how these Afro-Asian contact zones and peripheral, silenced knowledges transformed, through the recovery of their repressed agencies, identitarian and national discourses in the Americas., The essays collected this book by Ossa and Lee-Distefano present a formidable addition to Latin American, African, and Asian studies—where the fields converge in vigorous and well-researched conversation with one another.

Luisa Marcela Ossa is associate professor of Spanish and area chair of the undergraduate Spanish program at La Salle University. Debbie Lee-DiStefano is professor of Spanish at Southeast Missouri State University.