This book takes on the worthy and weighty task of illuminating forgotten Afro-Asian connections in the Western Hemisphere. The collection of essays takes varying literary, historical, and cultural-studies approaches to the convergence of African and Asian diasporas in the Americas.
Linda Ainouche wonders if the dearth of studies results from a lack of research, interest, or sources. In any case, the alignment of Afro-Asian connections has the potential to form an incisive critique of the ways that nationalisms and latinidad, in particular, have formed across Latin America and have functioned to erase such racialized difference and specific histories of exploitation. The first chapter, by co-editor Debbie Lee-DiStefano, on this context in Peru puts Chineseness and blackness in conversation with indigeneity, setting the ground for these important configurations of race and ethnicity. The book is part of a trend of renewed inquiry into the triangulation of race, to use Claire Jean Kim's formulation. Another recent book by literary scholar Ana Paulina Lee, Mandarin Brazil (2018), forms a cultural counter-archive to critique how Brazilian multiculturalist nationalism formed against the figure of the Chinese foreigner.
In many ways, this new book is a continuation of a conversation in the co-edited Imagining Asia in the Americas arranged by Lee-DiStefano and Zelideth Maria Rivas, who is also a contributor to this collection. It is renewed here with a more specialized focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, as opposed to highlighting the Latinx US context. Even as the volume aims to decenter the United States, Europe, and whiteness, these formations remain ever-present because they are being written against in the coalition of Afro-Asia. The volume importantly centers the institution of racial indenture, which was not implemented in the United States after the abolition of racial slavery, forming the contrast in the racialization of Asians in Latin America and the Caribbean versus the United States. It is clear that the chapters are the result of a robust intellectual synthesis taking place at conferences on Asians in the Caribbean and Latin America, with numerous special sessions at annual conferences of the Association of Asian American Studies, the Asian Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, and the yearly Asians in the Americas conference that takes place at various US institutions. Out of a dearth, a community has created a plenty of specificity and publications to accompany the conversation.
The book represents this wealth of engagement and is organized in three sections of three chapters each; the sections examine in turn identity, contact zones, and bodies. Even though interludes and an introduction form the necessary connective tissue to cohere the disparate essays, the sections and chapters feel as though they could be organized in multiple ways. Borrowing from the theoretical undergirding by critics Lisa Lowe and Mary Louise Pratt, the frame of the book is outlined by leaders in the field: historian Kathleen López, who wrote Chinese Cubans (2013), and literary critic Lisa Yun, who wrote The Coolie Speaks (2008). Their foundational books on the Chinese in Cuba have set the grounds for an approach that entwines the legal and historical transnational stakes of examining African enslavement and Chinese indenture together.
Yun and López pave the way for the other contributors, a number of them emerging scholars who analyze site-specific case studies, from the legibly Chinese aesthetic of modernist Cuban painter Wifredo Lam's artwork to the historic racialization of the Chinese and Africans in Peru, to the Hindu legacy of dreadlocks in Rastafari culture, to the trope of the woman of mixed ancestry—la mulata achinada—in Cuba. At times, there in an uneasy comparison formed between the atrocities of indenture and enslavement that pits Asianness against blackness rather than connecting the two as the title suggests. Though most of the chapters examine Afro-Chinese intimacies, it is important that the book is not limited simply to the Chinese overseas in Latin America, arguably its own subfield. For instance, there are chapters that engage Indian indenture in Jamaica and Afro-Asian identity formation in the case of Japanese Brazilians.
Although these may seem niche topics of singular interest, they are capacious in their global stakes. Afro-Asian intersections are not new in the Caribbean and Central and South America, and these accounts outline the storied history of encounters that are often erased by the contemporary predatory narrative of “China in Latin America” or “China in the Caribbean,” often tinged with “Yellow Peril” rhetoric. The imaginary of Asia and the reality of Asian people have a deep history across the continent, and in varying ways, with narratives related to labor and capital. The authors outline these connections.
The book could perhaps have been more cohesive if it dwelled more deeply on the question it poses from the outset: the forgetting of Afro-Asian connections as a point of entry to open epistemological questions regarding historiographies and fictions of racial formations in the Americas. More attention to the function of literature and the burden of representation for “ethnic” literary texts, as well as the stakes of recuperation, would have created a more robust overarching frame. As Yun writes, the project is an “incomplete chronology,” so if the volume feels unfinished, this is a good thing, because, as she suggests, it points to the richness of the topic. Instead of drawing any singular conclusions and orthodoxies, the field of Afro-Asian connections in the Caribbean and Latin America is about opening up, zooming out, and deepening hemispheric critique.
