Keynote Speaker: Dr. Andrea Mendoza (from UC San Diego)

Date: Thursday, April 13, 2023
Time: 6:00-7:00pm
Location: Scharbauer Debate Chamber (1001)

                  Towards an Undisciplined Transpacific (Asia and Latin America)

•    Event Preview: This lecture will consider how the transpacific critique offers a pedagogical framework for decolonizing the study of the histories and cultural productions that underwrite the connections, disconnections, encounters, nonencounters, and intimacies between Asia and Latin America. Through an emphasis on “undisciplining,” it argues for understanding the constructed distances between Area and Ethnic Studies as openings for ways to rethink and re-orient the models that we use to attend to the way we research and teach questions around racism and racial formations, gender and heterosexism, class and capitalist expropriation, and settler colonial and imperial national violence. What would it mean, the lecture asks, to envision the transpacific classroom as one that accounts for voices, histories, and experiences often erased or disregarded by Anglo-American disciplinary models?

•    Keynote Bio: Dr. Andrea Mendoza (Ph.D. Cornell) is Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she serves as an affiliated faculty member in the Critical Gender Studies, Film Studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies, Latinx/Chicanx Studies, Latin American Studies, and Japanese Studies Programs. Currently, she is completing her first academic book manuscript, tentatively titled Transpacific Nonencounters: Confronting Race, Modernity, and the “Ends” of Area, which proposes critical comparative framework of “nonencounters” that brings together and highlights the tensions between the seemingly disparate discursive circuits that shaped ideas about racial identity-making and modernity across twentieth-century Japan and Mexico. Writing from this project has recently appeared in publication in the journal Japan Forum and the research volume East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of the Transpacific.

For event information, please contact Director of Asian Studies, Dr. Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, at b.ireland@tcu.edu