This volume is a collection of essays dealing with the critical dialogue between the cultural production of the Hispanic/Latino world and that of the so-called Orient or the Orient itself, including the Asian and Arab worlds. As we see in these essays, the Europeans’ cultural others (peripheral nations and former colonies) have established an intercultural and intercontinental dialogue among themselves, without feeling the need to resort to the center-metropolis’ mediation. These South-to-South dialogues tend not to be as asymmetric as the old dialogue between the (former) metropolis (the hegemonic, Eurocentric center) and the colonies. These essays about Hispanic and Latino cultural production (most of them dealing with literature, but some covering urban art, music, and film) provide vivid examples of de-colonizing impetus and cultural resistance. In some of them, we can find peripheral subjectivities’ perception of other peripheral, racialized, and (post)colonial subjects and their cultures.

How can we talk about World Literature if we do not actually examine the world as a whole? Research on World Literature commonly focuses on the dynamics of a western center and a southern periphery, ignoring the fact that numerous literary relationships exist beyond these established constellations of thinking and reading within the Global South. Re-Mapping World Literature suggests a different approach that aims to investigate new navigational tools that extend beyond the known poles and meridians of current literary maps. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological crosscurrents, and book market processes within the Global South which thus far have received scant attention. The contributions to this volume, from renowned scholars in the fields of World and Latin American literatures, assess travelling aesthetics and genres, processes of translation and circulation of literary works, as well as the complex epistemological entanglements and shared worldviews between Latin America, Africa and Asia. A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a must-read for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.

In recent decades in Spain and Latin America, transnational voices, typically stereotyped, alienated or co-opted in the Western world, have been gaining increasing presence in cultural texts. The transnational representation of the “Oriental” subject, namely Arabs and Jews, Chinese and other ethnic groups that have migrated to Spain and Latin America either voluntarily or forcefully, is now being seen anew in both literature and cinema. This book explores Orientalism beyond literature, in which it has already garnered attention, to examine the new ways of seeing and interpreting both the Middle East and the East in contemporary films, in which many of the immigrants traditionally omitted from the dominant narratives are able to present the trauma, memories and violence of their exile and migration. As such, this volume explores the representation of those single and doubly marginalized groups in contemporary Spanish and Latin American cinema, analysing how films from Spain, Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Argentina portray transnational subjects from a wide spectrum of the “Orient” world, including Maghrebs from North Africa, and Palestinian, Jewish, Chinese, and Korean peoples. Once vulnerable to the dominant culture of their adopted homes, facing ostracism and marginalisation, these groups are now entering into the popular imagination and revised history of their new countries. This volume explores the following questions as starting points for its analysis: Are these manifestations the new orientalist normative, or are there other characterizations? Are new cinematic scopes and understandings being created? The old stereotypical orientalist ways of seeing these vulnerable groups are beginning to change to a more authentic representation, although, in some cases, they may still reside in the subtext of films.

This book turns to the intellectual discourses that have emerged from India and Latin America, two outposts of the Global South, on the themes of imperialism, sovereignty, development, and socio-economic, racial and caste inequalities. It recovers the elided reflective traditions of thinkers, writers and activists from these peripheries and highlights the distinctive ideas, alliances and parallelisms in their works, as well as the manner in which they articulate liberatory paradigms which continue to have contemporary relevance. The book maps the innovative epistemic engagements of thinkers from India and Latin America, highlighting the manner in which they have disrupted and challenged the hierarchies of global knowledge production. It argues that political, spatial and historical distinctions notwithstanding, the experiences of peripheralization, their common traditions of resistance to oppression and their deeply entangled histories have forged a shared intellectual identity and a rich alternative set of emancipatory epistemologies grounded in the realities and histories of Southern nations. The book recovers this body of work as mass movements the world over seek civilizational alternatives to capitalist modernity. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of development studies, history, political science, sociology, political economy, South Asian studies, Latin American studies and Global South studies.

Japanese Brazilian Saudades explores the self-definition of Nikkei discourse in Portuguese-language cultural production by Brazilian authors of Japanese ancestry. Ignacio López-Calvo uses books and films by twentieth-century Nikkei authors as case studies to redefine the ideas of Brazilianness and Japaneseness from both a national and a transnational perspective. The result suggests an alternative model of postcoloniality, particularly as it pertains to the post–World War II experience of Nikkei people in Brazil. López-Calvo addresses the complex creation of Japanese Brazilian identities and the history of immigration, showing how the community has used writing as a form of reconciliation and affirmation of their competing identities as Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian. Japanese in Brazil have employed a twofold strategic, rhetorical engineering: the affirmation of ethno-cultural difference on the one hand, and the collective assertion of citizenship and belonging to the Brazilian nation on the other. López-Calvo also grapples with the community’s inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian history and literature, using the concept of “epistemicide” to refer to the government’s attempt to impose a Western value system, Brazilian culture, and Portuguese language on the Nikkeijin, while at the same time trying to destroy Japanese language and culture in Brazil by prohibiting Japanese language instruction in schools, Japanese-language publications, and even speaking Japanese in public. Japanese Brazilian Saudades contributes to the literature criticizing the “cognitive injustice” that fails to acknowledge the value of the global South and non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. With important implications for both Latin American studies and Nikkei studies, it expands discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and communal belonging through art and narrative.

In her book, The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature, Rebecca Riger Tsurumi captures the remarkable story behind the changing human landscape in Peru at the end of the nineteenth century when Japanese immigrants established what would become the second largest Japanese community in South America. She analyzes how non-Japanese Peruvian narrators unlock the unspoken attitudes and beliefs about the Japanese held by mainstream Peruvian society, as reflected in works written between 1966 and 2006. Tsurumi explores how these Peruvian literary giants, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Gutiérrez, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Carmen Ollé, Pilar Dughi, and Mario Bellatin, invented Japanese characters whose cultural differences fascinated and confounded their creators. She compares the outsider views of these Peruvian narrators with the insider perceptions of two Japanese Peruvian poets, José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato, who tap personal experiences and memories to create images that define their identities. The book begins with a brief sociohistorical overview of Japan and Peru, describing the conditions in both nations that resulted in Japanese immigration to Peru and concluding in contemporary times. Tsurumi traces the evolution of the terms "Orient" and "Japanese/Oriental" and the depiction of Asians in Modernista poetry and in later works by Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. She analyzes the images of the Japanese portrayed in individual works of modern Peruvian narrative, comparing them with those created in Japanese Peruvian poetry. The book concludes with an appendix containing excerpts from Tsurumi's interviews and correspondence in Spanish with writers and poets in Lima and Mexico City.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. This is the first book-length study in English of the Japanese-language literary activities of early Japanese migrants to Brazil. It provides a detailed history of Japanese-language bookstores, serialized newspaper fiction, original creative works, and critical apparatuses that existed in Brazil prior to World War II. This case study of the reading and writing of one diasporic population challenges the dominant mode of literary study, in which texts are often explicitly or implicitly understood through a framework of ethno-nationalism. Self-representations by writers in the diaspora reveal flaws in this prevailing framework through what Edward Mack calls “acquired alterity,” in which expectations about the stability of ethnic identity are subverted in surprising ways. Acquired Alterity encourages a reconsideration of the ramifications (and motivations) of cultural analyses of texts and the constructions of peoplehood that are often the true objects of literary knowledge production.