CfP: When Global East Meeting Global South: East Asia and Latin American
University of Kansas – Lawrence, Kansas – March 29, 2024
The Center for Global and International Studies, Center for East Asian Studies, and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kansas are pleased to announce a call for papers for the „East Asia and Latin America“ conference, to be held virtually on Friday, March 29th, at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars from a variety of fields, including politics, history, economics, religion, anthropology, business, literature and the arts, to explore the historical and contemporary links between East Asia and Latin America and to rethink dominant narratives and knowledge production by the West and Global North.
The connections between East Asia and Latin America date to the colonial period, when the Spanish and Portuguese empires began trading with the “East Indies.” Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, relations between the two regions expanded due to the large-scale labor migration from Japan and China to Latin America and China’s political outreach during the Maoist period. At the same time, the Japanese government prompted reverse migration to address Japan’s labor shortage during the 1980s bubble economy, which prompted Japanese Brazilians and Peruvians to „return“ to Japan so that the country could maintain the myth of being a homogeneous nation. As first Japan, and then Korea and China became major producers of consumer goods, and as Latin America became a producer of raw materials for East Asia manufacturers, the nature of the relations between Latin America and East Asia has shifted in a variety of ways. For example, competition for resources and for diplomatic recognition have led China to extend the Belt and Road Initiative as well as other soft power and cultural diplomacy strategies to the region. By the same token, East Asian cultural products such as Korean and Japanese music and art have become increasingly popular in Latin America as have Latin American music and dance in East Asia.
We welcome individual papers or complete panels that will examine the historical and contemporary political, economic, cultural, and social interactions between East Asia and Latin America, and to explore how these interactions complement, complicate, or challenge such dominant narratives as the rich and the poor, East and West, and North and South based on Euromerican-centered binary thinking.
Papers can be delivered in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. The event will be hybrid, with most sessions online. However, we welcome participants to visit us on our KU campus in Lawrence, Kansas, where we will have an in-person audience.
The due date for submission is February 20, 2024. Accepted panels or papers will be notified by March 1, 2024.
If you have questions, please contact Professors Luciano Tosta (lucianotosta@ku.edu), Ayako Mizumura (mizu@ku.edu), or Megan Greene (mgreene@ku.edu).
Please submit your proposals here: