Introduction: Cultural and Literary Interactions Between Asia and Latin America

Abstract

This volume continues the critical trajectory that emerged with Ignacio López-Calvo’s groundbreaking work in organizing the series of conferences on East-West Cross-Cultural Relations. More specifically, the idea for this collection originated at the Tenth Conference on East-West Cross-Cultural Relations: East-West and Transpacific Studies: Reconfiguring Transnational Flows Across the Pacific, held at the Faculty of Political Science, the University of Zagreb, Croatia, in May 2018. The volume introduction provides a historical overview, spanning a period of the Hispanic colonial past, when the American world communicated with Asia through the Philippines, and the present time. It follows closely a recent social history that includes global Asian immigration (the Middle East and South and East Asia) and has left notable literary and cultural traces in Latin America. These traces are exemplified in current literary production, as an exploration of the multiple cosmopolitan identities split between both worlds: Latin Americans who recompose their Asian ancestry and Asians who reinvent themselves in the Latin American cultural mosaic. The volume is divided into four parts that examine the following themes: (1) Asian hybrid identities and Latin American transnational narratives, (2) translations and reception of Latin American narratives in Asia, (3) diffracted worlds of Nikkei identities, and (4) interweaving of Asian and Latin American narratives and travel chronicles.