100 books like East Asia, Latin America, and the Decolonization of Transpacific Studies

This book studies the anti-imperialist dialog between twentieth-century Latin American and Filipino intellectuals, writers, and diplomats who, in her view, appropriated brotherly discourses of Latinidad and Hispanidad as part of their resistance versus US imperialism. This book opened my eyes to the fact that, as late as the twentieth century, Filipino intellectuals still saw themselves as an intrinsic part of the Hispanic world and took for granted that it was beneficial for their country to keep a cultural and sociopolitical alliance with Latin America if they wanted to rid themselves of the new imperial yoke: the United States.

Between Empires compares the anti-imperial literature and history of two former Spanish colonies, Cuba and the Philippines, but this time focusing on the late-nineteenth-century “intercolonial alliance” and, more specifically, on the oeuvres of two nationalist authors and national heroes: the Cuban José Martí and the Filipino José Rizal. Hagimoto explores a transpacific collective consciousness of resistance as well as the shared historical ties between Latin America and the Philippines. What I found more exciting about this book was that it reveals how, led by two national heroes and martyrs, there was still, well after the end of the Manila Galleon transpacific route, an end-of-nineteenth-century anti-colonial alliance between two far-away countries united by a shared history of colonial domination and oppression.

Afro-Asian Connections looks at the cross-cultural relations between people of African and Asian ancestries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The chapters address how their common history in agrarian labor led to numerous interactions that have been reflected in the region’s history, literature, art, and religion. I found this continuation of the exploration of Afro-Asian sociocultural exchanges in Latin America initiated by Kathy López and Evelyn Hu-DeHart years earlier extremely timely and revealing, as it underscores a long history of intermittent alliances and animosities.

This was the first book on the literary representation of the Japanese and Nikkeijin in Peruvian fiction. It analyzes literature published by both Nikkei (the Nisei authors José Watanabe and Doris Moromisato) and non-Nikkei Peruvian authors (Mario Vargas Llosa, Mario Bellatin, etc) from 1996 to 2005. The book closes with interviews with six authors whose works are examined in the book: Miguel Francisco Gutiérrez Correa, Carmen Ollé Nava, Pilar Dughi Martínez, Mario Bellatin, José Watanabe, and Doris Moromisato. This important study opened the way for many other recent explorations of the traces of Japaneseness in Peruvian literature as well as the relevance of Japanese-Peruvian writing. 

If you’d like to take a relatively straightforward but sophisticated tour through ignorance, this book is for you. 

Frankly, it’s a book I would like to have written. The author is a philosopher and I’m not, so his viewpoint and voice differ from mine, but his book echoes, parallels, and expands my own work and a host of others’ writings on ignorance. DeNicola uses four engaging metaphors as vehicles for his tour: ignorance as a place, a boundary, a limit, and a horizon. 

His treatment of ignorance nicely avoids the usual negative bias against it. Like me, he recognizes that ignorance has its uses and even can be beneficial or virtuous. And his footnotes and bibliography provide plenty of material if you want to find out more. 

Two of Sarduy’s most extraordinary writings from the 1970s, these twin works chart a territory of radical transformation. In the first part of the book, Cobra makes their gender transition with the support of a slew of unusual characters who also shape-shift via the mysterious and violent rites of a motorcycle gang and a group of Tantric Buddhist lamas. Metamorphosis continues in the second half of the book, wherein a Cuban-Chinese cook reincarnates as the Buddha, in the midst of the Cuban revolution. The wild tales create a distinctive space for being otherwise.

As an undergraduate student I was lucky enough to take Professor Earle’s class on the history of food in Latin America and this book encapsulates the expansive outlook and conceptual complexity that made that class so mind-bogglingly brilliant and enjoyable. By examining the systems of thought through which European colonizers and Indigenous peoples of the Americas understood different foods, ways of cooking and eating, and the influence of diet on people’s bodies, The Body of the Conquistador helped me to think about the axiom “you are what you eat” in a whole new way. 

The great Mexican author Carlos Fuentes wrote this book as a commemorative reflection of an earlier quincentennial, that of 1492-1992. Fuentes’ book is transatlantic in scope and considers the fraught history of Hispanic heritage in the Americas. The title metaphorically employs the mirror—both of the kind fashioned from obsidian by the Aztecs and the one bringing the viewer into Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece of Spanish golden-age painting, Las Meninas—in reflecting on this mixed inheritance five centuries later. Cultural mixing, or mestizaje, defines the creation of Latin America and its millennial-deep roots in the exchange networks, migrations, political alliances, and colonialism on the part of Mesoamerican and Iberian peoples, on both sides of the Atlantic. Fuentes is a gifted writer and Buried Mirror is what first got me thinking about these historical entanglements when I read it as a college student.

This updated edition of Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book charts the long history of the United States’ imperial domination of Latin America through gunboat diplomacy, invasion, hard and soft coups, mercenary wars, and covert actions.

Often considered its ‘backyard,’ Latin America is where the United States “learned how to project its power, worked out effective and flexible tactics of extraterritorial administration, established legal precedents, and acquired its conception of itself as an empire like no other before it.” Grandin illustrates this history with numerous historical and contemporary examples, including the 1973 US-supported coup in Chile, which brought to power Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship.

With the help of University of Chicago economists Frederic Von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the dictatorship pioneered the first neoliberal imperial “workshop.” Chile would become the template for other attempts at regime change in the region, from the 1980s wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to… show more.

This book introduced me to the concept of a "private pregnancy." Imagine that you are a wealthy young woman in the colonial Spanish empire. Your beloved asks to marry you, and you agree; based on that agreement, you begin to have sexual relations. You become pregnant. In many cases, this would not matter: marriage would eventually legitimate that child.

But what if he leaves or dies? You and your family have to create a fiction that you are not pregnant, place your child elsewhere, and hope you live an honorable enough life that the child can someday also benefit from your reputation. This is the kernel of Twinam's story of how Latin American elites manufactured notions of honor within their society and how Spanish monarchs ended up publishing a price list for legitimating illegitimate births after the fact. It really revealed the mindset behind elite society, not only colonial but… show more.