Transnational Crossroads

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented migration and interaction for Asian, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultures in the Americas and the American Pacific. Some of these ethnic groups already had historic ties, but technology, migration, and globalization during the twentieth century brought them into even closer contact. Transnational Crossroads explores and triangulates for the first time the interactions and contacts among these three cultural groups that were brought together by the expanding American empire from 1867 to 1950. Through a comparative framework, this volume weaves together narratives of U.S. and Spanish empire, globalization, resistance, and identity, as well as social, labor, and political movements. Contributors examine multiethnic celebrities and key figures, migratory paths, cultural productions, and social and political formations among these three groups. Engaging multiple disciplines and methodologies, these studies of Asian American, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultural interactions explode traditional notions of ethnic studies and introduce new approaches to transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the American Pacific

Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel

Camilla Fojas, in her paper Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel, argues that turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan literary texts encoded political interests and that they were concerned with the proper way of being cosmopolitan and national at the same time, of forging literary and diplomatic parity between national and international interests. Unfortunately, this search for balance was beset by rhetorical and ideological prejudices manifest in phobic language about the corrupting forces of cosmopolitan effeminacy on national character. The conflict of cosmopolitanism with nationalism was played out as a kind of war between the sexes, as a gendered battle for dominance. This tension is born out in the critical responses to José Enrique Rodó\u27s Ariel (1900), a text that seeks to reroute the course of national identity through a turn to cosmopolitanism. Although women are excluded from the discursive scene of Ariel, its generic form is transgendered and inclusive, its rhetoric contains the possibility of breaking the masculinist coda of nationalism. Also, the parable of the hospitable king restores cosmopolitanism to its fundamental basis in hospitality where the outcast figures of speculation and imagination, of the strange and queer, might find refuge. The rhetoric of Ariel is insufferable and its classical boys-only model is tiresomely narrow, yet the refusal of North American materialism is admirable and it ventures onto terrain untraversed by many other modernists. In the end, it retains the most useful model of cosmopolitanism, one forgotten in the relentless drive to be modern

Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies

This essay seeks to map out the critical turn in mixed race studies. It discusses whether and to what extent the field that is now being called critical mixed race studies (CMRS) diverges from previous explorations of the topic of mixed race, thereby leading to formations of new intellectual terrain