Transpacific Nonencounters: Racial Disconnects Across Twentieth-Century Japan and Mexico
Transpacific Nonencounters: Racial Disconnects Across Twentieth-Century Japan and Mexico
by Andrea Mendoza
Duke University Press, 2026
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-3373-8
Paper: 978-1-4780-3862-7
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9459-3 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-6220-2 (standard)
About the Book
In Transpacific Nonencounters, Andrea Mendoza works across the seemingly unconnected histories of race and nation in modern Mexico and Japan, showing the commonalities in the way race figures in their state and social formations through a method Mendoza calls the theory of nonencounter. Intellectual and cultural productions of racial knowledge were important for the formation of the modernizing Mexican and Japanese states at the beginning of the twentieth century and helped conceive the project of national modernity through ideologies that promoted multiracial and multiethnic belonging—mestizaje and Pan-Asian co-prosperity. Despite the diasporic, economic, and political points of contact that connected these states throughout the twentieth century, however, traditional Eurocentric comparative and area-based studies treat the formations and legacies of Mexican mestizo nationalism and Japanese imperialism as wholly unrelated phenomena. Transpacific Nonencounters proposes a theory of nonencounter to formulate the logic of disciplinary disconnection, offering a framework and hermeneutic for a transpacific account of how Japanese imperialism and Mexican mestizo settler nationalism structured and reinforced one another through the modern formations of race and racism.
About the Author
Andrea Mendoza is Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Reviews
“Andrea Mendoza’s Transpacific Nonencounters is a groundbreaking study that redefines how we think about race, coloniality, and knowledge production across Japan and Mexico. Through the innovative framework of “nonencounter,’ Mendoza offers a bold, field-defining contribution to transpacific, decolonial, and comparative studies.”
-- Leo T.S. Ching, author of Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia
-- Leo T.S. Ching, author of Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia
“Transpacific Nonencounters urges readers to reevaluate the language of distance and difference that articulates settler-colonialism, imperialism, and anti-Blackness as a global grammar. Mendoza offers the concept of the nonencounter as a capacious site of reading that indexes these disavowed transpacific legacies of racism. An invaluable and inspiring contribution to understanding the stakes of adopting the transpacific as a critical viewpoint.”
-- Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia
-- Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia
Tags
Nationalism in literature, Mexican literature, Critical race theory, Asian Studies, Caribbean & Latin American Studies, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Mexico, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, History and criticism, Political Science, Social Science
Open Access Information
Label: University of California Libraries
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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