Transpacific Engagements

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, competing European empires, notably Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, and others vied for commercial and political control of transoceanic networks, particularly the transpacific routes between Asia and the Americas. The essays in Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires (1565–1898) address the resulting cultural and artistic exchanges with an emphasis on both the Spanish and American enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region. The essays are grouped into three parts entitled “Entangled Empires,” “Empires and Translations,” and “Empires and Trade.” A common thread in the diverse perspectives presented here is the importance of transpacific engagements to the global connections of the sixteenth century and beyond. While the focus is on the specific connection between the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas through the Philippines, we see how other parts of the world, notably South and Southeast Asia and Europe, were also participants impacted by these transpacific linkages. The goal is to convey the complexity of entangled networks of commercial, political, and religious interests that complicate the Spanish enterprise in the Pacific. Commercial ventures into Canton and Manila by the early American republic, for example, overlapped with and later replaced the Spanish galleons. East, South, and Southeast Asian polities and dynasties remained powerful players in what were often multilateral, rather than bilateral, exchanges. Contributors to this volume are based in Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

This volume explores cultural, social and economic connections between the Americas and the South Pacific. It reaches beyond Sino-American collaborations to focus on rather neglected, and sometimes invisible, Southern linkages, asking how these connections originated and have developed over time, which local responses they have generated, and what impact these processes have in the region in terms of representational forms and strategies, new cultural practices, and empowerment of individuals in (post)colonial contexts. The volume also compares and contrasts intriguing parallels of politics and identity formation. By extending the focus beyond East Asia to the Southern Pacific region, including Island connections with the Americas, the volume provides a more comprehensive understanding of recent dynamics and shifting relations across the Pacific. By approaching the Transpacific Americas as an assemblage or relational space, which is created and becomes meaningful through multiple localities and their translocal connections, the book complicates the Euro-American distinction between "centre" and "rim". While the collection offers a distinctive geographical focus, it simultaneously emphasizes the translocal qualities of specific locations through their entanglements in transpacific assemblages within and across cultural, social and economic spheres. Furthermore, without neglecting the inextricable, historical dimension of anthropological perspectives, the focus is on the diverse and unexpected contemporary forms of cultural, social and economic encounters and engagements, and on (re)emerging Indigenous networks. Primarily based on empirical research, the volume explores face-to-face encounters, relations "from below," and transcultural interactions and relationships in, as well as ideas and conceptualizations of, cultural spaces across localities that have long been perceived as separate, but are indeed closely interconnected.

This book is published in conjunction with Intertwined: Transpacific, Transcultural Philippines, Ayala Museum's inaugural exhibition for its newly renovated space opened in 2021. It is authored by the exhibition curator Florina H. Capistrano-Baker, Ph.D. and features essays by contributing scholars and field experts—Sandra Castro; Michael F. Manalo, M.Arch; Maria Cristina Martinez-Juan, Ph.D.; and Iván Valdez-Bubnov, Ph.D. Intertwined provides important scholarship on Filipino heritage and transpacific studies. The publication also serves as the catalogue of the exhibition. The exhibition and its joint publication open up visual and verbal conversations on the complexities and contradictions of Filipino art and identity. By illuminating the Filipino’s transcultural heritage resulting from pre- and post-colonial maritime exchanges with diverse cultures in Asia, America, and Europe, Filipinos can gain a better understanding of our culture and take pride in the excellence we've shown throughout history in the arts, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, and the global economy.

In 1854 Yung Wing, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, returned to a poverty-stricken China, where domestic revolt and foreign invasion were shaking the Chinese empire. Inspired by the U.S. and its liberal education, Yung believed that having more Chinese students educated there was the only way to bring reform to China. Since then, generations of students from China—and other Asian countries—have embarked on this transpacific voyage in search of modernity. What forces have shaped Asian student migration to the U.S.? What impact do foreign students have on the formation of Asian America? How do we grasp the meaning of this transpacific subject in and out of Asian American history and culture? Transpacific Articulations explores these questions in the crossings of Asian culture and American history. Beginning with the story of Yung Wing, the book is organized chronologically to show the transpacific character of Asian student migration. The author examines Chinese students’ writings in English and Chinese, maintaining that so-called “overseas student literature” represents both an imaginary passage to modernity and a transnational culture where meanings of Asian America are rearticulated through Chinese. He also demonstrates that Chinese student political activities in the U.S. in the late 1960s and 1970s—namely, the Baodiao movement that protested Japan’s takeover of the Diaoyutai Islands and the Taiwan independence movement—have important but less examined intersections with Asian America. In addition, the work offers a reflection on the development of Asian American studies in Asia to suggest the continuing significance of knowledge and movement in the formation of Asian America. Transpacific Articulations provides a doubly engaged perspective formed in the nexus of Asian and American histories by taking the foreign student figure seriously. It will not only speak to scholars of Asian American studies, Asian studies, and transnational cultural studies, but also to general readers who are interested in issues of modernity, diaspora, identity, and cultural politics in China and Taiwan.

This book highlights the significance of North­–South connections as a part of transpacific history. The little-known stories it tells of such “vertical” encounters across the Pacific Ocean complicates established historical narratives which focus instead on “horizontal” connections between the United States and Asia.

A sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history, Antipodean America identifies the surprising affinites between Australian and American literature.

Charts a new wave of feminist and queer media activism in post-millennial China Digital Masquerade offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights. Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms.

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World introduces an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology examines the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture.