Andrea S. Bachner

This project explores the rich history of cultural contact, exchange, and affinity between Latin American and Chinese cultures from the late nineteenth century to today. It focuses on transpacific patterns of circulation between two regions that have long been “peripheral” to a Western-centric perspective, in spite of their vibrant cultural, literary, and aesthetic productions. By pushing cultural comparison beyond the axes of East and West and North and South, by questioning the dichotomy of centers and margins, by espousing a bilateral and multi-perspectival approach, this project remaps the global trajectories of cultural expressions. As a challenge to basic assumptions of comparison and (in)commensurability, it formulates an intercultural ethics of comparative cultural analysis.