During the 1910s and 1920s, a wave of Orientalism took root in Peru. Peruvian diplomatic officials dispatched to Eastern Asia turned their homes into self-fashioned Asian art museums, donned Kimonos and published travel narratives of their adventures in the “Orient.” Indigenista intellectuals imagined Japan and China as sites of revolutionary inspiration for a post-colonial global politics. Simultaneously, labor movements and state officials targeted Chinese and Japanese businesses and dwellings as sources of theft, contamination and social degradation. This talk explores how the 1930s global economic crisis and expansion of US hegemony shifted the politics of imagining Asia in the Americas.
ANA MARIA CANDELA is a historian of Modern China and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University. Her research focuses on Chinese migrations to Latin America and on the global dimensions of Chinese history and China’s social transformations. Her current book project Intimate Others: Peruvian Chinese Between Native Place, Nation and World examines the translocal histories and nationalist imaginaries forged by two generations of Cantonese migrant elites in Peru during an era of expanding industrial capitalism, settler colonialism and nation making