“Tres veces apátrida”: Redefining World Literature through the Work of Contemporary Asian/Latin American Writers

Paula Park, Associate Professor of Spanish at Wesleyan University

The history of migration from Asia to the Americas is long and profound. Yet the production and reception of literature by Asian migrants in Latin America is a fairly recent phenomenon. This, in part, is due to the difficulty of situating their work in neatly bound national categories. This lecture will offer an overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century East Asian-Latin American writers, among them Siu Kam Wen, Julia Wong, Kyoung Park, and Moisés Park, who reflect on their condition as perpetual outsiders in the Americas and beyond. Engaging with the concepts of “serial migration” (Lok Siu) and “rhizomatic diaspora” (Kyeyoung Park), which refer, respectively, to the extended transnational crossings of Chinese and Korean migrants in the Americas, the work of these writers will be presented as postnational literature as well as one that invites us to rethink our approach to world literature.