Transpacific Marxism: Theory, Practice, Solidarity

9AM-5PM, Friday April 25 Weiser Hall | Room 1010

East Asia and Latin America have an intertwined history of experimentation with Marxist theory and practice, which has informed past and present efforts to build solidarity across the Pacific. Please join us for a day of panel presentations and roundtable discussions as leading scholars from East Asian and Latin American Studies explore the multifaceted phenomenon that we have termed transpacific Marxism.

Program

9:00-9:15        Welcome Remarks

9:15-10:45      Thinking the Transpacific

Moderated by Youngkyun Choi (Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan)

• Junyoung Verónica Kim (NYU), “Transpacific Freedom Dreams: Racial Capitalism, Dirty Wars, and Militarized Diaspora(s) in Asia-Latin America”
• Laura Torres-Rodríguez (Emory University), “Transpacific Marxisms and the Question of Capitalist Time”
• Thiti Jamkajornkeiat (University of Victoria), “Transpacific Contradictions”

11:00-12:30     East Asian Elective Affinities

Moderated by Dongkyu Yeom (Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan)

• Viren Murthy (UW-Madison), “Cuba is Part of Asia: Rethinking Global Maoism in Relation to East Asia and Latin America”
• William Marotti (UCLA) “One Station from Yoyogi: Art on the Borders of Marxism and Revolution”
• Hyun Ok Park (York University) “Simultaneity and Difference in Left Politics: On South Korean and Global Conditions”

1:30-3:00        Latin American Correspondences

Moderated by Ariana Afsari (Comparative Literature, University of Michigan)

• Anne Garland Mahler (University of Virginia), “The Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas and Regino Pedroso’s Afro-Chinese-Cuban Writings”
• Brian Whitener (University at Buffalo), “Value-Form, Planetary Capitalism, and Transpacific Solidarities”
• Sarah Townsend (Penn State) “Opera in the Amazonian Export Zone”

3:15-4:30        Roundtable: Transpacific Marxism Today

Moderated by Daniel Weaver (English, University of Michigan)

4:30-4:45       Closing Remarks

Participants

Presenters

Thiti Jamkajornkeiat is Assistant Professor of Global Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Victoria, where he teaches courses on activism, human rights, public humanities, and anticolonialism in 20th- and 21st-century Asia. He serves as a board member of the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Society and an editorial member of positions: asia critique collective. His essays and interviews appeared in Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, Spectre, Haymarket Books, positions:politics, and Verge. He works at the intersection of Marxism, anticolonialism, and Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia and Thailand. His first book project charts an intellectual history of and develops a Marxist political theory from left internationalism in Indonesia during the Bandung era through the intertwined circuits of third worldism and minor communism.

Junyoung Verónica Kim is a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, where she will be joining Liberal Studies starting Fall 2025 as Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Cultures. Her interdisciplinary research examines how settler militarism, imperialism, and racial capitalism intersect in East Asia and Latin America and across hemispheric Asian American diasporas. She has published on Korean immigration in Argentina, the Global South project, Transpacific Studies, Asian-Latin American literature, and Latin American involvement during the Korean War.  Dr. Kim is on the editorial board for the book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” for Palgrave Macmillian, and “Between Asias and Americas” for University of Pittsburgh Press, and serves on the executive committees of numerous scholarly organizations. She is a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective” and an associate member of the Korea Policy Institute. Her book in progress–Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America– centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms, hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new monograph tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War, as well as co-editing a special issue of positions: asia critique on "The Transpacific Korean War."

Anne Garland Mahler (University of Virginia) is an interdisciplinary scholar focused on South-South political and cultural movements. She is author of From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (2018) and co-editor of The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters (2022). She has two books in progress: A Wide Net of Solidarity: Anti-Racism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe (forthcoming Duke UP, 2025) and The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Global South (forthcoming 2026).

William Marotti is an Associate Professor of History and Chair of the East Asian Studies MA IDP Program at UCLA. He is Director of the Japanese Arts and Globalizations (JAG) research group, www.jag.ucla.edu. Marotti teaches modern Japanese history with an emphasis on the politics of culture, everyday life, and political legitimacy in modern and post-WWII history. Marotti's Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013) addresses politics in Japan in the 1960s through a focus upon avant-garde artistic production and performance. His current book project, “The Art of Revolution: Politics and Aesthetic Dissent in Japan’s 1968,” analyzes cultural politics and oppositional practices in Japan with particular emphasis on 1968 as a global event.www.history.ucla.edu/marotti

Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and researches Chinese, Japanese and Indian intellectual history.  He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011), The Politics of Time in China and Japan, Routledge, 2022) and Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (University of Chicago, 2023).  He is co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014), co-editor with Joyce Liu of East Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor with Max Ward and Fabian Schäfer of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017).  He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique, Jewish Social Studies, Critical Historical Studies, Journal of Labor and Society.

Hyun Ok Park is a professor in the Department of Sociology at York University. With archival and ethnographic research, her research investigates global capitalism in colonial, industrial, and financial forms, as well as democracy, socialism, and post-socialist transition. She is the author of two books: Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005); The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea (Columbia University Press, 2015; the Korean translation, Chabon Ŭi Muŭisik, was published in 2023). Currently, she is finalizing a book manuscript titled A Sublime Disaster: The Sewŏl Ferry Incident and the Politics of the Living Dead, which examines the everyday politics of four communities grappling with the interconnected tripartite crises of capital accumulation, liberal democracy, and leftist politics. The work analyzes the social infrastructure of fascism while identifying new political possibilities that escape the limits of historical and contemporary leftist frameworks.

Laura Juliana Torres-Rodríguez is an Associate Professor at Emory University. Her research and teaching focus on several areas, including Mexican literary and cultural studies, Asian-Latin American studies, transpacific ecologies and poetics, archipelagic and decolonial thinking, feminist aesthetics, and Marxist theory. She is the author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia  [Transpacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia] (2019). In 2020, this book won the first prize for the LASA Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities and received an honorable mention for the 2019 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. Her essays have been published in Public Books, Latin American Literary Review, Revista de Crítica Latinoamericana, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Ciberletras, Esferas, and 80 grados. Recently, she curated a review dossier titled “Asia-Latin America: A Critical Corpus,” which appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Sarah Townsend (Penn State) has written works that ask how an attention to culture can illuminate histories of capitalism (and vice versa). She is primarily a Latin Americanist and a specialist in theater and performance, but in the interest of exploring capitalism as a world system she frequently stray across geographical and linguistic boundaries, and she considers how theater and performance engage with other genres and media. Her current work focuses on the Amazon and has led her to engage with political ecology, geohistory, and current debates about natural resource extraction. For the past several years She has been conducting archival and field research in Manaus, Brazil and in various sites throughout Italy for a book-in-progress called Opera in the Amazon: Culture, Capital, and the Global Jungle. This project revolves around the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house in Manaus that was built in the late nineteenth century during the Amazonian rubber boom and is now the site of an annual opera festival. Opera in the Amazon it challenges traditional cartographies of cultural creation and circulation by showing that opera has always been a global genre closely tied to the historical development of capitalism.

Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). His recent editorial projects include: Border Abolition Now (Pluto Press, 2024), Abolir ya: otra justicia es posible (Bajo Tierra, 2024) and In Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar(Common Notions, 2024). He has also participated in the translations of Colectivo Situaciones, Genocide in the Neighborhood (Common Notions, 2023); Grupo de Arte Callejero, Thoughts, Actions, Practices (Common Notions, 2019); and Heriberto Yépez, The Empire of Neomemory(ChainLinks, 2013).

Moderators

Arianna Afsari is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her studies span three regions and languages: Russia, Latin America, and Iran. She examines traditions of poetry and literature deployed as tools of anti-colonial and decolonial resistance to identify a distinctive world literature that is grounded in an anti-imperialist culture, contraposing the Eurocentric and Anglophonic discourses surrounding global literary exchanges.

Youngkyun Choi recently received his PhD from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His dissertation compares reformulations of Marxism in non-European contexts by Paek Nam-un (Korea) and José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru), and explores the transpacific migration of Marxism in the 1980s by examining Chinese Maoism in Latin America and Latin American Dependency Theory in South Korea.

Daniel Weaver is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where he studies the novel and twentieth-century theories of politics and aesthetics. His research interests focus on mid-to-late 20th c. American and Sinophone cultural production and Marxist literary studies.

Dongkyu Yeom is a doctoral student in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He is studying South Korea’s left-wing intellectual history from the 1980s to the neoliberal present, with a focus on its connections to the Third World project.

Organizers

Gavin Arnall is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan.

Youngkyun Choi recently received his PhD from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.

Youngju Ryu is Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan.