In this episode, we are joined by Prof. Andrea Mendoza, Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Mendoza's work combines the studies of 20th and 21st century East Asian and Latin American literatures and visual cultures; transpacific studies; feminist and gender studies; critical race studies; and intellectual history. Her current projects focus on developing an intersectional and transpacific approach to comparing philosophical, literary, and cinematic discourses on race and racism in Mexico and Japan and their role in constituting ideas about national identity in the twentieth century. Prof. Mendoza is joined in conversation with JSAP contributors Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, Harrison Watson, and Prof. Reginald Jackson. Topics of discussion include: identifications and positionality; growing up in Mexico and New Jersey as a racialized migrant; attending primarily white schools; Orientalism; Black feminist theory and scholarship; The Bridge Called My Back; Sara Ahmed; micro- and macro-aggressions in the academy; Othering in Japanese Studies; Abe Sada; Prof. Mendoza's article "Nonencounter as Relation;" transpacific studies; antiracist practice and pedagogy; undisciplinary shifts; astrology.
In this episode, we are joined by Prof. Andrea Mendoza, Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Mendoza's work combines the studies of 20th and 21st century East Asian and Latin American literatures and visual cultures; transpacific studies; feminist and gender studies; critical race studies; and intellectual history. Her current projects focus on developing an intersectional and transpacific approach to comparing philosophical, literary, and cinematic discourses on race and racism in Mexico and Japan and their role in constituting ideas about national identity in the twentieth century. Prof. Mendoza is joined in conversation with JSAP contributors Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, Harrison Watson, and Prof. Reginald Jackson. Topics of discussion include: identifications and positionality; growing up in Mexico and New Jersey as a racialized migrant; attending primarily white schools; Orientalism; Black feminist theory and scholarship; The Bridge Called My Back; Sara Ahmed; micro- and macro-aggressions in the academy; Othering in Japanese Studies; Abe Sada; Prof. Mendoza's article "Nonencounter as Relation;" transpacific studies; antiracist practice and pedagogy; undisciplinary shifts; astrology.
To learn more about Professor Mendoza's research, please watch her JSAP webinar, "Confronting the “Ends” of Area: On Transpacific Accountability" or read her article "Nonencounter as Relation: Cannibals and Poison Women in the Consumption of Difference" in Verge: Studies in Global Asias. She is on twitter @andbrea_m.
This podcast is created with generous support from the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies. Recording, editing, and transcription support came from Reginald Jackson, Justin Schell, Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, Harrison Watson, Robin Griffin, and Allison Alexy. Please see the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy homepage for more information.
Dr. Reginald Jackson: Welcome to “Origin Stories,” a podcast developed through the Japanese Studies Antiracist Pedagogy Project. Here we talk with scholars of color about their personal history, intellectual formation, pedagogical commitments, and their ongoing journey as scholars, and as human beings. This is “Origin Stories.”
Rachel Willis: Today's guest is Dr. Andrea Mendoza. Dr. Mendoza is an Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century East Asian and Latin American literatures and visual cultures, as well as feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, and intellectual history. Thank you for joining us, Professor Mendoza. So to get us started here, could you tell us a little bit more about how you identify?
Dr. Andrea Mendoza: First, thank you so much Rachel, Reggie, Sophie, Harrison, for having me here today. I am honestly so honored. I mentioned this before, but when I received the invitation and when I saw the lineup for this webinar and podcast series, I thought to myself, you know, what do I, you know, this little, like nobody have to contribute among these really amazing superstars who themselves are the reason why I went into Japan Studies? So, you know, I come into this with so much gratitude, so much humility, and so much appreciation for being able to participate and contribute just a little bit to the community that you're all here growing through this project of Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy.
So the question of how I identify. For me, the question of identity tends to be a difficult word for me, since it often seems to ask us to individualize parts of ourselves that come from others, or that are external to us. And assimilate them into how we understand who we are, how we interact with and within the world. And more concretely, how others are able to understand us. Basically, identity for me is often a question of, okay, how will I translate myself into this context?
My positionality, if I can speak on positionality rather than identity for a moment, I think really shifts depending on environmental and social factors. There was actually a moment in Dr. Hwaji Shin’s talk on April 22nd that really stuck with me as I was listening. Where she talked about how it wasn't until she moved to the United States that she started to have to identify herself as Asian. And I think for me, it took me a while to come to the idea that I was not just a person who had Mexican citizenship living in the US. Especially not with the skin tone that I have and how I'm perceived in the context of the United States, especially in US academia, where I think the language and politics of identity tend to be very magnified for me.
So I was born in Mexico. I was born in Guadalajara. And when I'm there, I have, I think a sense of, a lot of privilege, because I can identify based on markers that are, I think, really inverse from the codes that I navigate in the United States. So for instance, I come from a family of predominantly women who were really educated. My mom is a chemical engineer and she has four sisters, three of whom are doctors. And they were raised by pretty progressive parents, my grandparents, who were this like Marxist political journalist and a school teacher who was orphaned at sixteen but was able to raise her siblings, put them through university, and then went on to found one of the first all-girls schools in her state.
So when I was growing up, the only sense of expectation for my identity that I had was to be like really educated and to know that I could always depend on this community of frankly like neurotic but also pretty bad-ass women. I wasn't raised with any religion or within any kind of religious community. And I was raised only by my mother. So I was, I'm an only child of a single mother. And if I were to say, like, I identify as anything very strongly and universally, it would be that I am an only child of a single mother. And that, I hope my therapist does not listen to this. I really hope that.
So my mother was moved by her work to suburban New Jersey, to her offices there. I'm not an engineer by any means. But she was a chemical engineer and she specialized in something that they really wanted in the office that she worked at in suburban New Jersey. And she worked, I think really hard to protect me from the ways in which the public school system of suburban New Jersey – I lived in this town called Middletown, shout out Middletown, New Jersey, if anyone has heard of it here, I really hope not. So she shielded me from the ways in which this small, suburban, not too small, this like suburban, predominantly conservative area and school system targeted me racially. I was really unaware of it until we had an honest conversation about it much later on, but I learned that she would like, tell off the PTA mothers who made comments about my inability to speak English. She also told off the Spanish teacher whom I had made really uncomfortable from the moment that I stepped into second grade because I corrected her a lot and told her that people in Mexico didn't wear sombreros or dressed in these really stereotypical ways. And I actually remember overhearing this really angry conversation that my mom had with the Spanish teacher where she told her that I wasn't learning anything from her and to stop trying to make herself feel better by giving me C’s in her class, which I didn't really construe as an issue with discrimination at the time. I just kind of glossed it over.
So it wasn't until college that I learned how to recognize what it was to be considered truly a person of color, or to be Latinx or to be a minority, or to be a target of racism, or of sometimes white insecurity within the context of higher education, where all of a sudden I had to navigate these codes that called me disadvantaged, underrepresented, a diversity issue. I do still wonder a lot if I ever felt those things myself. More than anything, I think these markers of difference helped me to identify with and relate to others and to find a sense of community that made me feel supported and welcomed and not like my mother had to yell at the Spanish teacher for me to feel like I belonged.
But to summarize it, I know I've gone on a long tangent here and I want to, you know, welcome more conversation on this as well, because this question of identity is really difficult for me to tackle. But if I were to, like, summarize it, I guess I can identify as someone who has experiences as a racialized migrant in the US, but who has most strongly felt her identity as the only child to a single bad-ass mother. And, let's see, I'm also a Leo sun Gemini rising, and I am a human mother to very adorable cats, two of them.
Reginald: Yeah, this is going to be awesome. You know, it was already clear. We already knew this Andrea, but then you ended with the astrology. So we knew it was gonna, it was gonna take off. So thank you for sharing that. And we'll talk later about astrological reading and, and Rachel's talents in that regard as well, you know, speaking of different modes of reading. But for now, I wanted to say, first of all, you know, thank you for sharing all of that and really problematizing from the beginning this notion of identity. This podcast is called Origin Stories and, I appreciate it when, you know, really smart interlocutors like yourself actually destabilize that notion. I mean, that's part of the goal that we have here in some ways, in not taking those things for granted. And I think that the story you've just shared with us is really valuable in that regard.
So my mom's a school teacher and her mom was a school teacher. And so there's this way in which I would laugh in college and high school too, at a certain level, but with Asian friends who like, we had certain things in common, which is not to say that there weren't also Black kids who were forbidden from getting B’s. But like the idea of, of like what couldn't happen in that house was, was really something. So I think there's, we share that, I have an affinity with you in that regard.
But I was also thinking when you're talking about the way that you're marking in some ways, this kind of blessed ignorance of the nonsense of the kind of constraints that American society puts on folks of color, BIPOC folks in particular, around these kinds of issues. And I was thinking about another podcast that we did with, with Jayanthi Selinger. And she was talking about being upper-caste and how, in some ways, if I'm simplifying a bit, like that identity kind of insulated her and actually kind of gave her in some ways, this kind of cushion or this shield to not necessarily fall into these categories. Help resist that kind of pathologizationthat happens in the context of US race relations and so forth. So I was really interested in, in that kind of link to what you were saying about, in some ways, having this, this kind of lineage of bad-ass women who are shaping your sense of what you can do and kind of what you deserve, moreover. And fighting for that as a way that, I would imagine it's helpful in that context of, of college when you're kind of having to renegotiate these things and come face-to-face with these, I think of it in terms of corporate multiculturalism, but also just that kind of diversity trap in some ways.
So, you know, I was wondering if you could talk maybe a little bit more about, about that. I mean, the ways in which you're kind of seeing yourself, particularly as you move from, let's say, high school, college, when you're thinking about that kind of development in terms of notions of privilege, or, you know, underrepresentation or something like that, and how you're in some ways reconfiguring that as you learn more and you enter these different spaces.
Andrea: I love that question. And I also really appreciate this conversation on caste because I think you're right, that in US society, we often tend to flatten what race, class, caste, and identity really mean, especially for positionalities like mine. So officially, caste doesn't exist in Mexico, but in practice, it absolutely does. It's a very classist society. I would say that it's also a very racist society, and informally, a very casteist society. In Guadalajara I went to private school. I was lucky to be from a family that could afford that. I went to a bilingual French-Mexican elementary school so the second language I learned was actually French. It was very funny to me, then, when I moved to suburban New Jersey. So not a city, and public school where I, you know, had a lot of privilege and came into it with a lot of entitlement. I had a lot of entitlement when I was an elementary schooler. I think that's also the only child identity, though. Maybe the Leo as well, we can talk about astrology, I'd love that later.
But I came in thinking that I was better than everyone, because I knew how to divide and multiply. I was seven, I knew how to divide and multiply. I knew my cursive handwriting better than anyone. But even still, the teachers and students would talk to me and act toward me as if I was unaware, as if I needed more help than others. My mother was encouraged to keep me back a grade and she had to fight against that because I learned English quite quickly. And I would say like four or five months after moving, I was already quite fluent. And not only that, but I had all of these skills that actually should have put me in a higher grade, but they kept me in the same one. So I really identify with this idea of, sometimes, especially in predominantly white American environments, the people around us might not expect that we come from backgrounds where we may actually have seen more or been entitled to more privilege than our peers around us within that space. And I certainly have to recognize that my family in Mexico in the context of that family, is not one where historically, or even now, they've experienced forms of exploitation based on histories of colonialism or imperialism or casteism or classism. It's really important to understand that for me and for the kind of accountability that I have toward the work that I do. And I always try to remind myself that this is a position that I'm coming from. However, it's also been instrumental for me to be able to solidify solidarity and forms of relationality with other people who are racialized and marginalized based on race, gender, class, et cetera.
And in high school, I would say I didn't really know how to do that because I went through this phase in high school where I really didn't want to talk about being different. Even though I went to a high school where it was ninety plus percent white, there really no other Latinos, there were really no other migrants. So the only friends that I had that were also racialized differently than our white peers were from Asian American and South Asian American backgrounds with maybe like a couple of students who were Black and African-American. But very, very few. There were maybe a total of like, seven of us who were not white.
So I went through this phase where I really resisted being a minority because I didn't want to be different, which I think is natural for someone going through high school, right? I think I have to give a lot of grace to myself in that regard. So it wasn't until college -- I went to Connecticut College, which is a small liberal arts college in New England. So maybe you can imagine the demographics of that space, especially in relation to class. I grew up in the US, I would say that I was, like, properly middle class. That would shift, also like, again, question of positionality, that positionality shifts if I move across the spaces of Mexico and the US. Where like, in Mexico, you know, we have this whole family structure that had generational wealth, I would say. In the US it was me being raised by a single mother and us being a Mexican family. And that had its own form of codification. And I'm sure that my mother also faced a lot of discrimination because of this dynamic, as well, from her workplaces.
When I went to college, it became more pronounced to me that the only people that I could feel safe with and relate to were the 10% of students who were not white in that institution. I'm exaggerating it with the 10%, but truly it was astounding for me to see the amount of wealth privilege, and quite frankly, ignorance that I witnessed in college, because it was such a small community, because we were kind of siloed up on a hill, like many SLACs, small liberal arts colleges are. And it was in college that I was able to have conversations with not only fellow students but faculty about what it meant to be Latinx, and how that identity could help me navigate forms of community that felt safer and that made me feel more at home within a very unhomely institution in many ways. It was also there that I was accepted into the really vibrant cult that is the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. I can talk more about that too, but it's basically like a bootcamp for racialized and marginalized undergraduate students who want to get PhDs. So it’s this like PhD bootcamp for Black and Brown kids who just were really academically driven and wanting to pursue their passion in their particular fields in the humanities and social sciences. So the conversations around race and identity for me began there and haven't stopped since. I don't know if I fully answered the question, but that's where the question took me.
Rachel: Yeah, no, thank you. I think that more than answered the question. Thank you for going into such detail. You described what sounds like, what was like a very gradual amplifying of your awareness of what it meant to be a racialized person as you moved through high school, and then a more sudden cultural shock in college. And that resonated with me. I grew up in Detroit, didn't encounter, honestly, I didn't encounter white people very often for like the first eighteen years of my life. And then I was kind of suddenly thrown into like a wealthy PWI environment. And so for me, Black feminist texts, so like bell hooks, KimberléCrenshaw, are what helped me make sense of that experience. So I was wondering if there were any readings or maybe other forms of media that helped you to navigate that experience or that were instrumental in your kind of awakening in that regard?
Andrea: Absolutely. I would say that the first text that really politicized me in questions of race and representation was actually Edward Said’s Orientalism. I also started reading a lot of Audre Lorde at the end of college. But it was really in graduate school after years of kind of just being like, okay, well Japanese Studies is done in this way because I was a Japanese Studies major, that I could really bridge my interest in, like, women of color critique. I readThis Bridge Called My Back on Tumblr back in the day when it was all uploaded in a PDF. I think I still have that PDF somewhere with Gloria Anzaldúa. Who else is part of it, obviously Cherríe Moraga. So these women of color writers talking about identity and talking about specific forms of violence that they incur in the institution were very much alive in my academic unconscious, but it wasn't until graduate school where I–. I went to Cornell University, and Cornell has this reputation of being this like critical theory factory, where, like, regardless of what you study, if you are not well-versed in like, Heidegger, Derrida, and these important and very interesting European philosophers, then like, what are you even doing here?
It wasn't until graduate school, and until I had the time to actually have space for my own work, that I turned more seriously to Black feminism, to women of color critique, to people like Sara Ahmed, to really reframe the way that I approached my citational politics and to allow myself the space to have these conversations. Not just with my mentors or with my peers, but truly with myself about what it was going to be like for me, a person who is gendered in a particular way, racialized in a particular way, and also aged in a particular way, I have to talk about that too, within a field, Japan Studies, Asian Studies, even comparative literature that hasn't historically seen people like me within it. So that's where representation started to become a question that I felt I needed to navigate. And I think the texts that most strongly resonated with name would be Sara Ahmed's Living a Feminist Lifealongside Sylvia Wynter's writings on especially this issue, how women of color, but in particular, I would say she's talking about Black women, incur forms of violence and dehumanization and how that's repeated within the production of humanistic knowledge. So her essay, “Disenchanting Discourses” really shifted the way that I did my work. And now when I teach it's one of the first texts that I will teach. It's on the way that humanistic knowledges have been traditionally framed around the figure of the bourgeois white European male and how literary studies can be reshaped to contest that.
Sophie: That course sounds fantastic. And I wish I could take it. Thank you so much for everything you've said so far about how you've navigated different identities, whether it's class, race, gender, especially in a setting of higher academia. I'm also really struck by the way you talked about having to translate yourself to become legible to this largely white audience, I would say. And I was really interested in how you discuss the struggle of being able to feel safe or build a community within higher academia when you are a part of a racialized or minoritized population. So I'm wondering how this awareness from your lived experiences has impacted your own teaching philosophy.
Andrea: You know, I still struggle with navigating this in certain ways, because whenever I form a class or whenever I create a syllabus I try to think, what is something that eighteen-year-old me really needed? And for me, now centering conversations around our responsibility to create a more ethical Japan Studies are at the center of each class that I teach on Japan, but even classes that I teach that are not on Japan. So if I were to talk about the experiences that shaped this approach. I'm now recalling, there was this one instance in graduate school, it was maybe the first month of my PhD program, where a writer from a little-known online publication called The Japan Times–maybe this is like a little bit too shady to share, I don't know, you can cut it out if you want to later– but this writer who I'm not going to name came to give a lecture on environmentalism and Miyazawa Kenji, the author. And after the talk myself and two members of my cohort, both who were white, but one was from England and the other from Scotland. So the three of us went to introduce ourselves. And I would say that out of the three of us, even though I was still then a permanent resident, I was the closest thing to kind of a domestic student. So we went to introduce ourselves. And when we did so, this writer asked my cohort-mates what they were working on and why they were interested in Japanese literature. But guess what he asked me? He asked me, “oh, where are you from?” Which is like the quintessential racism 101, right? He asked me, “where are you from?” I kind of glossed over that, because I think at the time, I just really didn't expect this blatant racial profiling. Yes, it was, uh, someone just said in the chat, the microaggression special. I didn't expect the microaggression. So I said, “oh, I'm also in the Asian Studies department, and I'm also getting my PhD, studying Japanese literature with my advisors.” And he said, “no, no, I was wondering, where are you from?” I said, “oh, I grew up in New Jersey.” I thought maybe like my voice, my like accent today just sounds really Jersey and maybe I said coffee in a weird way, I don't know. I was trying really hard, unconsciously, I think, to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, because I think I just did not want to believe that this microaggression was happening to me in that moment. But then he followed it up with the best hit of microaggression, “where are you from, from?” And what he really wanted to know was why I was Brown, why I was there and whether he could talk to me about the Puerto Rican friends he had in his school days who taught him how to curse in Spanish and try out those curses on me. And I just looked at my friends, they looked at me and they said, in a very wonderful moment of solidarity where they were like, oh, this is American nonsense. They were like, “oh, you know what? We have this thing, this other meeting we have to go to. Okay, bye. Thank you for the talk.” And we left. And then when we were maybe ten feet away from the lecture hall, we just all burst into this uncomfortable laughter. So the jokes on this guy, because we still laugh about it today. But I keep going back to moments like this. And it's not the first one that I've had. I've also had instances where I go to a conference and somebody passes me their empty glass or their empty paper plate. And I'm like, nope, nope, I'm also here for the conference.
Microaggressive instances like this that always make me want to be really transparent about who I am and what I am to my field. I do try to talk to my students about, you know, Japanese Studies has been transforming for a very long time. It started out as this like Cold War project of accumulating knowledge about the US’s Others, and trying to do so in like the most clear and simplified way possible while also emphasizing, hey, it's still not very common for a Mexican immigrant to be teaching a class on Japanese film or literature, even in a school like UC San Diego that is quite diverse compared to the other institutions that I've been in. So I try to sort of invite the students to think about what it means to learn about Japan in the context of learning it from someone who isn't the expected figure of the expert, the figure of man that Sylvia Wynter talks about as the generator of knowledge. And what that production of knowledge means when we are approaching questions of gender and race, especially, because I do teach a lot of gender studies. And this allows me a lot of freedom to teach courses on topics that I am passionate about, that aren't just about defining what Japan is, but are about really tackling with a global vision of the ways in which the study of Japan is responsible for addressing the global histories of colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism, and so forth. I know that with a diversifying university system, the students that come into my classes are not just the students that I was in classes with when I was an undergrad who were maybe interested in learning about anime and bushido and calling it a day. And then would have really violent and defensive reactions at a text like Edward Said’s Orientalism, which seems to me now like a very 101 text for the students that I teach, especially, who are so much more politically aware than I was when I was in college.
Harrison Watson: Yeah, thank you for that. I am really just been thinking about this trajectory from Mexico to New Jersey and then all the transitions that you've mentioned. So how impactful that transition to public education in America was for you and then undergraduate, right, at a PWI and then your graduate school experience. And so I've been wondering maybe how and where Japan becomes a factor in this and maybe what that did for you in certain moments. And also, you know, considering that you went to an undergraduate and sort of was educated in this really affluent white, very traditional, perhaps, orientalist environment, one might assume, right? Where, where, and how might your awareness of the issues, problems with area studies developed, you know, along that road.
Andrea: Yeah, thank you for that question. So I would say that, although I went to a PWI, the faculty in the East Asian Studies department at Connecticut College were really instrumental for my love for a deconstructive approach to area studies. So I was mentored by a scholar named Sayumi Takahashi Harb, who I think did her PhD in comparative literature. And yes, I think, Reggie, you might know her. She's amazing.
Reginald: She is in fact amazing. Shoutout to Sayumi, yeah.
Andrea: Professor Harb really changed the game for me, as far as thinking that I could even major in Japan Studies, she alongside my Japanese language professor. So I went to college thinking that I would major in 18th century French literature, like that was my passion. And that was the path that I was going to take. I wanted to major in, like 18th and 19th century French literature, talk about maybe Simone de Beauvoir at some point, but that was what I was set to do. I arrived there and it's a PWI, but I test into the senior seminar level classes. So that means that the major that I wanted would no longer be available to me because there weren't enough classes for me to take in the small liberal arts institution, and that my language requirement I still needed to do. So I was like, okay, well I really have enjoyed reading people like Kirino Natsuo, Murakami Ryū Takami Koushun in high school, I was really into Battle Royale,the novel. So I was like, okay, it would be cool to read these authors in Japanese. Maybe I'll take two years of Japanese. Maybe I'll just keep up with it, but it will be like a hobby for me while I try to figure out a way to do this French major.
First day of Japanese class, I was struck with how much I admired my professor, who ended up encouraging me to take more classes in the department. And I did and found that I could transport my love of studying literature and literary analysis into the study of Japan. Which was amplified by the fact that my introduction to Japanese Studies, what began with Edward Said’s Orientalismand with watching Sayumi Takahashi Harb really not back down when my peers were trying to challenge the lesson, which was that in the study of East Asia, this was an East Asian Studies 101 class, we needed to think about the methodologies and approaches that were ethical and that were able to confront the racist and colonial histories of this field and how they permeate even the most innocent seeming spaces, such as popular culture. So watching her take on a bunch of very cranky white college students was amazing to me and I thought, “oh, I really want to be her.” So this whole time, I think I always keep in the back of my mind, like this sounds corny, but like, how can I be the best that Sayumi Takahashi Harb for my students today?
Reginald: That's great. Sayumi, if you're out there, "Happy Birthday!" This is really great for lots of reasons. I had the pleasure and honor, I guess, even of taking a class with Sayumi at graduate school at Princeton, she had done her undergrad there in philosophy, and maybe she was a double major also in Asian Studies, I forget now.
Andrea: I think actually it was physics.
Reginald: Was it physics, was it? Yeah, of course it was physics, because it’s Sayumi. So the class I met her in was actually a Genji seminar that my late advisor was teaching. And it was great, we got to know each other in that context. And so I have, I also have a ton of respect for Sayumi and I'm really struck by a few things. One is how her political commitment slash ethical commitment, to say nothing of the kind of expertise in the good way, not the bad way, in teaching that course was really inspiring to you. But then also, I can't imagine that there wasn't some sense of vindication, as well, in watching her – you mentioned Battle Royale– but like dispatch ninja style or samurai style these folks whose heads were imploding at the prospect that there might be something wrong with their appraisal or their kind of engagement with Japanese culture. And so, I mean, I'm thinking more about this kind of longer genealogy of women who were really highly educated and really impressive, and how, you know, maybe, if I were to do a reading, you know, like how that is haunting that scene of, you know, then kind of having that reactivated.
I'm also struck by how, like that constraint of having a smaller, predominantly white institution and being so advanced in French actually then led to this other path, which is really fascinating to me, like that kind of requirement to have to be international insofar as one has to take another foreign language. Like, you're too advanced to do what you plan to do. And so you're drawn to do this other thing I think is a very cool thing. I'm studying Japanese because I failed a Spanish placement test. So we'll talk later about what these kind of these queer circuits. But I was thinking too, about how, in your particular case that resonance of Said as someone focused on European literature, French literature, and, and who was conversing in that, that, I mean, that must have resonated as well, right? So it's not just Japanese as Japanese Studies, but in an Asian Studies or Japanese Studies class, having a teacher who's introducing you to a text that even if you're not familiar with Japanese language, actually still kind of taps into this long-standing love of say French literature that you have that kind of allows you to reflect on that in a different way. And so I'm just kind of really struck by how his learning and his orientation actually kind of dovetails with yours through the vehicle or the medium of shaminist extraordinaire Sayumi Takahashi Harb, but also through this Japanese Studies class. So I was wondering if, you know, along those lines, if you might say a bit more about, in committing to, say, Japanese Studies beyond the fangirling over Sayumi, which is completely understandable, you know. Were there other things that kind of conceptually or historically that resonated with you that, you know, as you moved from, say the introductory level through to... deciding to do a PhD in this?
Andrea: That is a perfect way to encapsulate how I came into it for sure. If I were to describe in a word how I've arrived at this field, it would be disorientations, you know, using the Sara Ahmed “queer phenomenologies,” that really do hinge on witnessing, and, and I say this so respectfully, falling head over heels with women tearing down the patriarchy. It sounds corny, but one of the reasons why I thought, oh, maybe Japanese Studies was for me. So in my PWI SLAC college, we had this really tight knit community of Japanese language students. And one thing that was, I guess a tradition, was that the senior students would show the freshmen, so that like the yonenseiwould show theichinenseiOshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Sensesas like a joke, which is–. I don't know if you've watched it, but a very explicit film with non-simulated scenes of a couple having sex. And it's based on the real life story of the Abe Saba incident during which a woman named Abe Sada, we’re actually coming up on the anniversary of the Abe Sada incident on May 18th, when she was arrested, she sexually asphyxiated to death and then proceeded to castrate her lover, who was this upper-class bourgeois a man named Ishida Kichizō.
What I guess impacted me about the film was not how sexually explicit it was because need I remind you I was studying French film and literature, too. So I was, you know, kind of not shocked by that. I was in awe with the story though. Oshima’s portrayal I think has many issues. And I've been thinking about them for the last ten plus years now. But what drew me to thinking more seriously about Japanese Studies was the possibility that I could actually learn more about this woman who, in her own way, tore down the patriarchy in her time, caused a scandal in the midst of this highly militaristic and imperialistic era. And was on the front page of newspapers for, like, weeks, even after her arrest and even now causes a lot of sensationalism and scandal because of what she did. So I remember going to Sayumi Takahashi Harb, going back to her and being like, “hey, I think I want to write something on this.” And two years later I found myself writing my honors thesis on it.
I was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow so I knew that I was going to apply to PhDs. And initially, actually, I wanted to do a PhD in Comparative Literature. And the only program in Japan Studies that I applied to was the one at Cornell because Naoki Sakai and Brett de Bary were there and their style in Japanese Studies is very deconstructive. It's very postcolonial theory oriented. So I knew that that would be a place where I could comfortably do what I wanted to do, which is expand the study, not just of Abe Sada, but of feminism, gender studies, a critical study of imperialisms within a context where I didn't have to be siloed into defining what Japan was for an audience. So I thought, okay, maybe Japan Studies can be for me, but it was never the Japan Studies that maybe was the more traditional route to take, because I wanted very badly to do something that was against the grain.
Sophie: Speaking about the Abe Sada incident that you talked about, I did read your article called “Nonencounter as Relation: Cannibals and Poison Women in the Consumption of Difference.” And I was so interested in how, what you call a nonencounter can serve as a useful tool to put seemingly very different regional topics or issues in conversation with one another. And I think this is a way of thinking that isn't usually embraced in area studies and within very strict disciplinary boundaries. So I was wondering if you could talk more about how you made that leap to kind of reimagine your own research and discourse, for example, through thinking about the nonencounter as this new vehicle for interdisciplinary collaboration. And I wonder if you had any challenges from either peers or professors when trying to navigate your own research. I know you said that your faculty mentor was very useful and, like, really supported your work, but I wonder if outside of that you found any pushback?
Andrea: So the pushback that I've gotten for the work that I do.So I have really left Abe Sada behind a little bit outside of my teaching, I still teach the text. I've left behind in that article that I wrote when I was in my second year of graduate school. So I'm a little bit embarrassed of it because I've now developed this concept of nonencounter. And the way that I define it now is that it's a heuristic. There's no way that I could say and sustain an argument saying that Latin America and Asia have a relation of nonencounter. No, that's absolutely untrue in that you can demonstrate the different ways in which they've been connected for centuries based on histories of diaspora, cultural exchange, intertextuality, and different forms of imaginaries. Nonencounter to me is a very specific figure and framework to confront how knowledge is expected to be produced, especially about texts and contexts that belong to, or are said to belong to, or to act as objects of study within the fields we talk about as area studies.
So what I was trying to do in the article is to talk about the figure of the poison woman in modernist literature in Japan and the cannibal in modernist literature in Brazil, and say that in fact, you know, yes, these two figures are supposed to be, or are expected to be studied in these two disciplinary silos. But if we bring them together, what kind of conversations can we have about this historical moment about the ways in which gender, race, and monstrosity are constantly imbricated on each other and on larger histories of colonialism, on larger histories of racialized and gendered violence. And the nonencounter for me functions as a heuristic figure, as a heuristic for making that critique quickly of area studies and then saying, oh, in fact, when we bring these two contexts or when we bring these two objects that are meant to belong to different disciplines together, we can actually learn more about what I talk about, which is the history of modern racism in literature and literary representation. And give a voice to scholars who are traditionally not thought to be part of either of these two fields, such as Sylvia Wynter, I really try to center Sylvia Wynter.
The pushback question, so the pushback that I've received has usually not been on the level of the people who support me. I was really kind of allowed to do whatever I wanted for my dissertation. I had a really good committee of people who were encouraging of my experimental approach, and mainly, because I think they'd seen it happen a lot of times. I came to Cornell in a time where the two main people who work on Japan there, Brett de Bary and Naoki Sakai, had mentored students who had worked on Japan or Asia in Latin America, including people like my colleague at the University of Pittsburgh Junyoung Verónica Kim, whose essay “Asia-Latin America As Method” also appears in that same collection from the journal Vergethat my essay appears in. Like Pedro Erber, who works on Japan and Brazil and who was also a professor there at the time, and one of my advisors, Andrea Bachner worked on Hispanicphone and Sinophone literature. So it was almost kind of a perfect place for this project to emerge for me, and I had a really good support network. The pushback that I've gotten mostly has been, like, at conferences or from people who really just don't understand that. I mean, I wouldn't even call it an interdisciplinary move in some ways, because I'm still working with literature. I'm still working with similar media. But what is perceived to be an interdisciplinary or anti-area, anti-national model of looking at things that are related to Japan and Latin America or Mexico, more specifically.
Reginald: Thank you for explaining that. And I was thinking particularly about Sylvia Wynter in that piece. I was not surprised to hear, you know, that she's kind of exerted an outsize influence on, it sounds like in your work for a long time and you're thinking for a long time, which is amazing. And I mean one of the things we read in the Antiracism and Japanese Culture project is “1492,” that amazing, amazing grueling, grueling, brilliant, essay and, , thinking about what it means to reject certain premises of disciplinary silos, say, or kind of linguistic genres or, you know, or these other kinds of things. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about this notion of the nonencounter really as being a heuristic, you know, so this kind of interpretive tool that you're using and you're refining now. Could you talk a bit more about other tools that you've kind of drawn from other places, I mean, kind of other disciplines or other thinkers that you find particularly valuable or useful? Or tools that you used to find really valuable that you've kind of done away with at this point, or ones that you find particularly useful for students that, you know, as you try to teach about some of these things? And particularly what I have in mind is along the lines of Sophie's question about pushback is, you know, the nature of the kind of policing that can happen at say a conference or in, you know, depending on the journal. I think Vergeis great, and shout out to the editors there for like, it didn't exist until it did. And so I'm also kind of thinking about just at that level of finding, not just kind of advisors and undergraduate and graduate programs that were really useful and really helpful to you, but then also publishing venues and what it means to do that kind of work in a journal that's relatively new, where it doesn't make sense for a journal, like, say, Monumenta Nipponicaor, or doesn't necessarily make sense for these, you know, more I think kind of tried and true journals that themselves have expanded, but I think it's a different kind of thing. So could you talk a little bit about the kind of tools that you found useful, either for your scholarship broadly or your teaching specifically?
Andrea: Yeah, of course. So alongside Sylvia Wynter – I'll begin with the first question of what are the types of concepts that have really transformed how I teach and how I write and do research. Although “research” can be considered a kind of tenuous term still, now, because often I feel like research, especially for area studies, is loaded with this history of producing knowledge about communities. And I don't know if I can subscribe to that. Even now, when I say “I'm going to go do research,” it feels really unnatural for me. I'd rather say, “I'm going to go dialogue with these texts or I'm going to go and learn from these texts.” Nonencounter is one thing that I'm trying to develop. And maybe I'll listen to this interview again in three years and find that my definition of it has changed completely. So you can actually like very much, you know, hold me accountable to that, if that happens after my book comes out.
Things that I've really been inspired by include, you know, Sara Ahmed's writing on phenomenology, on the phenomenology of whiteness, on queer phenomenology have actually resurfaced a love that I had for continental theory as an undergraduate and early graduate student in ways that I didn't think possible because the field of phenomenology tends to be quite burdened with its own racist and colonial and imperial histories. I mean, it's about centering the figure of man that Sylvia Wynter critiques so heavily in that essay “Disenchanting Discourses.” But the way that I think about phenomenology today is in conjunction to the project of the transpacific and how I want to teach what the transpacific does. In the sense that I think for a long time, the term “transpacific” has been used to describe different decolonial approaches to the perceived gaps between area and ethnic studies often and while also pushing us to think in a different direction about the types of comparisons, if we can call it comparisons, juxtapositions, and dialogues that we build in our research. So what I'm trying to think about with a transpacific phenomenology, with this transpacific term, is really what does it mean to orient or disorient ourselves transpacificly for something like area studies, where we don't often venture outside of the national or regional constructs that we're supposed to be specializing in, that we're supposed to be experts in. And what it's done for me is to not only, you know, enrich the type of, I know Takashi Fujitani problematized “comparative,” but I'm going to use the term here now because it's the word that I can think of, the type of comparative work that I do across Japan and Mexico, but transpacific studies and a transpacific turn of transpacific phenomenological approach has made me think about what I as a scholar am positioned to do here, what my agency and the comparison is meant to do.
And what I've been pushed to do through this approach is to consider better, the ways in which transpacific studies can't truly exist as this decolonial radical approach if it doesn't think about Black and Indigenous voices. I'm trying now to really center the histories of racialization and Indigenous disenfranchisement that haunt the texts and histories that I'm studying and that I teach, and going to the question of things that I've abandoned. I think I've really kind of abandoned even the idea that I'm a Japan Studies scholar outside of formalistic frameworks, where I have to say, “oh yeah, you know, I am the Professor of Comparative and Japanese Literatures, or I'm applying for this grant as a Japan Studies expert.” I'm trying to really undiscipline myself, and this idea of a transpacific phenomenology, or a transpacific nonencounter has really shifted and reoriented what I privilege in my writing and my teaching. And going back to Sara Ahmed, it's really just transformed my politics of citation.
Rachel: Thank you. Actually, kind of going off of that, you touched on this earlier, when you talked about trying to imagine maybe the course that you needed when you were eighteen, and you shared some of the key texts and theories that have shaped your thinking around antiracism. So I hope this doesn't feel repetitive, but could you talk more about what your antiracist practice looks like on a day-to-day basis in the classroom with your students and when you're constructing your syllabi?
Andrea: Yes. So on the level of syllabi, it seems maybe a little bit superficial, but for me it means a lot that my Japanese film studies or Japanese literature studies students are reading people like Christina Sharpe, like Tiffany Lethabo King, like Edward Said, like Sara Ahmed. I mean, I even try to include Kimberle Crenshaw in my syllabi, regardless of the topic that I'm teaching, because having a grasp of intersectionality and having a grasp of these global networks through which we can understand Japanophone literatures and medium, for me, it so key for the experiences that my students have with the question of race and with the question of gender in my classroom. So it seems very superficial, but the kinds of conversations that we're able to build are really different from those that I think I expected and the ones that I experienced in other classes in undergraduate, and also in graduate school. For a long time, I think the type of work that we call addressing racism in Japanese Studies, until very recently, I think, felt like it needed to be part of a whisper network. Like Reggie, I don't know if you're okay with me sharing this, but you came to give a talk at Cornell, I think during my fourth or fifth year there.
Reginald: You’re welcome to share.
Andrea: Can I share? Where you said at the end of your talk that, you know, any kind of future for the study of Japan needed to include people like Sara Ahmed and Saidiya Hartman. And I really took that to heart because I hadn't been in courses where Saidiya Hartman or Sara Ahmed’s voices had been centered by any means. And then I went and I emailed you because I was so struck by this. And we had this really lovely exchange that quite honestly, I have to say, shifted what I thought survival in academia meant for me and how I could survive in academia. For a long time, again, though, it felt like addressing racism in Japanese Studies and the experience of being racialized in Japanese Studies needed to be part of a whisper network. And this was maybe even, like, four years ago that I still felt like this. Like I would have conversations with people at conferences about racism, about such-and-such scholar about such-and-such incident of abuse or such-and such-incidents of microaggression. Because I think for a while, we liked to speak about antiracism in Japanese Studies and the way that we center, and I always do as well, literatures by writers, for instance of Japanophone literature. I use the framework of Japanophone instead of Japanese in my classes to highlight that writers of Japanese language literature might not consider themselves Japanese. So someone like Kim Sok-pom the Zainichi writer, or Lee Yangji, or Yu Miri, or Sakiyama Tami, Okinawan writers, might have a more fraught relationship with the national categorization of literature. So I work against that.
The reality of talking about antiracist practices in the field that are outside of the object of study, it's still a very abstract conversation, but because the field I think has a lot of well-deserved white guilt. But more and more, I'm trying to be more open to having these conversations, not just outside of the classroom and in conferences with senior scholars or with peers, but with my students themselves. In not only saying, okay, so my, my experience coming into this field is a particular one because of such-and-such reasons, because of my positionality and the way that I've been received in the field and the kind of politics that I've had to navigate. But also because the demographics of students who take courses in Japanophone films and literature is changing so much. And I'm noticing now more than when I was TAing at Cornell, that the students really welcome these conversations and really want to talk about what it means for them to come into this field as people who have experiences being marginalized or racialized, of not being the people expected to be the ones in even a Japanese language classroom. I incorporate a lot of my own experiences into the classroom space without trying to retraumatize or traumatize students, of course, because I think I can't call it carework. I can only call it what I think is an ethical approach to feminist pedagogy and feminist of color pedagogy, where I try to make myself visible so that students don't feel they need to invisibilize themselves. And I guess that this also comes from my own experiences thinking, oh, if I'm going to talk about racism it has to be in this like hush hush way, or I have to, you know, connect with that scholar via email later on, because I don't know if this is okay to do here.
Reginald: Well, first of all, thank you so much. That's incredibly kind of you. And I remember that exchange and that talk and I mean, it's deeply humbling, but it's also just kind of surreal that these things that are so much a part of this professional machinery of applying for jobs and giving talks, you know, these things can have these effects that, we can't kind of know in advance, right? I mean, it's just kind of, it's really interesting in that regard. And it was so great to meet you in that context and to learn more about your work, certainly.
And I wanted to say that one of the things that strikes me about what you said about this notion of the whisper network and so forth is that, you know, that talk, versions of which I'm still working through in different ways, has been really fascinating, partially because of the reception. And I think the ways in which people have been interested in that work now as direct contrast to, you know, so much of my experience of the field, you know, in the past. Like there's no way, you know, speaking of feeling vulnerable or, you know, being policed, that talk about slavery and performance in medieval Japan, you know, that, that makes reference to William Pope.L and makes reference to Saidiya Hartman and thinking about intimacy and slavery and these things. There is no way in hell, you know, that, that I would've ever, even though I was thinking about these things for, you know, a long time, at least a decade, if not longer, since graduate school, really, that I ever would have, presented on it because it felt too, too risky. And too, you know, you're talking about, to my point about Vergenot existing once upon a time, to say nothing of having a venue, or having a kind of ready-made audience that would be really kind of capable of, to say nothing of willing, to embrace some of the things that you're doing now, that just wasn't even on my radar. And particularly, you know, I think around tenure and what it means tocredentialoneself and to prove oneself to be an expert in usually an incredibly narrow, aggressively unimaginative way is part of what you have to do in order to get to home base or kind of get to this kind of place where you can be safe to then do what you really want to do.
It's really exciting for me. And I feel very old, um, at this moment, but, you know, to see scholars like you who have been mentored in all these really great ways to be able to not feel that same sense of, that same degree of fear, frankly, or, you know, we all kind of self-discipline in different ways and self-censor in different ways. But what you're saying about the shifting demographics in classrooms, as well as your own experience, I think really makes me hopeful. And I don't mean hopeful in terms of like, and now it's time to save Japanese Studies. It's like, you know, it can perish and the world will still continue to spin. But I think that I'm struck by my own, I don’t know, like I care so much less now about the kind of appraisal of the work and that, you know, that's taken a lot of work and a lot of bruises, frankly, you know. And I think that it's been interesting to define in these kind of strange spaces, like people who've been, like yourself, it's often through students, not always. And there are people like the people that have invited for, you know, that, you know, you know, kind of identify for this podcast, but in other cases, the students who've been much more, receptive less narrow-minded about some of these things, less invested in kind of notions of prestige or boundaries that in this way that deadens the work. So, I mean, I think that, you know, hopefully projects like this continue to, I don't know, remind folks that they have really valuable things to offer, even if their Japanese isn't perfect yet, you know, as though it will ever be, or even though they don't look like the people who are writing the books that they're forced to read, you know?
Andrea: Thank you so much for those words. I think if I can follow up on the question of feeling less policed, I think it's also based on context and the kind of support, the kind of collaborators that we have. I feel, especially these last two years being at UC San Diego where there is a Japanese Studies program, shout out to the amazing Japanese Studies program at UC San Diego, but there is no Japanese Studies department. And I'm part of a Literature department, of forty-five faculty, all of us doing very different things and trying to translate ourselves to each other. But working in the department where I am now, which is a department that is frankly, far more diverse than most other literature departments that exist in this country where I have these amazing, brilliant colleagues, I've been really challenged to reframe my references even more so than I thought that I had to in graduate school when I thought that I was doing the most radical thing in my dissertation by not citing any white men in a Japanese Studies dissertation, like how dare I? My colleagues have really challenged me to reframe my references and adopt an even more feminist, more radical citational politics that reflects the kind of work that I want to do truly, and that I want to see being represented in relation to scholarship in the field. Like now I can't write anything for my book that doesn't include Jodi Byrds’ The Transit of Empire,a really great work in Indigenous critical theory, that frames how we understand concepts like even solidarity in relation to the representation and experience of Indigenous disenfranchisement in the Americas. Or Ferreira da Silva is such a foundational text for me now. So I think you're right in that personally, individually I can say, I feel less policed by the idea that I need to speak to a Japanese Studies, whatever it may be. And also Vergeis an amazing audience. But I've also been able to connect with more and more people that work in these really, you know, antinational, undisciplinary ways like Junyoung Verónica Kim at Pittsburgh. Like, I really admire her work, but I haven't been able to meet her, but like Tao Leigh Goffe, who's now a professor at Cornell and works on Afro-Asian diasporic connections. So these sort of anti-area, we could say, and undisciplinary shifts that are happening in, especially my generation of scholars, feel like a new home, but also feel like, oh, well this is my audience now and I need to be responsible to them more so than I need to I don't know, like Donald Keene’s corpse, with all due respect.
Harrison: I really, really enjoyed that back and forth between you and Professor Jackson just now, especially about sort of the role of students and the shifting demographics in the classrooms. I think for my undergrad career, I get to see maybe a small four or five-year slice of what it's like to learn in the Japanese Studies environment. And so hearing it from, from people who have seen these developments over the course of many more years is, is really good to see and I'm heartened honestly, by the observations that you guys are making today. We’re coming up on time here, so I do want to just give you a little bit of time at the end to highlight any recent or upcoming work that we might be interested in and just sort of give yourself the space for a shameless plug.
Andrea: Sure, I can be my own hype man here. So I will be giving another talk at UC Santa Barbara on May 26th. I think it's open to the public. I can share the poster for it later, if you like, and it's going to be on the Rashomon actor Mifune Toshiro’s role playing an Indigenous character in a Mexican film from the 1960s where he is in full, like, I like to call it racial plagiarism. I also have an essay on transpacific phenomenologies coming out in a volume edited by these two amazing scholars of transpacific Asia-Latin America Studies, Chiara Olivieri and Jordi Serrano-Muñoz, so the volume is called When East is North and South: Decolonizing Asia-Pacific Studies, and the other essays in that volume also look so amazing, so I'm excited to have it in my hands and read through it. It's part of a series by Palgrave MacMillan called Historical and Cultural Interconnections Between Latin America and Asia. That's edited by my colleague at UC Merced, Ignacio Lopez-Calvo. So there's like already, I would say a community of like Asia-Latin America scholars that are like, “come here, this is where you're welcome.” And it makes me feel really at home in the kind of unhomely place that academia tends to be. yeah, those are the few projects that I have coming up.
Reginald: That all sounds amazing.
Andrea: I'm excited.
Reginald: Um, yeah, we are too. People, people listening can't see the various emojis and wide-eyedness that is happening here, but no, that sounds so, so great. We'll also, just to say, Andrea, we’ll, some of the other folks that you've mentioned and some of those readings that you've mentioned that have been really important and so forth, we'll, we'll make a space for that on the website to share with folks so that people can be similarly inspired, hopefully, by the same stuff that's inspired you.
Andrea: Thank you so much for having me here and for allowing me to contribute just this, like, small part in this amazing project that you all have created here. I truly feel so excited and happy after this conversation. I'm so, so grateful. Thank you all so much.
Rachel: We can we can talk astrology after the recording ends.
Andrea: Yes, please. I'm excited for this, Rachel.
Reginald: Thank you for listening to our “Origin Stories” podcast. I’m Reginald Jackson, coordinator of the Japanese Studies Antiracist Pedagogy Project, and my co-conspirators include Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, and Harrison Watson. We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and additional production support was provided by Justin Schell, Robin Griffin, and Allison Alexy. Please check our website for additional resources and information.