Asia in Caribbean Literature and Art: A Book Presentation

September 25, 2026 - 5:00 pm

Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Asia in Caribbean Literature and Art: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad (Escribana, 2026) by Araceli Tinajero examines several cases of Transpacific cultural encounters between the Caribbean and Asia. First, it studies the representations of India in Trinidad and Tobago’s poetry. Second, it delves into Indo-Trinidadian culture in the art of three contemporary artists. The author then analyzes depictions of the Vietnam War in literature by Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican writers who saw the conflict firsthand. Haiku in the Dominican literary tradition is the focus of chapter five; and chapter six covers Depictions of Japan in contemporary Dominican art. Chapter seven offers an interview with a performer and artist that shows the influences of the Caribbean in Asia: the popularity of Dominican merengue and bachata in the Land of the Rising Sun.

 

 

 

Araceli Tinajero is professor of Hispanic Literatures at The City College of New York and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano; El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader; Kokoro: A Mexican Woman in Japan; and A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan. Tinajero is the editor of Cultura y letras cubanas en el siglo XXI; Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica, and Orientalisms of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian World. She has co-edited Technology and Culture in Twentieth Century México (with J. Brian Freeman) and Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Social Change (with Mauricio Font).

 

Koichi Hagimoto is professor of Spanish and director of Latin American Studies at Wellesley College. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Latin American literary and cultural studies, with a focus on Transpacific Studies. He is the author of Between Empires: Martí, Rizal and the Intercolonial Alliance (2013) and Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho: Transpacific Modernity and Nikkei Literature in Argentina (2023), in addition to several volumes about Asia-Latin America relations. His most recent publication is an anthology of Latin American writers of Japanese descent, entitled Más allá del haiku: antología de autores nikkei latinoamericanos (2024).

 

 

Moderator: Enrique Desmond Arias, The Graduate Center/ Baruch College, CUNY

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