In Transpacific Nonencounters, Andrea Mendoza works across the seemingly unconnected histories of race and nation in modern Mexico and Japan, showing the commonalities in the way race figures in their state and social formations through a method Mendoza calls the theory of nonencounter. Intellectual and cultural productions of racial knowledge were important for the formation of the modernizing Mexican and Japanese states at the beginning of the twentieth century and helped conceive the project of national modernity through ideologies that promoted multiracial and multiethnic belonging—mestizaje and Pan-Asian co-prosperity. Despite the diasporic, economic, and political points of contact that connected these states throughout the twentieth century, however, traditional Eurocentric comparative and area-based studies treat the formations and legacies of Mexican mestizo nationalism and Japanese imperialism as wholly unrelated phenomena. Transpacific Nonencounters proposes a theory of nonencounter to formulate the logic of disciplinary disconnection, offering a framework and hermeneutic for a transpacific account of how Japanese imperialism and Mexican mestizo settler nationalism structured and reinforced one another through the modern formations of race and racism.

Andrea Mendoza is Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Note on Terminology  vii
Introduction. Transpacific Nonencounters  1
1. Grammars of Imperial Nationalism: The Philosophical Contours of Racial Settler Colonialism  29
2. Tierras Incógnitas: Japanese Humanity and the Question of Mexican Philosophy  56
3. Mestizaje’s Echoes: The Spectacle of Race as Cacophony  86
4. Racial (Dis)connects in the Wake: Transpacific Inscriptions and Erasures of Black Life  118
Coda. Nonencounters at the “Ends” of Area  149
Acknowledgments  161
Notes  165
Bibliography  181
Index  195