Junyoung Verónica Kim is an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and Media, and Latin American Culture and Literature, in the Department of Hispanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. Before coming to Pitt, she taught at the University of Iowa and the State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook. She has served on the Executive Board of the Cultural Studies Association (CSA). She is currently an Executive Committee Member of the Asia and the Americas Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Her current book project Asia/Latin America: The Politics of Area Studies, explores the cultural and migratory flows between Latin America and Asia by looking at cinema, literature, and Asian immigration history in Latin America. This study reveals that the cultural, historical, sociopolitical, economic, and epistemological relations between Latin America and Asia – which have often been neglected – are an inherent aspect of Latin American history, society, and culture and provide a crucial and critical perspective on discussions of re-imagining Latin America today. By focusing on an inter/cross-disciplinary study of the diverse relations between Latin America and Asia, this project highlights the need to reformulate the area studies approach, which has become the dominant model of knowledge production in the study of both Latin America and Asia. It contends that the area studies framework, along with the historical, sociopolitical, and economic context of the Cold War, imperialism, and late capitalism in which it was developed, has in part produced the obscuring and silencing of Asian and Latin American relations, as well as the experiences and bodies of those who incorporate these marginalized and disavowed relations. This, in turn, directly relates to the racialization, expulsion, marginalization, persecution, and even commodification of Latin Americans of Asian descent. Thus, by drawing connections between geopolitics (e.g., Cold War, imperialism, globalization), epistemology (e.g., area studies, ethnic studies), and biopolitics (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender), Asia/Latin America contributes to the current discussions on empire and the international division of labor, the Global South project, differential racializations, neoliberal technology of multicultural governance, and the politics of knowledge/lack of knowledge.
Professor Kim’s ongoing research also involves two other projects: Orientalism in Latin American Film and Literature and the trope of the border in Latin American and South Korean cinemas.
Degrees
- PhD, Latin American Literature and Culture (with a minor in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies), Cornell University
- BA (summa cum laude), English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Selected Publications
- “Disrupting the ‘White Myth’: Korean Immigration to Buenos Aires and National Imaginaries.” Imagining Asia in the Americas. Eds. Zelideth María Rivas and Debbie Lee-DiStefano. Rutgers UP, 2016. 34-55.
- “(Re)ORIENTando América Latina en el capitalismo global: Orientalismo y la cuestión nacional en Madama Sui de Augusto Roa Bastos.” Hispanófila Vol. 172 (Dec. 2014): 225-240.
- “Centering Panama in Global Modernity: The Search for National Identity & The Imagining of ‘the Orient’ in Rogelio Sinán’s ‘Sin novedad en Shanghai.’” Centroamericanidades: Imaginative Reformulations and New Configurations of Central Americanness. Spec. issue of Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature Vol. 37 N. 2 (Summer 2013): 61-76.
- “Borders Within Cities: The Topography of Power in the Global Order.” Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas.Eds. Debra A. Castillo and Kavita Panjabi. Worldview P, 2011. 192-216.
Areas of Specialization
- Transpacific Studies
- Latin American Film and Media
- Contemporary Latin American Literature
- Critical Race and Gender Studies, Critical Theory
- Asian Diaspora Studies
- Korean Film and Popular Culture