Event Description
Gustavo de L. T. Oliviera is a CFD Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College.
"Transnational Agribusiness and Orientalism in Brazil, 1807- 2017" outlines Oliveira's research agenda to examine three interrelated phenomena. First, Oliveira reveals the origins of various Orientalist racial forms in Euro-American/Brazilian imaginaries since 1807, which at various times encouraged or foreclosed Chinese and Japanese immigration to Brazil, and would eventually give rise to a form of sinophobia that marks the contemporary discourse about Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil. Second, Oliveira examines the key role of transnational agribusiness professionals in both creating and combating these sedimented layers of Orientalist xenophobia, as Brazil-China relations (not only agroindustrial but also cultural, diplomatic, etc.) waxed and waned according to their faltering attempts at establishing agroindustrial partnerships. And third, Oliveira explains the lack of significant Chinese migration to Brazil and establishment of a diaspora, which is not only contrasted with, but dialectically related to the incredibly strong and influential Japanese migration and diaspora in Brazil. My narrative traces how the production of Brazil-China relations over the past two centuries has been led by the efforts of transnational agribusiness professionals to assemble agroindustrial projects centered in four key commodities--tea, labor, cotton, and soybeans--and how Orientalist discourses have dialectically produced the Japanese diaspora and simultaneously prevented a similar strong wave of Chinese migration to Brazil. |
