About

Paul Amar is a Professor in the Latin American & Iberian Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from New York University. His academic focus is on Latin American and Iberian studies, with particular interests in security politics. He is involved in the Global Studies department and contributes to the university's efforts in Latin American and Iberian regional studies. As a faculty member, he is engaged in teaching, research, and departmental activities within the College of Letters and Science at UC Santa Barbara.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Gender studies
• Law
• History
• Media studies
• Geography
• Telecommunications
• Art history
• Criminology
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• La ruta tropical de la seda: el futuro de China en América del Sur

  2025-01-01

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  Este libro aborda la intersección de dos de los procesos más significativos del siglo XXI: la expansión de la influencia global de la República Popular China en el Sur Global y la destrucción de los biomas amazónico, del Cerrado y Andino. En abril de 2020, el presidente Xi Jinping dio un nuevo impulso a esta dinámica con el lanzamiento de la "Nueva Ruta de la Seda para la Salud", un ambicioso proyecto de ayuda e inversión que conecta América del Sur con la iniciativa "Belt and Road" de Eurasia y África, promoviendo una serie de megaproyectos mineros, portuarios, energéticos e infraestructurales en los trópicos latinoamericanos. A través de treinta ensayos breves, este volumen reúne a un diverso grupo de autores: economistas, antropólogos, politólogos, activistas indígenas, feministas, afrodescendientes, ambientalistas y periodistas locales, con el fin de ofrecer un análisis innovador sobre la presencia de China en América del Sur. En un contexto marcado por las fisuras en el legado progresista de la Marea Rosa y las fallas de los populismos de derecha ecocidas, que están reconfigurando nuevas economías políticas y posibilidades geopolíticas, el libro ofrece una visión desde las bases populares de un mundo poscentrado en los Estados Unidos y presenta un mapa de las luchas emergentes y las formas de resistencia que están configurando el futuro de América del Sur.

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• Introduction

  2024-10-11

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  The introduction traces how this collective intervention emerged from Rio de Janeiro, where scholar-activists have generated globally relevant tools for organizing and concepts for alternative governance shaped by five centuries of transnational exchanges and comobilizations, not just with the North and across the Americas but with the African continent, including the regions of today’s Angola and Congo. Rio has served as a transfer hub and site of innovation for collective resistance. Rio’s progressive concepts and resistance models fought their way onto the stage of history as they confronted and exposed the social origins, ideologies, and weak-points of emergent hard-right political regimes. Rio’s social movements, media influencers, community organizers, cultural figures, student organizations, Afro-Brazilian religious groupings, and a broad front of new feminist, ecology, Black, queer, and labor mobilizations did not just provide resistance; they engineered a series of triumphs and articulated new methods of being and of being political.

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• Introduction: Methods and Concepts for a New Generation

  2024-10-31

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• Introduction:

  2024-10-11

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• INTRODUCTION:

  The American University in Cairo Press eBooks · 2023-12-23

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• The Tropical Silk Road

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

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  • Computer Science
  • Geography
  • Computer Science

  The Tropical Silk Road maps patterns of global investment, infrastructure transformation, and social-environmental struggle at the juncture of two of today's most transformative processes: China's "stepping out" into the global south and the disintegration of the Amazonian, Cerrado, and Andean biomes.

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• Introduction: China Stepping Out, the Amazon Biome, and South American Populism

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2022-10-28

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• Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China's New Global Family in Wolf Warrior 2

  Feminist Studies · 2021 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 419 Paul Amar Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family inWolf Warrior 2 This essay offers a new paradigm of “deimperial queer analysis” that reveals the tension between the People’s Republic of China’s extractive expansionism in Africa and its claim to solidarity with Africans against white supremacy and Northern imperialism. China has been labeled an “anti-imperial empire” that forcefully challenges previous Euro-American imperial legacies—all while it verges on reenacting them.1 A critical way it resolves this geopolitical tension is through the articulation of a mission for global China, and since 2017, the heroic filmic fictional figure of the “Wolf Warrior” anchors such an approach. The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates—all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Extending a hugely popular film series, the release in 2017 of the blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 (abbreviated below as Wolf 2) unleashed a worldwide social media frenzy as well as a revolution in diplomatic tone and protocol for China. In these ways, Wolf Warrior 2 came to mark the debut of the global PRC as a hegemonic structure 1. David Armitage, “The Anti-Imperial Empire?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 6018, August 3, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-anti-imperialempire -american. 420 Paul Amar of feeling with an attendant popular cultural logic, launching a cast of military characters, humanitarian imaginaries, and gendered rebranding initiatives. These fused into a global cultural megaproject with the PRC presenting itself as a leader in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South—a time the PRC has officially branded as its “Rejuvenation Era” of “Stepping Out into the World.” This essay shows how exactly this Wolf Warrior imagination has legitimized a new global regime, but I also reveal how, paradoxically, the Wolf Warrior regime has offered a distinct, more subversive worlding project. I argue here that the utopia immanent in this project can be revealed by interpretively turning this Wolf universe inside out through a deimperial queer analysis that honors and combines a Third World feminist lens and the “Asia as Method” approach with Danmei/BL and Slash queer-feminist fanfiction hacks. Danmei is a Chinese (originally mainly Tawainese) fanfiction genre that subverts mainstream heteronormative narratives by erotically aestheticizing and renarrating male-male intimacies within mainstream plotlines from feminist perspectives. BL (short for “boylove ”) is a similar Japanese fanfiction genre, and Slash is the term used in English for the queer/feminist hacking and excavation of sublimated and particularly utopian gender and sexuality plots from within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts. The everted or inside-out epistemology given expression here uses a set of non-phallogocentric lenses and decolonial feminist decoding practices. At stake is the urgency of not repeating the epistemic violence of conventional “anti-imperial” arguments, which tend to be heteronormative , statist, macho, and monolithic. Instead, the form of critique elaborated here brings questions of gender, race, and sexuality to the fore through a three-part approach. First, I identify the homoerotic register of the techno-infrastructural elements in the film. I generate close readings that detail the visual and genre codes of battle scenes, thug subjects, and piracy plots that forge a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality and that act as a metaphor for China’s techno -infrastructural rule. Second, this essay explores the gendered hauntings of supremacist humanism. I deploy a decolonial feminist lens to map the configuration of African women, female doctors, Maoist women insurgents, and feminized “flowerboys” as a rebel protectorate overseen by China’s phallic prerogative that is itself haunted by the specters of Euro-American humanist betrayal and white supremacy. Third, Paul Amar 421 I trace queer kinship utopias. I demonstrate that Wolf Warrior 2 rejuvenates a non-Western, queer, globalist kinship structure that triangulates Asian, white, and Black through adoption dramas and bromance bonds. Through these intimacies, an...

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• Saving Rio’s “Cradle of Samba”: Outlaw Uprisings, Racial Tourism, and the Progressive State in Brazil

  2020-11-16

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• Diplomacy of Masks: China and the Crisis of Populism in South America

  global-e · 2020-09-03

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Frequent coauthors

• Maciel Brito

  Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

  16 shared

• Cleiton Pons Ferreira

  16 shared

• Emilia Bonilla

  Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

  16 shared

• Fernando Brancoli

  3 shared

• Isabelle Prêcheur

  2 shared

• Lisa Rofel

  2 shared

• Catherine Pesci‐Bardon

  Hôpital l'Archet

  2 shared

• Marı́a Amelia Viteri

  2 shared

Labs

• Latin American & Iberian Studies ProgramPI