With this fascinating and theoretically sound study, Rosario Hubert has produced a key text not only in Asia-Latin American studies, but also in Latin American studies and Asian studies. In Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, she explores, from the theoretical perspectives of world literature and cosmopolitanism, not so much how Latin American authors have mimetically represented China in their works but, rather, how their own misreadings (hence, the “disoriented” in the title of the book) of Chinese culture allowed them to reconsider world literature and join global cross-cultural debates. Hubert explores the sui generis circulation of Chinese culture in Latin America outside academic circles or the discipline of sinology. She does so by focusing in different chapters on topics such as the meaning of chinoiserie for modernistas, Chinese script for vanguardia writers, and Maoist propaganda on the New Left and Latin American cultural and political debates. This book reconsiders the contingent, unplanned, and “undisciplined” Latin American infrastructures of comparative criticism to draw conclusions about the geopolitics of knowledge and the political undertones of representation. Again, translation, one of the keywords in the book, is understood as the displacement of the visual and haptic qualities of a cultural artifact through time, space, and different cultures. Along the way, Disoriented Disciplines advocates for this type of alternative cosmopolitan indiscipline that, blending the concrete and the sensorial, appeared at the juncture of the literary market, commerce and diplomacy, as a methodological option for comparative literary studies outside the philological field. The best theoretical exploration of the writing of China in Latin America to date, this book recovers, along the way, a never-before analyzed catalog of texts in variegated media. Its main message is that the representations and circulation of Chinese culture (a culture often considered unreadable and undecipherable with conventional critical tools in the region) went well beyond the boundaries of the academic disciplines through different types of “undisciplined translation,” including ethnography, philology, international relations, linguistics and transfer of affect.
An urgent call to think on the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries
In the absence of specialized programs of study, abstract discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce. As Rosario Hubert reveals, modernism flourishes comparatively, in contexts where cultural criticism is a creative and cosmopolitan practice.
Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature understands translation as a material act of transfer, decentering the authority of the text and connecting seemingly untranslatable…
Transnational Philippines is a much-needed contribution to the subfield of Spanish-language Filipino literature and culture. This is an emerging subfield and a book like this represents a major contribution toward solidifying it and toward encouraging the teaching of Spanish-language Filipino literature in college courses. The different chapters are written by the best-known experts on the topic.
Transnational Philippines: Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish approaches literature that has been forgotten or neglected in studies on other literatures in Spanish due, in part, to the fact that today Spanish is no longer spoken in the Philippines or in Asia. However, isolation has not always been the case, and by omitting Philippine literature in Spanish from the picture of world literatures and Spanish-language literatures, the landscape of these disciplines is incomplete. Transnational Philippines studies how this literary production stemmed from its relationship with other cultures, literature, and arts. It attempts to break this literature's isolation and show…
In this brilliant study, Strabucchi astutely comes to the conclusion that the signifiers China and Chinese, as imagined and fetishized in contemporary Latin American literature, have become discursive matrixes to reframe the discourse of alterity in a more cosmopolitan way, demand a more accurate depiction of the region’s heterogeneity, and deconstruct essentialist constructions of Latin American community, identity, and difference. The book is very original, thoroughly researched, and well written.
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM.
Representations of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016) analyses contemporary Latin American novels in which China is the main theme. Using 'China' as a multidimensional term, it explores how the novels both highlight and undermine assumptions about China that have shaped Latin America's understanding of 'China' and shows 'China' to be a kind of literary/imaginary 'third' term which reframes Latin American discourses of alterity. On one level, it argues that these…
This Handbook covers the history of the Latin American novel—both Spanish-American and Brazilian—from its beginnings during colonial times, to its development and growth during the nineteenth century, to its coming of age during the first half of the twentieth century, to its international recognition from the 1960s to the present. In addition to introducing readers to authors as worthy as those who have achieved international celebrity—such as María Luisa Bombal, Juan Rulfo, or José María Arguedas—it provides insight into the unique trajectory of the Latin American novel in its national, regional, cultural, and linguistic (in Spanish and Portuguese) pluralities. After all, in addition to a regional Latin American literary context, there are distinct national traditions that, even in the cases of comparable cultural realities, such as those of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, often have limited connections. Equally important, it highlights the diversities in gender, race, and ethnicity that have marked the development of the Latin American novel and, more generally, Latin American literatures.
