2 Books Like Transnational Philippines

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… show more.

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.