Project

Disorientations. Writing China in Latin America

Program

ACLS Fellowship Program

Department

Spanish and Portuguese

Abstract

“Disorientations” argues that the intellectual discussion of China in Latin America has not taken place within academia, but rather in a network of discourses around criticism, the literary market, fiction, and diplomacy. Instead of seeing this as a limitation, the project understands that the geographical distance from the object of study and the porous disciplinary boundaries at stake yield to a profound interrogation of both the hegemonic archive of the Orient and the effects of cultural epistemologies in general. By scrutinizing nineteenth-century ethnographies, modernist translations, Maoist print culture, concrete poetry, and contemporary narrative, this project gathers an unprecedented archive of China in Spanish and Portuguese, and proposes a comparative entryway into the study of Asia and Latin America.