By Rosario Hubert
Reviewed by Carles Prado-Fonts
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)
Rosario Hubert, Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. 328 pp. ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback); 9780810146563 (hardcover); 9780810146570 (ebook).
The study of Sinographies, or “the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China,”[1] has become a meeting point where scholarship from Chinese studies, historiography, and comparative literature merge and interact in productive ways. To be sure, these studies differ depending on each scholar’s background, as well as on their scope and concerns. But, as a whole, they form a field that has now already gone a long way since its original formulation, which mostly covered writings about China in hegemonic Western contexts. The pioneering works of Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, and a few others have now been enlarged, supplemented, and problematized from new angles and new linguistic perspectives, as well as with the aid of archives.
The study of Sinographies in Latin America is an excellent example of such fertile evolution. The past few years have seen a wide array of contributions that study the meanings of “China” in Latin America. Works by scholars such as Araceli Tinajero, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio López Calvo, and Kathleen López have recently been expanded in new directions by contributions from Andrea Bachner, Monica DeHart, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Ana Paulina Lee, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt Strabucchi, Brenda Rupar, and Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, among many others.[2] Thus, while a common trope in prefaces and introductions may still claim that China in Latin America is a new and under-researched topic, the fact is that solid scholarship already exists about it—in Spanish and English. The future also looks promising: not only because there is a massive archive that has not yet been fully explored, but also because of the theoretical potential of these discoveries to come. As a “South-South” interaction that escapes the logic of hegemonic scholarship, the study of China in Latin America can raise pertinent critical questions in discussions about truly global and transnational issues.
Rosario Hubert’s Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature illustrates such vitality and contributes to these discussions—in particular to those about world literature, cross-cultural material exchanges, and the geopolitics of knowledge. In a nutshell, Disoriented Disciplines explores how the writing about China in Latin America developed in an “undisciplined” way across the boundaries of different fields, given that knowledge produced about China lacked any solid scholarly foundation in Latin American countries. This situation produced a heterogeneous archive that should make us rethink the place and meaning of the fragmentary, the serendipitous, the peripheral, or the residual in discussions about world literature and in other fields. The chapters of the book deal with modernistas, Jorge Luis Borges, cultural diplomats, visual poets, and political activists. They offer a fascinating account of empirical and theoretical heterogeneity.
Hubert’s project is an ambitious one at many levels: geographically, because it embraces Latin America at large; chronologically, because it begins in the nineteenth century and ends in our present day; and, above all, thematically and methodologically, as it deals not only with books, bodies, objects, archives, and images but also with different theoretical debates and geopolitical frameworks. The ambition pays off: Disoriented Disciplines not only unveils a large and fabulous archive, but also—and perhaps most importantly—empowers that archive with theoretical relevance and puts it at the service of current conversations in cross-cultural studies.
The introduction, “Indiscipline,” lays out the conceptual underpinnings of Hubert’s project. She begins with the apparent paradox that created the vast “undisciplined” collection of Chinas to be later explored in the book. For Hubert, the paradox goes as follows: While the Orient played a crucial role in Latin American culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Latin American knowledge of the East lacked any kind of order and formality. By this she means that China was not understood, discussed, or engaged in an informed and critical way derived from the (presumably) more solid knowledge that both Sinological scholarship and non-institutional cultural and literary venues provided in the West (12-13). Hubert’s main argument follows from there: given such an undisciplined development, the discussion of China in Latin America can therefore be found in “critical infrastructures that combine the trends of literary criticism with the repertoire of artifacts transported by global networks of travel at any given time” (14). Moreover, while these “undisciplined” or “disoriented” writings on China cannot be taken as realist representations and may not say much about China itself, they do speak volumes about how cross-cultural interactions work.
The introduction presents another concept central to Hubert’s project: a flexible notion of translation. Indeed, she considers “broadening the scope of translation from linguistic transfer to physical displacement” (28) to be one of the major goals of the book. Her claims about translation may raise some eyebrows among translation studies scholars: “Translation . . . is also an act of media transfer that implies physically transcreating media across cultural boundaries” (145); “Translation is . . . a haptic process of identifying the superficial aspects of a literary artifact and recreating—transcreating—them in a new cultural context” (191); “I take translation as the transfer of affect in the writing of history of China” (192). But her flexible understanding of translation is very much in tune with scholarship in world literature and comparative studies. This understanding of translation provides Hubert with a certain coherence and structure (it is tempting to call it discipline) to work across the undisciplined archive to be unfolded in the following chapters.
Chapter 1, “Trade, Tourism, and Traffic: The Labor Routes of Modernismo,” focuses on the writings from José Martí (1853–1895), Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927), and José Juan Tablada (1871–1945). Hubert offers a reading of these nineteenth-century modernistas’ works in relation to China that goes beyond the usual focus on orientalism, exoticism, and chinoiserie. Through a close reading of different aspects related to travel infrastructure and the China trade, she unveils details on relevant political issues at the time, such as global labor migrations, imperialism, and the spread of capitalism, as well as “the material networks connecting fin de siècle Latin America to the rest of the world, particularly Asia” (28). In the last part of the chapter, Hubert connects this reading with what she calls “the coolie passage archive.” These are “the dispersed corpus of sources depicting the transportation of indentured laborers from China to Peru and the Caribbean in the second part of the nineteenth century” (54). She examines, for instance, the travel journal of the Colombian coolie broker Nicolás Tanco Armero (1830–1890), “the most notorious labor agent in Spanish America” (62), who between 1855 and 1873 oversaw the dispatch of coolie ships from Amoy (Xiamen) to the Caribbean for a Spanish trading company. In 1855, Tanco Armero visited China and wrote the travelogue Viaje de Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia (A Trip from New Granada to China, and from China to France), published in Paris in 1860. Hubert observes how his text “deliberately omits any reference to the coolie passage” (62) in a loud and incriminating silence; or any accounts of mutinies of Chinese migrants, which were frequent in journalistic and fiction sources at the time.
Chapter 2, “Sinology on the Edge: Borges’s Fictional Epistemology of China,” deals with the relation between Jorge Luis Borges and China. Hubert surveys Borges’s famous writings about Sinologists and Chinese encyclopedias as well as his lesser-known reviews of English and German translations of Chinese literature published in literary magazines between 1937 and 1942. Hubert connects Borges’s “highly productive Chinese years” (104) with his concern about the development of philology as a modern scientific discipline in Latin America that challenged the more conservative philological tradition imposed by exiled Spanish intelligentsia in the Americas. Hubert calls this “sinology on the edge.” Even if Borges did not care very much about China itself and his reviews about Chinese literature were only a few among the thousands he penned throughout his life, Hubert convincingly shows how writing about China was a way to explore the creation of “a humanistic object of study within a disciplinary framework” (70), and how Borges’s thoughts on China were influential in his theories of creative mistranslation. The whole book in general and this chapter in particular provide many enlightening examples of what I have elsewhere called the instrumentality of “China,” or the use of representations of China for all sorts of purposes—generally unrelated to China itself.[3]
Chapter 3, “The Twisted Networks of Cultural Diplomacy: Global Maoism in Print,” examines Latin American leftist intellectuals and cultural diplomats who interacted with China during the Cold War. The establishment of the PRC in 1949 transformed cross-cultural dynamics. Maoist cultural diplomacy “resulted in a torrent of translations pouring out from Beijing to different corners of the globe and particularly the so-called Third World” (108). Hubert shows how the writing about China in Latin America did not strictly change as a result of the ambitious efforts of Chinese diplomacy but rather due to the local dynamics of the cultural field, as “Latin American intellectuals used Chinese cultural diplomacy initiatives to fulfill their singular aesthetic projects rather than to rubber stamp Maoism” (108-109). Tracing the trajectories of figures such as Bernardo Kordon (1915–2002) or Fina Warschaver (1910–1989), we get introduced to the flows and networks, agents and institutions, aesthetics and ideologies that were essential in the writing and understanding of China during the Cold War in Latin America. Hubert’s accounts illustrate the serendipity and lack of structure of this kind of cultural interactions, which were “channeled through the networks of Chinese cultural diplomacy and catalogued in world literature series or simply in translation; read in Marxist terms as well as Orientalist ones; and addressed to a disparate audience ranging from Maoist militants to art dilettantes” (136).
Chapter 4, “The Surface of the Ideograph: Visual Poetry and the Chinese Script,” centers on visual poets and plastic artists who engaged with the Chinese script. The works by Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003), José Juan Tablada (1871–1945), and Severo Sarduy (1937–1993) challenge Octavio Paz’s famous lamentation about the limited repercussion of Chinese poetics in Latin America—even if their engagement with Chinese poetry and script was not textual but performed through visual and plastic ideogrammatic innovations: grids and designs, tattoos and acupuncture piercings, and glyphs made of the kinds of objects imported by the Manila Galleon. These “translations” end up establishing a conversation between Chinese poetics and Latin American art and engage with Western philosophical debates that questioned the supremacy of the written word at the time. As in other chapters, powerful reflections arise when Hubert connects the archive with larger issues related to, for instance, world literature: “By evidencing the textual instability of Chinese literature in Spanish and Portuguese, Haroldo and Borges do not lament the peripheral writer’s residual access to world literature but instead demonstrate that any form of world literature—or rather, Literature—thrives when it transcends individual talent and place of enunciation” (184).
Chapter 5, “Moving Memories: The Affective Archive of the Cultural Revolution,” brings to light personal archives of Latin American families who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand. Hubert examines how these materials resurfaced decades later in the artistic production of the so-called “red diapers”: children who, following their Maoist militant parents, were educated in China during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their singular positions as children who were educated as locals but still always treated as foreigners “complicate notions of identity, community, and internationalism during the Chinese revolutionary process” (199). The memoirs, novels, and documentaries by Brazilian João Moreira Salles (1962–), Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez (1973–), Uruguayan Pablo (1958–) and Yuri Doudchitzky (1961–), and Venezuelan Víctor Ochoa-Piccardo (1955–), among others, become contemporary affective archives. As “leftovers of an era of utopia” (194), they offer a valuable counterpoint to official historical narratives—and a most interesting paradox too: “enduring socialist concerns in an era of market commodity consumption” (231). This is a very original chapter that addresses lesser-known materials and engages with important questions about history and subjectivity, archival memory, and emotions as modes of knowledge production.
The Afterword, “Imposture,” reflects on the wealth of representations of China in contemporary Latin American fiction following the global rise of China in the twenty-first century. This is the case of Santiago Gamboa’s Los impostores (The impostors), which Hubert discusses at length not only as “a fast-paced and funny text that complicates frameworks of East-West comparison” (241) but also as a text that encapsulates in fiction each of the “translations” of China that she has studied in the book: migration of coolies, transplantation of Sinology, transfer of ideograms, and adaptation of Maoism (242-243). Hubert closes the book with a strong claim for a methodological shift in the study of cross-cultural exchanges. The examples examined in the book, she stresses, illustrate how cross-cultural interactions do not navigate the world through fixed geographies but “through trafficked routes, twisted networks, on the edge, from the surface, and in motion. They are contingent positions that make use of given infrastructures but do not conform to their geopolitical logic, because, after all, they deal with literary creation” (244). The afterword is followed by an appendix: a table with a list of Spanish translations of Chinese literary works published in Buenos Aires between 1942 and 1981.
Disoriented Disciplines is a suggestive work that opens multiple avenues for discussion and further investigation. As an example, let me point out three reflections that emerged from my own reading—and from my own biases and interests.
First, I wonder whether we could extend the scope of Hubert’s claim beyond Latin America. Or, in other words, whether the correlation between the lack of Sinological formality and a disorganized knowledge about China that Hubert sets up as an organizing foil for her project can be limited to Latin America—or similar non-hegemonic contexts. It is certainly true that Sinology did not develop in Latin American universities as it did in some Western places. But did the development of Sinology as an academic discipline in the West bring a more organized writing of China in Western society at large? My impression is that the heterogeneity of the representations of China was such—at least in Europe and, particularly, around the interwar period—that scholarly Sinological discourses coexisted with plenty of “disorganized” or “undisciplined” representations of China. As I have argued elsewhere, “China” ended up being nothing but an empty signifier ready to be filled with many different signifieds—academic or otherwise.[4] In other words, “China” has always remained cross-culturally unstable, dispersed, submerged, scattered, and slippery—the very same qualities that Hubert attaches to the Latin American archive she unveils. I suspect, then, that should we apply Hubert’s methodology to sites with “an institutional framework for the study of China” (110) we might arrive at similar results. This does not invalidate Hubert’s argument, but rather extends its scope and relevance: Couldn’t it be possible to trace, excavate, bring to the surface, and give significance to new and different kinds of Sinographies in other locations? Perhaps “indiscipline” and “disorientation” are rather the norm—and not the exception—pretty much everywhere.
Second, an important part of the “undisciplined” knowledge of China that serendipitously traveled to Latin American writings may have been “disciplined” by other languages and cultures prior to its arrival. In non-hegemonic European locations such as Spain or Catalonia, the representations of China were almost always mediated by Anglophone and Francophone interventions. And this mediation was often more important than the actual knowledge about China itself—for Spaniards and Catalans, writing about China was a way to become more European and engage with Western cultural and political centers. As such, China was part of a triangulation that reinforced existing hierarchies of knowledge among languages and cultures. Reading Disoriented Disciplines I often found myself asking whether this was also the case with the archive under discussion. Was China used in a similar triangular and instrumental way in Latin America? The book offers several hints that seem to indicate so: it mentions similar indirect circuits through French, English, and German languages (91, 108, 135, 150, 154) and also examines many cases of “China” becoming an instrument for local purposes (Borges’s concern about the development of philology being perhaps the most prominent). But the book leaves these mediations rather unproblematized, and my impression is that there is probably ample room in Hubert’s archive for future explorations along these lines that would yield important insights into transnational, global circuits of knowledge.
Third, another avenue to be further explored is how China contributed to the internal politics within the Latin American context. As the book covers Latin America at large, Hubert can test her claims against a vast geography that is antagonistically contrasted with an equally vast and problematic category such as “Europe” or “the West.” At the same time, though, such a large scope may erase the historical diversity of the national and regional contexts within Latin America, and how China may have interacted differently with each of them. At different points of the book I wondered whether and how China contributed to, for instance, the singularization of Argentina vis-à-vis “states closer to the ethnically mixed Caribbean, like Colombia and Venezuela” (35), or places with extensive experiences with Chinese indentured labor such as Cuba or Mexico.
These are only three of the many potential reflections that this rich book will pose for the reader. Disoriented Disciplines contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Sinographies with a largely unexplored archive, new thoughts on literary and material culture, and an ambitious intervention in relevant trends and issues in comparative studies. The book’s array of fascinating materials and historical figures, the finesse of its close readings, the elegant complementarity of its chapters, and the sophistication of its theoretical claims also make it an absolute pleasure to read.
Carles Prado-Fonts
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
NOTES:
[1] Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, “Sinographies: An Introduction.” In Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, eds., Sinographies: Writing China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), vii.
[2] A representative selection of single-authored monographs published in the past few years is: Ana Paulina Lee, Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Monica DeHart, Transpacific Developments: The Politics of Multiple Chinas in Central America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); María Montt Strabucchi, Representations of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023); Brenda Rupar, Los “Chinos”: La conformación del maoísmo en Argentina (1965-1974) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Imago Mundi, 2023).
[3] Carles Prado-Fonts, Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022).
[4] Ibid.