Orientalism and Identity in Latin America

Fashioning Self and Other from the (Post)Colonial Margin

Edited by Erik Camayd-Freixas

The University of Arizona Press

Building on the pioneering work of Edward Said in fresh and useful ways, contributors to this volume consider both historical contacts and literary influences in the formation of Latin American constructs of the “Orient” and the “Self” from colonial times to the present. In the process, they unveil wide-ranging manifestations of Orientalism. Contributors scrutinize the “other” great encounter, not with Europeans but with Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese cultures, as they marked Latin American societies from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. The perspectives, experiences, and theories presented in these examples offer a comprehensive framework for understanding wide-ranging manifestations of Orientalism in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world.

Orientalism and Identity in Latin America expands current theoretical frameworks, juxtaposing historical, biographical, and literary depictions of Middle Eastern and Asian migrations, both of people and cultural elements, as they have been received, perceived, refashioned, and integrated into Latin American discourses of identity and difference. Underlying this intercultural dialogue is the hypothesis that the discourse of Orientalism and the process of Orientalization apply equally to Near Eastern and Far Eastern subjects as well as to immigrants, regardless of provenance—and indeed to any individual or group who might be construed as “Other” by a particular dominant culture.

Camayd-Freixas has brought together a very worthy set of contributions that add to the burgeoning study of Orientalism in Latin America.'—CHOICE

“In its historical and geographical scope and in its theoretical sophistication, this is a major contribution to the burgeoning study of orientalism in Latin America and to the ever more urgent discussion of issues of multicultural identity in the region.” —Juan E. De Castro, author of Mestizo Nations: Culture, Race, and Conformity in Latin American Literature

“The book is outstanding in its breadth of geographical, historical, and racial scope.”—Robert Chao Romero, author of The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940

Erik Camayd-Freixas is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at Florida International University. He is the author of several books and co-edited the seminal Primitivism and Identity in Latin America.

Introduction: The Orientalist Controversy and the Origins of Amerindian Culture
Erik Camayd- Freixas
1. The Death of the Critique of Eurocentrism: Latinamericanism as a Global Praxis/Poiesis
Brett Levinson
2. The Mentality of the Reconquest and the Early Conquistadors
Hernán G. H. Taboada
3. Orientalism Criollo Style: Sarmiento’s “Orient” and the Formation of an Argentine Identity
Christina Civantos
4. Orientalism and Mexican Nationalism: Catarina de San Juan as the China Poblana’s Asian Mother
Blake Seana Locklin
5. Journeys and Trials of the Fu Family: Transpacific Reverberations of the Anti- Chinese Movement in Mexico
Julia María Schiavone Camacho
6. Narrating Orientalisms in Spanish American Modernism
Ivan A. Schulman
7. Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s Japan and Latin American (Peripheral) Orientalism
Zoila Clark
8. The Tao of Mexican Poetry: Tablada, Villaurrutia, Paz
Erik Camayd- Freixas
9. The Dragon’s Footprints along Cuban Narrative
Rogelio Rodríguez Coronel
10. Renace el sueño: Remaking Havana’s Barrio Chino
Kathleen López
11. Of Chinese Dragons and Canaries on the Isthmus of Panama
Margarita Vásquez
12. Siu Kam Wen and the Subjectifi cation of Chinese Peruvians in “El tramo final”
Debra Lee- DiStefano
13. Zen in Brazil: Cannibalizing Orientalist Flows
Cristina Rocha
14. Writing and Memory: Images of the Japanese Diaspora in Brazil
Karen Tei Yamashita
Selected Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index

Related Titles