Rosario Hubert

UC Irvine

FlashPoints

Title
Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World
Literature

Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99v278zm
ISBN
978-0-8101-4655-6
Author
Hubert, Rosario
Publication Date
2024-02-09
Peer reviewed
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University of California
Disoriented Disciplines
The FlashPoints series is devoted, to books that consider literature, beyond strictly
national and disciplinary frameworks and that are distinguished both by their
historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books
engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without
falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the
humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence
and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter-
ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how
such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are
available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints.
series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi-
tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley),
Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature,
Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (School of Humanities, UC Irvine),
Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita;
Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,
UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz),
Founding Editor
A complete list of titles begins on page 325.
China, Latin America, and
the Shape of World Literature
Rosario Hubert
northwestern university press / evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2024 by Northwestern University. Published 2024 by Northwestern

University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hubert, Rosario, author.
Title: Disoriented disciplines : China, Latin America, and the shape of world
literature / Rosario Hubert.
Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.)
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2023. | Series:
FlashPoints | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023039569 | ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback) | ISBN
9780810146563 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810146570 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Latin American literature—Chinese influences. | Latin American
literature—History and criticism. | Chinese literature—Influence. | Orientalism—Latin
America. | Modernism (Literature)—Latin America. | China—In literature. | Latin
America—Intellectual life.
Classification: LCC PQ7081 .H77 2023 | DDC 860.998—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039569
Para Joan, Joancito y Rosie, mes copains d’abord
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
A Note on Romanization xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. “Indiscipline” 3
Chapter 1. Trade, Tourism, and Traffic: The Labor Routes
of Modernismo 25
Chapter 2. Sinology on the Edge: Borges’s Fictional
Epistemology of China 67
Chapter 3. The Twisted Networks of Cultural Diplomacy:
Global Maoism in Print 107
Chapter 4. The Surface of the Ideograph: Visual Poetry and
the Chinese Script 147
Chapter 5. Moving Memories: The Affective Archive of
the Cultural Revolution 193
Afterword. “Imposture” 239
Appendix: Spanish translations of Chinese liteary works
published in Buenos Aires, 1942–81 245
Notes 251
Bibliography 281
Index 299
Illustrations
Fig u r es
fig. 1. Edgar Holden, “Coolies embarking,” Harper’s

New Monthly Magazine, 1864 55
fig. 2. Fina Warschaver, public lecture after her trip
to the People's Republic of China, 1953 115
fig. 3. Cultura China (Asociación Argentina de Cultura
China) 1, no. 2 (1954–55), cover 117
fig. 4. Ricardo Piglia’s visit to the People’s Republic
of China, 1973 140
fig. 5. Daniel Santoro, Días peronistas, 2003 148
fig. 6. José Juan Tablada, Li-Po y otros poemas, 1920 165
fig. 7. José Juan Tablada in his studio in Coyoacán, 1918 166
fig. 8. Chinoiserie melamine bowl with the inscription
“longevity” 167
fig. 9. Miguel Covarrubias, book cover project for
José Juan Tablada’s La feria, 1928 174
ix
x ❘ Illustrations
fig. 10. Handscroll-like book cover of Haroldo de Campos,

Escrito sobre jade, 2009 181
fig. 11. Children of foreign residents singing Maoist marches in
Beijing, Hotel de la amistad, 2016 204
fig. 12. A propaganda poster of Camarada Norah, Tempestad
en los Andes, 2014 228
fig. 13. João Moreira Salles’s mother, No intenso agora, 2017 235
fig. 14. Chinese film director Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke:
Um homem de Fenyang, 2014 236
fig. 15. Cover of the first edition of Santiago Gamboa,
Los impostores, 2002 242
Ta b les
table 1. Jorge Luis Borges’s reviews of recent translations of Chinese

literature, 1937–42 88
table 2. Spanish translations of Chinese literary works
published in Buenos Aires, 1942–81 245
A Note on Romanization
Per scholarly convention in the United States, I use the pinyin romaniza-
tion system of standard Chinese and only employ other transcriptions
when quoting a source or when they are of common usage, for example,
in names.
xi
Acknowledgments
Although I wrote this book over the last years, its initial ideas took
shape some time before. I owe so much of my trajectory as a scholar
to Mariano Siskind, who has been not only a perpetual mentor of this
project but also the most engaged interlocutor in everything related to
culture, life, and friendship. At Harvard, Diana Sorensen and David
Damrosch were key guides in helping me formulate my own ideas on
the crossover between literature, geography, and knowledge. I thank
them for their foundational inspiration.
It has been a privilege to carry out this project at Trinity College, where
I have received unyielding support in the form of grants and workshops
and, especially, in the freedom to teach in the most creative ways. At
the Department of Language and Culture Studies I have found devoted
mentors and colleagues, among whom I particularly want to thank Sara
Kippur, Priscilla Meléndez, Anne Lambright, Dario del Puppo, Johannes
Evelin, Kifah Hanna, Yipeng Shen, Diana Aldrete, Aidalí Aponte-Avilés,
Blase Provitola, David Souto-Alcalde, and Thomas Harrington, as well
as Sonia Cárdenas.
Throughout these years I was fortunate to share my research in dif-
ferent contexts and institutions; I am indebted to so many of the pre-
cious conversations with colleagues and friends, particularly Graciela
Montaldo, Mónica Szurmuk, Gonzalo Aguilar, Alejandra Uslenghi, Fer-
nando Degiovanni, Ignacio López-Calvo, Koichi Hagimoto, Paula Park,
Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Jason O. Chang, Christopher Bush, Andrea Bach-
xiii
xiv ❘ Acknowledgments
ner, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt-Strabucchi, Ana Hosne, Pablo Blitstein,

Fernando Pérez Villalón, Martha Puxan, Carles Prado-Fonts, Xavier
Ortells, Salvador Marinaro, Lucila Carzoglio, Guido Herzovich, and
Jerome Silsby. Thank you for always welcoming me in Buenos Aires to
share my thoughts: Florencia Garramuño, Álvaro Fernández Bravo, Luz
Horne, Edgardo Dieleke, Irene Depetris Chauvín, Martín Bergel, Lila
Caimari, Adriana Petra, and Malena Higashi. Thank you for answer-
ing long emails with Chinese queries: Matthew Rothwell, Miguel Ángel
Petrecca, and Qiaomei Tang. Thank you for your enthusiastic feedback
at different stages of the manuscript: Beatriz Sarlo, Nora Catelli, Aníbal
González, and the late Juan Forn. Thank you for the ongoing tertu-
lia that stretches from Cambridge to all corners of the world: Daniela
Dorfman, Daniel Aguirre, Simos Zenios, Juan Torbidoni, Carlos Varón
González, Antonio Arraiza, Luigi Patruno, Ernest Hartwell, Ana Paula
Hirano, Pablo Ruiz, Bruno Carvalho, Manolo Núñez Negrón, Lucas
Mertehikian, Mauro Lazarovich, Rodrigo del Río, Ernesto Livón-
Grosman, Nina Gerassi, Paloma Duong, Brendan Lanctot, Valeria
Luiselli, Pau Bujosa, Alfredo Lérida, María Charneco, Analía Ivanier,
Valentín and Bruno Siskind, and Pep Vicente.
Archival work was crucial for this project, and none of it would have
been possible without the support of fellowships from the National En-
dowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Soci-
eties, and various research funds from Trinity College. Along with their
records, the gatekeepers and protagonists of these archives helped me
navigate the exhilarating world of Chinese papers in Latin America.
Thanks to Laura Rosato, Germán Álvarez, and Guillermo David at Bib-
lioteca Nacional Argentina. Thank you for your memories and insight:
Victor Ochoa-Piccardo, Alberto Giudici, Guillermo Schavelzon, Daniel
Santoro, Daniel Samoilovich, Eliot Weinberger, and the late Jorge Laf-
forgue and María Kodama.
I am very grateful to the American Comparative Literature Associ-
ation for the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award. Thanks to
Michelle Clayton and Susan Gillman from FlashPoints for their enthusi-
asm for this book from the get-go; to Faith Wilson Stein and the team at
Northwestern University Press for their work in bringing this project to
fruition, and to the generous anonymous readers for helping me refine
the initial version of the manuscript. Isis Sadek not only polished my
writing but also mentored me on how to better understand my prose.
Thanks to Malcolm Thompson for the excellent indexing work.
Acknowledgments ❘ xv
A very early version of chapter 1, published as “Chinoiseries” in

Latin American Literature in Transition 1870–1930 (2022): 135–47,
is reprinted here with permission of Cambridge University Press. As
are a few pages from chapter 2, which came out as a stand-alone arti-
cle in Variaciones Borges 39 (2015): 81–101. Some ideas developed in
chapter 5 were originally conceived in Spanish in the exploratory essay
“Pañales rojos (o el archivo afectivo de una infancia revolucionaria),”
published in Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World 9, no. 3 (2020): 34–55.
In the years it took me to complete this book, my two children were
born, and my writing also experienced the physical transformations
that come with labor. This has made me think a lot about the working
conditions of women in academia and, inspired by Severo Sarduy, of
writing as a bodily practice. None of the efforts put into this project
would have been worthwhile without the support of loved ones across
the many geographies that my family calls home. In Buenos Aires: Cota,
Tani, and Tino along with my lifelong friends, as well as aunts and cous-
ins (and their ever-open office space for me in Maldón). In Seattle: Tito
and Sharbani have convinced me that there is another place in the US
that feels like home. In Barcelona: queridas Tata y Yaya, always ready
to give us that much needed helping hand. Thank you Rebeca Medrano
for being there for my kids and my family in our daily lives. My chil-
dren Joan Marcel and Rosie are not only my loves but also my constant
reminder of the transformative power of language and storytelling. Fi-
nally, Joan, thank you for your loving complicity, your relentless drive,
and your precious care. This book is for you.
Introduction
“Indiscipline”
China, more than any other imaginary construction of the Orient, has
occupied a crucial role in Latin American literary modernity. Modernis-
tas were obsessed with the chinoiserie imports that ornamented their
luxurious interiors and precious language, and that stressed their em-
brace of the exotic in lieu of the mimetic. The Chinese script—or rather,
the European fantasies of the ideograph—was a critical object of in-
quiry for avant-garde artists such as José Juan Tablada, who used it as
a precursor of haiku poetry in Spanish; for the Brazilian concretistas,
who made the ideogram the ars poetica of their movement; or for poet-
translators debating logocentrism, who manipulated Asian glyphs in the
most unexpected ways. Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction teems with Chinese
characters: spies, professors, pirates, diplomats, fugitives, bookkeepers,
encyclopedias, as well as a good number of English and German sinolo-
gists. Since the Cold War, both socialist realism and the enormous Mao-
ist propaganda apparatus consisting of revolutionary novels, poems,
films, plays, and operas have had a decisive impact in Latin American
intellectual and aesthetic debates on culture and politics. With recent
migration waves, international cooperation initiatives, and the general
renewed interest in this ancient culture that is today at the forefront of
global capitalism, China comes up time and again in fiction and criti-
cism in Spanish and Portuguese.
Truth be told, very few of these writings of China advances much
specialized knowledge about Chinese culture itself. It is unlikely that
3
4 ❘ Introduction
sinologists will expand their understanding of Du Fu or Wang Wei by

reading Haroldo de Campos’s translations of poetry from the Tang dy-
nasty (618–907), and linguists might be rather perplexed at Severo Sar-
duy’s wholly invented Asian signs and words. These writers barely had
any background on the Chinese literary traditions, seldom spoke its lan-
guages, or had access to relevant bibliography in their cultural fields. In
the foreword to Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940; The Book of
Fantasy), Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo
openly acknowledge the challenges of writing from Argentina about a
faraway culture like China: “El admirable Sueño del Aposento Rojo y
hasta novelas eróticas y realistas, como Kin P’ing Mei y Sui Hu Chuan,
y hasta los libros de filosofía, son ricos en fantasmas y sueños. Pero no
sabemos cómo estos libros representan la literatura china; ignorantes,
no podemos conocerla directamente, debemos alegrarnos con lo que
la suerte (profesores muy sabios, comités de acercamiento cultural, la
señora Perla S. Buck), nos depara” (The admirable Dream of the Red
Chamber and even erotic and realist novels, like the Kin P’ing Mei and
Sui Hu Chuan, and even philosophical works, are rich in ghosts and
dreams. But we do not know how these books represent Chinese liter-
ature; we are ignorant of it, and cannot access it directly. Instead, we
must content ourselves with what luck [very sage professors, cultural
cooperation committees and Ms. Pearl Buck] has in store for us).1 Read
literally, this quote establishes that peripheral intellectuals are destined
to remedy their ignorance of faraway cultures only by “contenting them-
selves” with derivative forms of knowledge, that is, through the fortu-
nate mediation of metropolitan experts. But the ironic tone in which the
Argentine writers caricature these specialists reveals that, rather than
lamenting their own subaltern position in the cartography of compara-
tive literature, they are actually questioning the nature of the so-called
authorities: “very wise professors” (erudite scholars), “cultural coopera-
tion committees” (like the cultural diplomacy initiatives that their group
Sur designed with US foreign officials at the time of the Good Neighbor
Policy), and “Ms. Pearl Buck” (a best-selling novelist based in China,
whom they designate merely as a middle-class woman). To the Latin
Americans, neither philology, foreign policy, nor immigration seem
valid mechanisms for producing knowledge about foreign cultures.
Borges, Bioy, and Ocampo eventually include numerous excerpts of—
undecipherable—Chinese fantastic literature in their anthology, and in
the following years Borges goes on to translate, review, and compare
Chinese novels that he has not even read, because Borges, like many
“Indiscipline” ❘ 5
other artists and intellectuals studied in this book, is less concerned with
the mimetic representation of China than with the ways in which Chi-
nese culture helps rethink the larger networks of world literature and
with establishing an unstable topos to adopt in a global conversation
on cultural exchange. While these disorienting writings of China do not
say much new about China itself, they do say lot about Chinese culture
in its transnational, diasporic, and global dimension. Chinoiserie trade
goods, the ideograph, Maoist propaganda, and the Chinese diaspora are
after all different inflections of this distant and ancient Eastern culture,
and they all emerge through the displacement of peoples, texts, and ar-
tifacts since early modernity. “What can furnish the West with a better
reservoir of dreams, fantasies, and utopias?” posits Zhang Longxi in
reference to the longstanding misconceptions of Chinese culture in the
West.2 Tracking the circulation of Chinese culture in Latin America fur-
ther complicates such prevalent tropes and demands a reconsideration
of context. Although chinoiserie goods had been circulating in global
markets since the seventeenth century, these products were imported
to Latin America at the turn of the century thanks to the transplanted
Chinese indentured laborers who facilitated the export of commodities,
thus making modernist exoticism in Latin America inseparable from
demographics. Also, avant-garde artists from Latin America did indeed
embrace the fertile misconceptions about the ideograph promoted by
the Jesuits in the seventeenth century and revived by Anglo-American
modernism. But in doing this they defined a new approach to these mis-
conceptions, through the prism of the concerns of folklore, archaeology,
and antiquity regarding Mesoamerican hieroglyphs and Andean nonver-
bal languages. The Maoist fever of the New Left in Latin America was
evidently influenced by French theory and its romanticization of the Cul-
tural Revolution. Yet, Maoist aesthetics in Latin America were debated
in the context of societies in the grip of state terrorism and the guerrilla
warfare spreading throughout the Third World. A reading effect of the
itineraries and afterlives of Chinese culture, these disorienting writings of
China open a far-reaching interrogation of both the scholarly archive on
Orientalism and the effects of cultural epistemologies in general.
Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World
Literature is a study of the archival formations, theoretical debates, and
geopolitical frameworks that facilitate the flow and exchange of books,
bodies, and things between China and Latin America from the nineteenth
century to the present. In the following pages I make two distinct but con-
nected claims. First, the writing of China in Latin America is a material
6 ❘ Introduction
act of translation, a form of writing that involves the physical dislocation

of agents and artifacts across cultural boundaries. In this light, translation
is more than a textual exercise; it is also the displacement of the human,
visual, and haptic qualities of a literary work. My second claim is that
the writing of China in Latin America unfolds as an undisciplined crit-
ical praxis that bypasses conventional academic methods, thus produc-
ing new modes of reading and archives. World literary discourses about
China in Latin America taken shape in contingent critical infrastructures
given the absence of specialized programs and scholars of Chinese eth-
nography, philology, international relations, and history.
***
I pursue three goals in this book. The first is to provide an in-depth
study of the circulation of Chinese culture in Latin America. The book
compiles a unique archive on China in Spanish and Portuguese that
revisits the work of canonical artists and intellectuals who had a long-
standing fascination with Asia such as José Juan Tablada, Jorge Luis
Borges, Octavio Paz, Haroldo de Campos, and Severo Sarduy; yet this
book also unveils an overlooked corpus of primary sources that is
scattered across “coolie” trade documents, Maoist print culture, and
the plastic arts. Lesser-known authors such as the Argentine Fina War-
schaver and Bernardo Kordon prove to have been invaluable brokers
of Chinese humanist culture through Communist networks during the
Cold War. What’s more, recent works by renowned filmmakers like João
Moreira Salles and Sergio Cabrera reveal intimate family memories of
the Chinese Cultural Revolution that further complicate current de-
bates on postmemory and art. The fiction of the Sino-Peruvian Siu Kam
Wen and the recent translation of testimonies of Chinese indentured
laborers in Cuba adds not only to a growing corpus of Asian American
voices in Latin America but also to silenced accounts of slavery. This is a
humanist, yet fragmentary and scattered body of works that sheds light
on Chinese culture in translation and poses the very question of how to
read cultures from afar.
The second goal is historical in nature. I revisit Latin American lit-
erary modernity in light of its critical infrastructures, what I refer to as
the conjunction of trends in literary criticism and the networks of travel
that facilitate the translation of Chinese cultural artifacts at different
moments in time. Overall, the book provides a sweeping revision of
Latin America’s literary history considering the rhetorical mediations
that make sense of a culture that is virtually unreadable and undeci-
pherable with the conventional tools of literary criticism. Therefore, it

proposes an alternative genealogy of comparative literature as practiced
in a cultural field where the university is not the axis of cultural criti-
cism. Throughout the book I provide ample evidence of how the most
substantial theoretical and critical debates on foreign cultures in Latin
America happen eminently outside of academia.
The final goal is methodological and refers to my own intervention
as a scholar of Latin America in the global conversation on cultural
exchanges happening for the most part in US academia. Because of my
emphasis on the circulation of cultural artifacts; my understanding of
literature as a material, sensorial, and affective phenomenon; and my
attention to the historical processes that enable such acts of translation,
I participate in the ongoing studies on world literature in Latin America
in light of material evidence of the region’s global engagements, such
as “concrete and finite set of global trajectories traveled by writers and
books,” “material institutions of world literature,” and “institutional in-
terventions within the war and the market.”3
My book also contributes to the growing scholarship on East-West
comparison through the lens of sinography, “the particular forms of
writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the
meanings of China; they try to understand those writings analytically,
symptomatically, and historically, in relation to multiple determinants.”4
Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven Yao postulate in a foundational
volume titled Sinographies: Writing China (2007) that rather than seek-
ing to advance philological or historical “truth” about China, sinogra-
phy is concerned with the boundless aesthetic potential of the cultural
constructions of China as an object of knowledge: “sinography would
be to sinology (a debated discipline in its own right) as historiography
is to history, a reflection on the conditions, assumptions, and logic of a
set of disciplinary and cultural practices.”5 In dialogue with the rise of
China globally and the opening of the humanities beyond the university,
Disoriented Disciplines scrutinizes the writings of China in Latin Amer-
ica to pose a crucial question for the present: What does it mean to be a
specialist in a foreign culture?
Wor ld Liter at ur e a nd L at i n A me ri ca
The complex nature of specialized knowledge of foreign cultures is the

perennial question of comparative literature. In Comparing the Litera-
8 ❘ Introduction
tures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), David Damrosch looks

back on the life and work of comparatists who have struggled to define
and redefine the terms of literary analysis over the past two centuries,
and in doing so, he reflects on his own role in the heated debates on
world literature from the last two decades. From the start, Damrosch
phrases this initial question as “how can we best address the many dis-
parate literatures now at play in literary studies, and what do we really
mean by comparing them” (my emphasis).6 The first clause of the sen-
tence signals the geographical widening of Weltliteratur, which, unlike
in its Eurocentric origins, now engages with multiple and disparate lit-
erary traditions from around the world. The second part of the phrase,
and its adverbial emphasis “what do we really mean” (and “how can
we best address”), points to a misreading: throughout the chapters of
this panoramic book, Damrosch corrects, revises, and amends many of
the premises and misunderstandings of his own watershed contribu-
tion What Is World Literature? (2003), which garnered a plethora of
devoted followers across the globe, as well as harsh critics within the
fields.7
By broadly defining world literature as a mode of circulation, Dam-
rosch turned the taboo of philology into the totem of comparativism:
contrary to the rigorous linguistic training of the past, it now seemed
possible to engage with literary works as ancient as the Epic of Gil-
gamesh without experiencing Sumerian, to delight in Dante in English,
or even to attempt to venture into Chinese literature in Spanish or Por-
tuguese. Scholars and students of comparative literature were suddenly
encouraged to make comparisons between arcane traditions and remote
epochs thanks the alchemy of translation. New syllabi teemed, antholo-
gies of world literature were published by various presses, and special-
ized publications, symposia, and even an Institute for World Literature
consolidated the structure of what is now, according to Damrosch, “a
very crowded field.”8 In terms of Emily Apter’s distinction between
“world literature” as the descriptive catch-all term referring to the
sum of all forms of literary expression in all the world’s languages, and
“World Literature” as “the disciplinary construct that has secured its
foothold in both the university institution and mainstream publishing,”
Damrosch’s scheme has become World Literature with capital letters.9
As a scholar of Latin America interested in China, I found the cri-
tiques of World Literature astoundingly illuminating as well as per-
plexing. Latin American cultures could now be read in connection to
unexplored traditions and across multiple time periods, thus revisiting
fossilized notions such as indigeneity, exoticism, or modernism, as well

as overcoming the dominant postcolonial lens that insisted on reading
Orientalism as a problem concerning subaltern identities of the Global
South. Yet, as somebody also interested in the material history of literary
forms, the attacks on World Literature as “undisciplined” and “overtly
reliant on translation” did not quite resonate with my object of study,
since in Latin America comparative criticism is essentially about indis-
cipline and translatability. Disoriented Disciplines sits on the cracks in
World Literature. By studying the writings of China in Latin America,
in this book I follow World Literature’s boldest wager that everything is
comparable, even antipodal and remote traditions that have barely been
in touch or do not have an extant archive in which to trace their over-
looked encounter. Yet, I also embrace the pitfalls of World Literature, by
acknowledging its lack of discipline and its assumption of translatabil-
ity as a point of departure. In view of the lack of an institutional frame-
work and the opacity of the Chinese language in Latin America, this
book reconstructs the critical infrastructures that facilitate the flow of
literary artifacts across borders and produce new modes of reading and
archives. Furthermore, World Literature’s capacious theory of transla-
tion as “the introduction of a text into a literary system beyond that of
its original culture” is precisely what enables the term’s conceptual plas-
ticity in the comparison of seemingly untranslatable traditions.10 Dis-
oriented Disciplines understands translation in its most essential sense
of displacement; after all, etymologically speaking, the Latin translatio
is an inflection of transferre “to bring over, carry over.” I argue in this
book that the writings of China in Latin America are a product of lin-
guistic and nonlinguistic forms of translation, such as human migration,
intellectual adaptation, media adjustment, and transfer of affect.
If the debates on world literature strive to reconcile the long-standing
disciplinary models for the study of foreign cultures within the increas-
ingly diverse US university, this book moves this discussion forward
by asking how distance is a factor in the foundations of this expan-
sive move. How can we rethink translation in a cultural context like
Latin America where comparative criticism is not entirely defined by
the learned philological tradition of comparative literature, the strategic
social-science approach of area studies, or the identitarian paradigm
of ethnic studies? To what extent does the global circulation of new
archives pave the way for a reformulation of the concepts and methods
that define Euro-American modernism but are typically forced into other
latitudes as derivative paradigms? Theories of world literature need to be
10 ❘ Introduction
translated, because, after all, comparative literature—the cosmopolitan

and ever-changing enfant terrible of the literary disciplines—is just one
of the many iterations of émigré philology.
In disc iplin e
The exile of European Romance philologists to the Americas during the

interwar period was a pivotal event in the consolidation of the programs
of study of comparative literature.11 In Latin America, even before the
intellectual migrations produced by the Spanish Civil War (1936–39),
there had already been significant scholarly exchanges between Spain
and its former colonies in the Americas. By focusing on the trajectory of
the literary scholar Amado Alonso (1896–1952), Miranda Lida traces
the global history of the Instituto de Filología (1927–46; Institute of
Philology) in Buenos Aires, and examines its decisive role in the study
of languages and in the publishing industry, as well as in the configura-
tion of a Hispanist diaspora throughout the Americas.12 The Instituto
in Argentina was part of a larger hemispheric effort centered in Madrid
that had begun with the establishment of a Spanish program at Colum-
bia University in New York and a Spanish department at Universidad
de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras in the 1920s. The Colegio de México,
chaired by Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959) in the capital of that country,
also started out as an institute of higher education designed to host the
exiled Spanish intellectuals in the 1940s, and soon became the head-
quarters for Spanish philology, as well as a mandatory stopover for
those scholars who, like the Argentine Lida siblings, Raimundo (1908–
79) and María Rosa (1910–62), eventually settled in the United States
to work as specialists of Hispanism and of the emerging field of Latin
Americanism. As Fernando Degiovanni demonstrates in Vernacular
Latin Americanisms: War, the Market, and the Making of a Discipline
(2018), the wartime trajectories of these peripatetic scholars provide the
key to understanding the disciplinary origins of Latin Americanism not
as a spiritual discourse of continental solidarity but as “a group of intel-
lectual and institutional interventions that reject both state nationalism
and global internationalism to think regional community ties.”13
But what about the contribution of these exiled scholars to the study
of foreign literatures in Latin America? Latin American (public) univer-
sities saw their linguistic expertise as a crucial tool in their own peda-
gogical efforts to standardize a vernacular Spanish—somewhat mestizo
and in constant flux due to immigration—and to conduct research on

regional dialects, Indigenous languages, and other variants of speech
across their national territories (an effort of translatio imperii famously
lampooned in Jorge Luis Borges’s polemic with Américo Castro [1885–
1972] as “We do not suffer from dialects, although we do indeed suffer
from dialectological institutes”; see chap. 2). But these figures had a
more decisive impact in a flexible institutional configuration located
beyond academia. Philologists like Amado Alonso or the Dominican
Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946) joined the staff of the publish-
ing house Losada in Buenos Aires to design grammar textbooks and,
from that editorial position, became active curators of series offering
translations of works in linguistics, philosophy of language, and literary
criticism at large.14 Through these series in Losada and other publishing
houses established in Argentina and Mexico after the Spanish Civil War,
the Latin American general public had early access to the scholarship
of German thinkers like Karl Vossler, Helmut Hatzfeld, and even Leo
Spitzer (1887–1960), with whom Hispanists had corresponded during
their formative years in Europe. Also, through these erudite collections
catapulted by a booming publishing industry, Greco-Roman classics
were introduced to the mass market in refined versions by these rare
polyglots.15 The divulgation of their research also extended beyond
the walls of academia, since they were active contributors to literary
magazines, private institutes of higher education (e.g., Colegio Libre
de Estudios Superiores in Argentina, Ateneo de la Juventud in Mexico,
or Escuela Libre in Havana), and some, like Alfonso Reyes, even held
diplomatic posts. Because of their common language, connected histo-
ries, and cultural prestige, Hispanists in Latin America had a far more
vibrant public life than their counterparts in the United States, largely
cloistered at research universities and Ivy Leagues.16
This initial dispersion of literary criticism across the publishing in-
dustry, literary market, and cultural journalism soon became a trend for
comparative criticism in Latin America. This was particularly so in the
turbulent second half of the twentieth century, when the intermittent
military governments across the region forced the closure of universities
and pushed intellectual reflection to informal underground seminars
as well as into exile abroad (note the contrast with the United States:
while since the 1960s the university has been an enduring stronghold
of liberal and democratic values—and thus an enduring target of right-
wing attacks—in Latin America the public university was systematically
intervened during right-wing governments, forcing the displacement of
12 ❘ Introduction
liberal and democratic debate to other venues). In an article that seeks to

rethink the cartography of comparative literature, “Asymmetry: Specters
of Comparativism in the Circulation of Theory” (2017), Nora Catelli
reads these informal, individual, and material networks of magazines
and study groups scattered throughout Latin America and Spain during
the 1960s and 1970s not as supplements to (nonexistent) disciplinary
programs, but rather as new centers of production of critical thought
and theory: “travels, translations, exogenous readings deriving from
unexpected terrains, such as those of anthropology, psychoanalysis,
or linguistics.”17 By tracking early translations into Spanish of French
structuralist and poststructuralist theory, Catelli reveals how Latin
America became a “spectral” center of translation during that time, thus
elevating theory as a fundamental sphere of comparative literature, in
contrast with the field’s tendency to emphasize original primary texts.
The key to Catelli’s argument lies in the central role of translation in
Latin America at large. By signaling translation as a universal practice
that is significantly more common among peripheral cultures—perhaps
due to necessity, an inferiority complex, an encyclopedist drive, or an
urge to translate from central languages as a necessary step to partic-
ipate in modernity—Catelli revisits the US genealogy of World Litera-
ture and advocates for the “implicit comparativism” happening in other
latitudes.18 I unpack this hypothesis by showing how the high points of
translation of China in Latin America occur almost entirely outside aca-
demia, namely through the book industry, diplomacy, and the arts. This
brings me to my first understanding of indiscipline as a form of criticism
that unfolds on the margins of institutional fields of knowledge, in a
porous space where literary studies meets translation and creative prac-
tice, and addresses a larger, educated—yet not exclusively professional—
readership. When Enrique Gómez Carrillo depicts the Chinese merchant
class from Singapore for the broadsheet La Nación; when Jorge Luis
Borges reviews the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry for a
women’s magazine; or when Bernardo Kordon prefaces his own self-
published and self-translated versions of Tang dynasty tales, they are
practicing comparative criticism in its own right and in its own place.
In assuming that comparative criticism is an extramural and deterrito-
rialized practice in Latin America, this book reads genres such as travel
narratives, book reviews, periodicals, publishing series, short stories,
documentaries, or memoirs not as mere primary sources from Latin
America that illustrate theories of world literature, but as spaces of criti-
cal intervention of World Literature in Spanish and Portuguese.
My second understanding of indiscipline refers to the lack of spe-

cialized frameworks for the study of Chinese culture in Latin America.
In Europe, sinology arose as an academic discipline thanks to a vast
archive of sources exchanged through travel. Starting with the Jesuit
letters in the seventeenth century and later with the discursive apparatus
of imperial expansion, scrolls and manuscripts dating from Chinese an-
tiquity found their way into European libraries and universities, where
erudite scholars versed in Asian scripts interpreted and explicated them
using the tools of comparative philology (and where art aficionados like
Ernest Fenollosa or Arthur Waley translated them poetically, igniting
the distinctive fascination with China of Anglo-American modernism).
In the United States, Chinese studies followed the Cold War area studies
model that combined aspects of sociology, history, and cultural anthro-
pology to focus on political and economic phenomena in traditional
and contemporary Asian societies; as well as the ethnic studies model
that focused on the experience of migrant communities of Asian descent
in the Americas. None of these models took shape in Latin America as
such. Sinology had historically been a minor field in Spain. Thanks to
the enduring domains of the Spanish Crown stretching from the West
Indies to the Philippines since early modernity, the “Spanish Pacific” was
indeed a vibrant space of exchange of language, material culture, and
representations.19 But the Spanish did not produce a substantial school
of research or body of translations of Chinese humanistic culture as did
their European counterparts in the nineteenth century. As Carles Prado-
Fonts argues in Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of
Translation (2022), most knowledge about China reached Spanish read-
ers indirectly, as discourses on China arrived into European national
contexts mostly via pivotal centers such as Britain, France, or Germany:
“About 25 percent of the books related to China that were published
in Spain between 1890 and 1940 (including poetry, fiction, and nonfic-
tion) were acknowledged translations of English or French originals;
the rest relied heavily on foreign sources as well, even if they were not
always acknowledged.”20 As a result, Chinese classical works translated
into Spanish were rare, and the larger philological exile transplanted to
the Americas at the beginning of the century barely covered this region
in their literary maps. Martín Bergel notes that the pioneers in Asian
studies in Latin America were, in fact, amateur critics of comparative
religions who started publishing loosely about Buddhism, Hinduism,
and Islam along the lines of theosophy, spiritism, and other prominent
nineteenth-century pseudosciences that thrived in these latitudes.21 For-
14 ❘ Introduction
mal centers for the study of Asia did emerge in Latin America during
the Cold War, although these were not a part of national geopolitical
strategies connected to higher education as in the US area studies model.
Instead, they were a byproduct of UNESCO East-West Major Project
for Intercultural Dialogue (1957–66) that saw several universities in
Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa
Rica (as well as of other countries from the so-called Third World) cre-
ate seminars, courses, and even graduate programs in Oriental Studies.22
The most noteworthy of these are the Centro de Estudios de Asia y
África (1964) at Colegio de México and the Instituto Latinoamericano
de Investigaciones Comparadas Oriente y Occidente (1961) at Univer-
sidad del Salvador, Argentina, both active to this day.23 To some extent,
Asian immigrants in Latin America also secured their own disciplinary
fields of ethnic studies, yet this was mainly the case for the very co-
hesive Japanese diaspora in Brazil and to some extent in Argentina,24
but not so much for the overseas Chinese, who—with the exception
of the Peruvian tusán (“locally born Chinese”)—have historically been
a very dispersed community in the region.25 For the most part poly-
glots and globe-trotters, the protagonists of this book consume Chinese
literature in translation and read it in light of their broad repertoires
of world literature. They are self-taught sinophiles who absorb China
through the lens of literary theory and thus engage with it beyond the
zeal of exoticist infatuation. It is precisely their amateur—erudite, yet
not dilettante—grasp of China that makes these professional critics sin-
gular interpreters of World Literature.
I argue in this book that, because of the undisciplined nature of
comparative criticism and the absence of a specialized epistemological
framework for the study of China, the intellectual discussion of China
in Latin America unfolds in the critical infrastructures that combine the
trends of literary criticism with the repertoire of artifacts transported by
global networks of travel at any given time. Drawing from the work of
anthropologist Brian Larkin, I think of infrastructures as the material
forms that allow for the possibility of exchange across space: “They are
the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, peo-
ple, and finance are trafficked. As physical forms they shape the nature
of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities,
and its vulnerability to breakdown. They comprise the architecture for
circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies, and
they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.”26 Larkin stud-
ies actual infrastructure projects from urbanism, like bridges and roads,
exemplifying how, although these are essentially intended to transport

vehicles, in their uses they end up defining social patterns of mobility
and human behavior. This architectural model of circulation is useful
to consider the material undergirding that channels images, narratives,
and texts as well as writers, readers, and translators around the world
in the absence of conventional structures enabling literary exchange.
Ignacio Sánchez Prado is adamant as to the relevance of global material
networks in the study of world literature and accordingly qualifies the
publishing industry and the literary market as “institutions of world
literature”: “what defines world literature as such is not just the trans-
national circulation of works, but the material networks and practices
that construct its archives and repertoire and determine the condition
of possibility of world literature as a practice.”27 Critical infrastruc-
tures comprise institutions like the literary market and the publishing
industry, as well as other networks that do not purposely seek to foster
literary exchange, but end up becoming its condition of possibility, par-
ticularly so between cultures that are distant or minimally connected.
In this book such infrastructures are maritime trade routes, commercial
navigation, and human trafficking, as well as global circuits of cultural
diplomacy and political militancy, which overlap to different degrees
throughout the chapters and contribute an unforeseen collection of
sources and references on China to the broader conversation underway
in literary criticism. One of the most vivid images of my study is that
Chinese literature travels to Latin America not through foreign policy
or curriculum design, but mainly in the luggage of key cultural agents
who later circulate it to local audiences, filtered through their distinctive
personal lens. The writings of China in Latin America are the product
of individual aesthetic interventions that resist systematization because
they engage with global circuits of exchange in back and forth move-
ments that go in different directions: they unfold in luxurious ocean
liners as well as in cramped coolie clippers; in Maoist Friendship Associ-
ations and in international liberal organizations; and in English, French,
and German editions, as well as in hieroglyphic scripts, pottery inscrip-
tions, and acrylic painting.
In this sense, rather than examining “China” as an epistemological
formation or “Chinese literature” as a corpus of literary texts and con-
ventions (in whichever denomination, be it premodern, contemporary,
sinophone, etc.), I track “literary artifacts” that flow between China and
Latin America. Archaeologists understand artifacts as any item that has
been made or modified by past human cultures. For me, literary artifacts
16 ❘ Introduction
are not merely texts, but different articulations of the literary work that
can be apprehended in their full material, sensorial, and affective dimen-
sions. With this approach, I stress the physical transformations of world
literature as it moves through mediations that are material, such as liter-
ary agencies, publishers, and distributors; sensorial, such as paper, ink,
scrolls, parchment, film, and screens; and affective, since they arouse
emotions and demand a bodily disposition. This approach highlights
the phenomenological dimension of literature, or as Martin Puchner re-
minds us in the basic premise of The Written World (2018), that world
literature unfolds at the intersection of storytelling and the evolution
of creative technologies.28 In my book literature is read and written, as
well as seen, touched, felt, and recalled. Paratexts and textures become
privileged spaces of critical authority in view of the opacity of the text.
Typography, ethnography, and choreography, in this view, are indeed
forms of writing China.
Tr a n slation Mat t e rs
Thinking of literary artifacts instead of literatures also helps overcome

the dead ends encountered by translation theory in comparing discon-
nected cultural fields. However optimistic polysystems approach may
be as to the active role of translated literature within particular literary
systems, channeling this frame for the study of peripheral and semi-
peripheral languages like Chinese and Spanish would yield disheart-
ening results given the lack of a relevant corpus: the number of titles
and the quality of the extant Spanish translations of Chinese literature
lag far behind the diversity and complexity of that of nearer literary
systems, such as the Portuguese, or central ones such as, to mention
the most obvious example, the French. In “Mediated and Marginalised:
Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain,
1949–2010” (2018), Maialen Marín-Lacarta exposes the paradoxical
demographics of world-system models: even if Spanish and Mandarin
are the two most spoken native languages in the world (combined, they
boast more than one billion speakers, roughly 20 percent of the world’s
population), texts translated from Spanish represent as little as 1–3 per-
cent of the world market of translated literature, and translations from
Chinese have a share of less than 1 percent in that same market.29 In
her comprehensive analysis of nearly one hundred translations of Chi-
nese literary works published since 1917 in Spain’s official languages
(Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque), Marín-Lacarta observes that

these works are either marginalized within the cultural field (stripped
of their aesthetic value and presented as mere descriptions of history
in their paratexts) or mediated by the Anglophone and Francophone
literary systems (translated indirectly from these central languages).30
I complement—and complicate—Marín-Lacarta’s findings by revealing
the unexpectedly diverse and disperse catalogue of Spanish translations
of different periods and genres of Chinese literature (ancient poetry,
Tang dynasty lyrical poetry, “Four Classic Chinese Novels,” modern lit-
erature, contemporary literature, “Red Classics,” model opera librettos,
“scar literature,” etc.) published in Latin America throughout the twen-
tieth century, which will hopefully inspire scholars working in Chinese
studies to include Latin America in the larger linguistic cluster of the
Spanish literary system. But instead of engaging in close readings of
the textual strategies and linguistic turns of individual translations, I
read them as Chinese literary artifacts that circulate in larger bodies of
works on travel writing, philology, Communist culture, visual poetry,
and memorial literature. This effort to highlight the local end of circu-
lation echoes Andrea Bachner’s notion of “world-literary hospitality,”
which summons us to think of reception “beyond (yet with) the agency
of a text as a crucial (if not the most crucial) motor of world literature
and to leverage it for a global redistribution of world-literary power by
revaluing reception- and translation-intensive cultural contexts, liter-
ary systems, and historical moments as the core of world literature.”31
Marín-Lacarta’s “mediation” and “marginalization” are thus positive
marks in my argument: Borges’s ignorance of the Chinese language and
the difficulty of accessing actual volumes of Chinese novels spurs him to
pen a manifesto of indirect translation that challenges the tenets of phi-
lology upheld by his rival Spanish Hispanists exiled in Buenos Aires in
the late 1930s. To counter the Maoist revolutionary literature translated
by Chinese Friendship Associations, liberal presses begin to print older
French and English translations of Tang dynasty poetry, thus circulating
classical Chinese literature in Spanish for the first time in Latin Amer-
ica. With a limited grasp of the Chinese language, but a zealous eye for
design, Haroldo de Campos manipulates the ideogram and turns it into
the poetic form of concretism, elevating translation from a subsidiary
linguistic practice to literary act of “transcreation.” Let me emphasize
this idea: by revealing a massive and massively overlooked archive of
Chinese translations in Latin America, I do not intend to overemphasize
the influence of China in the tropes, themes, or language of Latin Amer-
18 ❘ Introduction
ican literary traditions, which, as I discuss in chapter 4, I find superficial.

I entirely agree with Octavio Paz, the exemplary poet-translator for-
ever dazzled by the Asian feel of Anglo-American modernism, that “the
translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry into English have been so
great and so diverse that they themselves form a chapter in the modern
poetry of the language. . . . It’s a pity. In Spanish this lack has impover-
ished us.”32 My key point in this book is that such untranslatability is
impoverishing in terms of textual analysis, but fruitful for a material,
sensorial, and affective approach to world literature. When considering
the larger historical and institutional constructs that frame the circu-
lation of literary artifacts between distant cultures, the opacity of the
script and the ignorance of the literary tradition are exceptional points
of departure for a material study of translation. An example from chap-
ter 4 captures this point vividly: in his collection of ideographic poetry
Li-Po y otros poemas (1920; Li-Po and other poems), José Juan Tablada
includes a Chinese character copied from an ornamental hanging scroll
and stenciled onto the page of the book using the Mexican and Chinese
folkloric techniques of punched paper (papel picado and jianzhi, re-
spectively). Tablada, unable to read the Chinese character, uses an ideo-
graphic method not “influenced” by Chinese poetics or Anglo-American
modernism, but rather, crafted with a Chinese decorative item bearing
a text of good auspices, and using the artisanal technique of cutting out
words from paper with a blade, both of which made it to Tablada’s stu-
dio in Mexico through transpacific trade routes. Tablada’s avant-garde
primitivism consists in deconstructing the materiality of Western writ-
ing by illuminating the prehistory of paper: by using paper to carve Chi-
nese signs manually, Tablada rewinds the history of literary modernity
and defers its course toward the Pacific, where paper no longer signifies
the medium of (Latin) text but the instrument of (Asian) words and
(mestizo) motifs.
Disor ien tat i ons
“Asia and Latin America” is a comingling of disciplines, corpora, and

histories that in the last decade or so that has yielded an enormous
amount of scholarship that reconsiders conventional cartographies of
comparison between these increasingly entangled cultural traditions.
Within Latin American Studies, Araceli Tinajero’s pioneering Orien-
talismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano (2004) set the tone for
the analysis of cultural exchanges between Latin America and Asia

within an unequal planetary order through the book’s close reading
of representations of Asian subjects and objects.33 Influenced by Ed-
ward Said’s Orientalism, Tinajero’s book provides a thorough review
of modernismo in light of a postcolonial framework that locates Asia,
Africa, and Latin America in a continuum of marginal resistance to
cultural formations coming from the North. Later developments of
postcolonial theory across various area studies gave rise to concepts
such as the “Sinophone” or the “Hispanophone,” which broke with the
metropolis-colony bipolarity of European Orientalism by identifying
disparate centers and peripheries in the Chinese-speaking communities
scattered throughout the globe.34 In a comprehensive study spanning
many monographs and edited volumes, Ignacio López Calvo has revised
the wholly overlooked contribution of Chinese and Japanese diasporas
to the cultural production of Cuba, Peru, Mexico, and Brazil. Race has
and continues to be a critical lens to organize alternative cartographies
for Asia and Latin America. Following the decades-long work of Evelyn
Hu-Dehart on Chinese indentured workers in Mexico and Cuba, the
work of ethnic studies scholars like Kathleen López, Lisa Yun, or Jason
Chang, to name a few, reconstruct the memories of the Chinese com-
munities in Latin America through novel primary sources in Chinese,
providing oral histories that operate as a counterpart to testimonio and,
as I will discuss fully in chapter 1, to the crónica modernista.35
The drive to decenter is at the core of the transpacific studies, an in-
terdisciplinary effort coming from US American universities to counter
the hegemonic narrative of the Pacific Rim’s central place in the global
economy and instead frame it as a contact zone “with a history defined
not only by conquest, colonialism, and conflict, but also by alternate
narratives of translocalism, oppositional localism and oppositional
regionalism between subjugated, minoritized, and marginalized peo-
ples.”36 The notion of the transpacific has nevertheless met with criti-
cism. Junyoung Verónica Kim denounces how the epistemic violence of
both area and ethnic studies is at work in the transpacific framework:
“Despite its careful attention to difference and multiplicity in relation
to the experiences of peoples of color in the United States, ethnic studies
largely examines migration as a movement from one non-Western area
to the West, in most cases privileging the United States as the desti-
nation for immigration.”37 Kim postulates “Asia–Latin America” as a
method for investigating the experiences of those living at or through
this underdetermined transpacific site, which is fraught with openings,
20 ❘ Introduction
gaps, cacophonies, and jagged encounters that cannot easily dislocate

the West. The task of the “Asia–Latin America” scholar, she concludes,
is to articulate a precarious position that calls attention to the workings
of knowledge that naturalizes itself and forgets the material conditions
of its own making.
To stress such material conditions of knowledge production, I follow
Diana Sorensen’s suggestion to envision a new geographical conscious-
ness that no longer assumes fixed epistemic locations (North-South,
Orient-Occident, center-metropolis, Global South, Third World, etc.)
but rather examines “alternative vectors of movement that imply tran-
sit, transmission, and exchange, often detecting conversations that have
gone unnoticed. It requires attentiveness to the singularity and unique-
ness of each encounter and then, in a concomitant move, an attempt to
draw appropriate generalizations.”38 I thus view geographical constructs
such as “Latin America,” “China,” or “the West” as profoundly unstable
positions that require serious nuance of the critical lineages and the in-
dividual actors that chart them. With my material, sensorial, and affec-
tive approach to world literature, I join Laura Torres-Rodríguez’s effort
to rethink Latin American and Asian exchanges in terms of the expe-
riential and embodied “orientations” of the region. Drawing from the
work of Sara Ahmed, Torres-Rodríguez in Orientaciones transpacíficas:
La modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia (2019) identifies alterna-
tive directionalities of bodies and objects from the Mexican intellectual
and artistic tradition beyond those of putative discursive geographies
like the Orient, which lies to the east only when observed from Eu-
rope.39 Whereas Torres-Rodríguez focuses on the specific transpacific
orientations of Mexican culture inherited from colonial and nineteenth-
century coordinates, I stress the decentering emphasis of the prefix “dis”
by identifying vectors of mobility between geographies such as traffic,
edge, twist, surface, and motion, all of which challenge Latin America’s
sense of direction toward China.
Each of these forms of disorientation organizes the five chapters of this
book, which discuss the agents, structures, and modes of writing China
in Latin America. Moving chronologically from the nineteenth century
to the present, the odd chapters base their arguments on Chinese global
moments (the coolie trade [1847–74], Maoist diplomacy [1949–76], and
the current Beijing Consensus, while the two even chapters contest spe-
cific tenets of philology and translation. Each chapter begins by identi-
fying a Chinese literary artifact, the interpretation of which demands an
account of the critical infrastructures that enable its translation.
Chapter 1 examines modernismo’s taste for chinoiserie as a politi-

cal critique of Chinese labor. José Martí, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, and
José Juan Tablada’s fascination with travel infrastructure illuminates
both the material and human traffic networks connecting China and the
Americas. I reread their crónicas about Oriental tourism and steamship
navigation in relation to what I name the “coolie passage archive,” to
refer to the horrific accounts of mutinies of Chinese migrants onboard
ships sailing through the Pacific, which were ubiquitous in the English-
language press and adventure fiction at the turn of the century.
Chapter 2 argues that Jorge Luis Borges’s writings of China put on
the edge the humanistic discipline that conceives China through the ex-
plication and interpretation of its classical texts. In the noticeably nu-
merous reviews of English and German translations of Chinese works
published in literary magazines during his most prolific years, Borges
anticipates his theories of (mis)translation, the fantastic, and literary
tradition. In this move, he enacts the creole form of criticism that he
advocates for Latin America in lieu of Romance philology, which con-
fronts him heatedly with the exiled Spanish intelligentsia seeking to re-
produce Castilian Hispanism in the Americas.
If the first two chapters acknowledge the role of European transla-
tions in satisfying a readership with a taste for foreign cultures, chap-
ter 3 explores the fascinating trajectories of leftist intellectuals who
gravitated between the networks of Maoist diplomacy and the booming
Spanish book industry in Latin America. Basing itself on extraordinary
archival evidence of publishing series, Communist periodicals, and front
organizations, the chapter demonstrates that these agents of the cultural
Cold War in Latin America used cultural diplomacy to nurture their
singular aesthetic projects rather than to simply rubber stamp Maoism.
Supported by travel and advocacy, but also informed by French theory
and English poetry, as well as intelligence agencies, these writers curate
a unique catalog of Chinese literature in Spanish that is eventually sub-
merged, scattered, and silenced by their own cultural fields.
The starting point of chapter 4 is the glaring contrast among Spanish-
language editions of Tang dynasty poetry, a genre that has become the
epitome of Chinese literature in the West. In dialogue with the China
craze of Anglo-American modernism and the ideogrammatic experi-
ments of the avant-gardes, I suggest that in Latin America it was not
lyrical but visual poets and plastic artists who innovated poetically in
engaging with the surface of the Chinese script. If the Chinese language
has been conceived as the paradigmatic counterexample of phonetic
22 ❘ Introduction
writing from early modernity to poststructuralism, Latin American

poets were eager to dislocate the boundary between word and image,
translating them beyond the linguistic: Haroldo de Campos recreates
the architecture of classical quartets in concrete grids and mimics the
cinematic experience of handscrolls in modernist design; José Juan
Tablada crafts pictographic glyphs with silk, pottery, and other trans-
pacific imports of the Manila Galleon; and Severo Sarduy tattoos ideo-
grams and pierces acupuncture needles as body writing.
At a juncture when the academic study of history is in the midst of
a subjective turn that incorporates emotions as modes of knowledge
production, and when art criticism is illuminating the workings and
transmissions of archival memory, chapter 5 asks how the personal ar-
chives of Latin American families who experienced the Cultural Revolu-
tion first-hand resurface five decades later in artistic form. Rather than
focusing on the documentary value of these materials in reconstruct-
ing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a historical event, the
chapter analyzes how these “moving” memoirs, novels, and documenta-
ries capture the embodied memories of performing arts. The retrospec-
tive gaze of the Maoist militants’ offspring educated in China, who are
now bicultural citizens living for the most part outside Latin America,
trigger new questions about cultural heritage, political commitment,
and, above all, the relationship between art and politics in the present.
***
Let me finish with an exercise on the reading effects of this introduc-
tion. In order of appearance, and turned into adjectives for the sake
of euphony, the keywords that convey the writings of China in Latin
America in these pages are as follows: disoriented, undisciplined, as-
sumed, translatable, lacking, opaque, ignorant, mediated, marginalized,
scattered, slippery, overlooked, unstable, mobile, trafficked, clandestine,
edgy, twisted, superficial, moving, illegible, displaced. This book grows
from the flaws of a paradigm of world literature and posits the fortuity
of Latin America’s critical infrastructures of comparison—these ideas
are tricky ones to propose in times of post-truth, fake news, and sys-
temic racism. With this book, I do not suggest that the notion of truth
or the scientific method should be questioned. Rather, I seek to stress
the speculative nature of the humanities, overlooked in an academic
context that steadily forces humanistic disciplines to adapt to the pro-
tocols of science. I echo Eric Hayot’s call to emphasize the humanist
reason of our scholarship: a way of thinking that uses a variety of epis-
temological and evidentiary practices to study the lifeworld of beings

with minds and their engagement with the social construct they inhabit
or that they imagine, through models that make truth claims that are
reasonable and realistic, and that far precede the epistemological disci-
plines institutionalized with the preeminence of scientific reason in the
nineteenth century.40 My work operates with the firm conviction that
literature travels through material infrastructures and in the context of
social, historical, and aesthetic frameworks that must be accounted for
empirically, but the question of how books and bodies navigate those
networks is always matter of chance, timing, and desire in individual
artistic projects that resist systematization. I hope that this book serves
as an invitation to consider that indiscipline in the writing of culture
can be a profound political intervention to expose the mechanisms of
representation and the geopolitics of knowledge at large. In this sense,
I embrace Erin Graff-Zivin’s “anarchaeological drive” to expose the
university by revealing the points of untranslatability that provide the
basis for and that unsettle disciplinary thinking: “I invite the reader to
imagine an undisciplined or indisciplinary university, in which literary
studies, moribund, would find, in anarchaeological readings, an afterlife
through its exposure to other practices and discourses, such as philo-
sophical discourse, and philosophy, moribund, would find an afterlife
through its exposure to aesthetic discourse.”41 Literary criticism is far
from agonizing, but, as can be seen in this book, it is displaced to an
extramural market, to the unraveling technologies of communication,
and to the culture wars happening on the streets. I am hopeful that this
book about the powerful disorienting quality of Latin American com-
parative criticism might help envision future forms of engagement of
the humanities at this critical juncture.
Chapter 1
Trade, Tourism, and Traffic

The Labor Routes of Modernismo
Modernistas loved china: porcelain, ceramics, and lacquerware furnish

the verses of Rubén Darío (1867–1916), Julián del Casal (1863–93), and
José Juan Tablada (1871–1945), as well as those of poets less associated
with cosmopolitan imaginaries, such as José Martí (1853–95). From
the outset of the movement, Rubén Darío reveals his obsession with
the glossy sheen of Asian artifacts. In the short story “La muerte de la
emperatriz de la China” (1890; “The Death of the Empress of China”),
published in the inaugural collection Azul, the protagonist Recaredo is
a sculptor who has a particular taste for “japonerías y chinerías”:
había leído buenos exotistas, adoraba a Loti y a Judith Gau-

tier, y hacía sacrificios por adquirir trabajos legítimos, de
Yokohama, de Nagasaki, de Kioto o de Nankín o Pekín: los
cuchillos, las pipas, las máscaras feas y misteriosas como las
caras de los sueños hípnicos, los mandarinitos enanos con
panzas de curbitáceos y ojos circunflejos, los monstruos de
grandes bocas de batracio, abiertas y dentadas, y diminutos
soldados de Tartaria, con faces foscas.
he had read all the good exotistes, he adored Loti and Judith
Gautier, and he made sacrifices in order to purchase good
25
26 ❘ Chapter 1
things from Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kyoto, Nankin and Pe-

king: knives, pipes, masks as hideous and mysterious as the
faces in his hypnoid dreams, tiny Mandarins with cucurbi-
tacean bellies and circumflex eyes, monsters with the open,
toothless mouths of batrachians, and tiny soldiers from Tar-
taria, with wild countenances.1
Recaredo’s thirst is an intellectual one, fueled by the French readings

of exoticist authors like Judith Gautier (1845–1917), and Pierre Loti
(1850–1923). But it is also a material craving for foreign products that
are crafted in actual Japanese and Chinese cities and that typify Ori-
entalist characters, such as hypnotic masks, tiny Mandarins, and ani-
malesque Tartar soldiers. Chinoiserie, or the European interpretation
of Asian decorative arts, was a trend that emerged in the seventeenth
century thanks to the modern commercial links that escalated the circu-
lation of exotic consumer goods in the West. This trade network defined
the matrix for cultural fantasies of a whimsical and inventive China
that echoed passionately among a vast consumerist audience.2 Although
that fashion peaked in the rococo period in European courtly circles, it
was quickly appropriated by artists and tastemakers all over the West
and continued to inform modernismo’s relationship to the imaginary
geographical construct of the “Orient” until the late nineteenth century.
As scholars have observed in reference to modernismo’s Orientalism,
the inclusion of a chinoiserie repertoire adds a cross-cultural dimension
to its exploration of ornamentation and precious language; the fictional
imagination of faraway cultures also signals the movement’s embrace of
the mythical in lieu of mimetic representation.3
Yet Darío’s take on the China trade is not solely driven by escapism.
Just like the statuette of the Chinese empress given to Recaredo as a
wedding gift from his friend Robert, in this short story chinoiseries are
not simply floating in the background to infuse the dramatic action
with an Oriental feel, they are introduced as consumer goods origi-
nating from an actual commercial network. In a letter signed in Hong
Kong, Robert writes to Recaredo: “Di un salto y caí en la China. He
venido como agente de una casa californiana, importadora de sedas,
lacas, marfiles y demás chinerías. Junto con esta carta debes recibir un
regalo mío que, dada tu afición por las cosas de este país amarillo, te lle-
gará de perlas” (“I leapt the pond and landed in China. I’m here as the
agent for a California firm, an importer of silks, lacquers, ivories, and
other such Chinese wonders. With this letter I am sending you a small
Trade, Tourism, and Traffic ❘ 27
gift—which, given your love of things of the Yellow Kingdom, should

make you jump with glee”).4 The emergence of the figure of the broker
that supplies Chinese goods to the South American market through a
Californian trading firm illuminates the larger network of exchange in
which South America participated in the nineteenth century eminently
as an importer of manufactured goods and exporter of raw materi-
als. The Chinese artifacts now appear in light of what Ericka Beck-
man names the “modernist import catalog,” that is, a rhetoric about
the consumption of imported goods that eclipsed the obsession with
commodity production during the Export Age. In reference to Julián del
Casal’s lists of material objects (e.g., bronzes, crystals, and tapestries),
Beckman observes that none of Casal’s objects of desire could have been
produced in Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, they
would have been purchased from Europe in exchange for the island’s
main export crop, sugar: “while Casal was himself the son of a ruined
sugar planter, sugar never appears in his poems; nor do the people of
sugar culture—(former) slaves, plantation owners, and the like—ever
appear. Instead, inspiration and desire emerge from a distinct but no less
legitimately ‘Cuban’ experience of modernity: the restricted and private
consumption of imported luxury goods” (emphasis in original).5
The erasure of the universe of the local export commodities that en-
able the import (and in this materialist reading, the literary representa-
tion) of luxury goods is all the more striking when considering the China
trade in Latin America. It was, after all, imported Chinese labor that
had facilitated the large-scale extraction of sugar, guano, and tobacco
in the region after the abolition of African slavery. The paradox is that
hundreds of thousands of Chinese “coolies” were trafficked across the
Pacific in order to meet the global market’s booming demand for cash
crops, which enabled the bourgeois consumption of things Chinese de-
picted in modernista prose and poetry. Yet the introduction of Chinese
indentured workers produced far less gleaming accounts than did the
modernista chinoiserie fantasies; in parallel to the sinophilia that devel-
oped around imported luxury goods, a loud sinophobic backlash sought
to expose Chinese migrants as perilous interlopers. Whereas in Europe
the debates on the China trade referred to an issue unfolding in colonial
areas faraway from metropolitan centers, in the Americas these conflict-
ing discourses of exoticism and immigration were voiced on the exact
same shores that received cargos of both Chinese goods and peoples.
This chapter reexamines characterizations of modernismo’s Asian
imaginaries as a mere aesthetics of evasion, reading them instead as a
28 ❘ Chapter 1
political discussion of Chinese labor. While I acknowledge the promi-

nence of the cultural politics of Orientalism in the movement’s transcul-
tural imaginaries of chinoiserie, I argue that the portrayal of the China
trade offers more than a reflection on the exchange of exotic luxury ar-
tifacts: it opens a discussion on the global division of labor, the modes of
displacement of peoples across latitudes, and the visual representation
of foreign bodies. These novel aspects of the China trade shed light on
the material networks connecting fin de siècle Latin America to the rest
of the world, particularly Asia.
The first part of the chapter is an attempt to read the crónica moder-
nista’s lighthearted consumption against the grain of discourses of labor.
Although José Martí, José Juan Tablada, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo
do not intervene directly in national debates on the “Yellow Question”
in their respective countries, they are eloquent about it overseas. In their
travels across the United States, Japan, and East Asia, they reconstruct
earlier transpacific migrations enabled by the trade routes of the Span-
ish empire and advocate for legislation affecting the industrious immi-
grant group that both thrives in and seems to threaten Western ports
around the world. These writers track the circulation of actual histor-
ical subjects within an international labor market that was critical to
Latin American state-building projects and thus do more than provide
a mere sociological critique, since a complex theory of translation takes
shape in the traffic of tropes and themes of their peripatetic prose. By
broadening the scope of translation from linguistic transfer to physical
displacement, in this chapter I understand translation as the traffic of
peoples and things, embodied in the overlapping practices of trade and
tourism, both of which were booming at the turn of the century with
the explosion of labor migrations, consumer culture, and the bourgeois
taste for the exotic.
In addition to its sharp commentary on imported Chinese labor, I
hold that the crónica modernista is strongly concerned with the in-
frastructure for the physical displacement of those bodies, provided
by the technological advances of navigation. The second part of the
chapter takes as a point of departure Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s crónica
“Paisajes y emociones” (1906; Landscapes and emotions), which por-
trays a Chinese passanger who is a scholar returning from a research
trip in Mexico and Italy. I argue that this singular trope of the seaborn
Chinese helps unfold the overlooked “coolie passage archive,” the cor-
pus of sources on the less alluring accounts of mutinies onboard coolie
ships sailing from China to Cuba and Peru, which were frequent in the
English-language press and travel literature, although less common in

Spanish and Portuguese. An analysis of the maritime infrastructures of
the China trade in Latin America helps unveil both the global itineraries
of modernism and modernismo’s take on immigration.
The C oolie T r a d e
Along with manufactured Chinese-style products, many Chinese peo-

ple also disembarked in Latin American ports during the nineteenth
century. Between 1847 and 1874, an estimated quarter million Chinese
men were transported to the Caribbean and to tropical South America
on vessels from twenty Western nations.6 Criollo landowners started to
search for a low-paid labor force in other regions of the globe, due to
the reduction in the enslavement of Africans, as well as their dismissal
of native populations for these tasks and their acknowledgement of the
futility of their efforts to attract European colonists for plantation. Fol-
lowing what was becoming an established human-trafficking network
in the British colonies, Spanish Americans also began recruiting Asian
indentured laborers for their plantation economies. Known by the dero-
gative term “coolie,” which was not a legal term but rather an ideolog-
ically charged descriptor of cheap and easily exploitable labor almost
inextricably linked to Asians, this large-scale human trade scheme fa-
cilitated a contract system that would eventually pave the way for free
wage labor but for many decades worked as a legal guise for slavery.
China offered a robust labor reserve in the second part of the nine-
teenth century. Famine, unrest, and a demographic crisis contributed
to an exodus of poor peasants overseas. A politically imploding em-
pire, weakened by defeat at the hands of the Western nations in the
Opium Wars (1839–60), China was forced to open its coastal ports to
foreign trade, among which human trafficking became one of the most
profitable businesses. An estimated one million Cantonese left South
China between 1840 and 1875, the majority coming from the Pearl
River Delta. For the most part, they departed as free contract workers to
toil in the mines of California, Canada, or Australia, and to the French,
Dutch, and English plantations of Southeast Asia. Some Cantonese were
recruited to Suriname and other Dutch possessions and to the English
and French islands in the Caribbean.7 This migratory wave represents
the peak of the global Chinese diaspora. The main destinations for coo-
lies in Spanish America were Cuba, Peru, and Mexico, where the de-
30 ❘ Chapter 1
mand for manpower increased owing to commodity bonanzas. Because

of the British embargo on the slave trade and the international pressures
to abolish slavery, Spanish Caribbean planters experienced a critical
shortage of labor as the demand for sugar was rising unabated.8 Slavery
was still legal in the Spanish colony of Cuba when thousands of colo-
nos asiáticos (Asian settlers) joined the labor force, and even though
the Chinese had signed contracts before setting sail, the treatment they
received differed little from that of their African counterparts. Although
Peru had put an end to both the trade and practice of slavery in 1854,
the labor regime for guano extraction underway there until 1870 was
equally oppressive. The migrants shipped across the Pacific collected
strict daily quotas of this bird excrement that was used as fertilizer,
working in conditions that were particularly inhuman in the Chincha is-
lands, a small archipelago off the southwest coast of the country where
this product abounded. Well into the twentieth century, in Mexico every
month hundreds of poor Chinese coming from Asia and North America
became contract laborers in plantations, railroads, and mining oper-
ations encouraged by the national colonization policies implemented
by President Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915).9 The lucrative so-called trata
amarilla (yellow trade) ended in the mid-1870s when opprobrium esca-
lated globally. The humanitarian cries of abolitionists, coupled with the
economic interests of colonial powers, and the pressures of the Anglo-
American press, prompted a series of diplomatic negotiations between
the Qing empire and the Spanish Crown over the situation of the coolies
in colonial Cuba. A mediation carried out by England, Russia, France,
Germany, and the US arbitered in favor of China and appointed a del-
egation in 1874 to investigate the accusations of mistreatment. Its fi-
nal report described the appalling working conditions of the Chinese
laborers in the Spanish possessions. As the Cuba Commission Report
(1876) was being made public, resistance to the trade grew in Southern
China, and the Spanish government was forced to end the traffic be-
tween China and its colonies before both governments had even signed
a final written agreement banning it.10
In each context Chinese laborers were not imported as permanent
settlers, but rather as temporary workers who were expected to leave
after the termination of their contracts, which usually lasted eight years.
For these Asian men in their twenties and thirties who were unprotected
by their homeland—which prohibited legal emigration—there was no
path to citizenship or naturalization in the young republics. Even if,
from the perspective of the positivist scientific parameters of the time,
they ranked higher than Africans, the national identity projects, aspir-
ing to whiten the population, barely saved a space for them in their
imagined communities. Fears of “mongolization” of the population and
stereotypes of the Chinese as degenerate opium addicts materialized in
loud expressions of sinophobia, known globally as the “Yellow Peril.”
Needless to say, in literature the Chinese were rarely characters, let
alone protagonists, of foundational fictions. This erasure of the Chinese
from the grand narratives of national identity also has a historiograph-
ical counterpart. As Jason Chang observes, “for the most part, Asians
have been relegated to the footnotes of discussions of mestizaje in Latin
American Studies, if mentioned at all.”11 After 1874 tens of thousands
of Chinese who survived indenture remained in the region and began
enjoying physical, occupational, and even social mobility. They joined
free agricultural laborers, peddled goods, worked as artisans in urban
centers, and even became merchants. Since this was an eminently male
migration, for the most part they married out of their communities and
gradually blended into the local populations. Like many of their Chi-
nese counterparts dispersed around the world, freed coolies represent
the late nineteenth-century’s bumpy transition from slavery to wage la-
bor, as well as the ambivalent space of the “yellow” race in Latin Amer-
ica’s civilizing mission.
Illeg a l A lie ns
Scholars of sinophone cultures in Latin America make a valid point

when they express puzzlement at the Cuban patriot and national poet
José Martí’s silence to the figure of the Chinese Cuban. That the intellec-
tual architect of Pan-American identity, carefully mindful of the extant
and vanished heritages of the mestizo inhabitants of “Nuestra América”
(“Our America”), barely mentions this minority that was particularly
noticeable in his native Cuba is a matter of speculation. Ignacio López
Calvo argues that references in passing to a “yellow doctor” in the po-
ems of Versos sencillos (1891; Simple Verses), to a Chinese prisoner in
the pamphlet “El presidio político en Cuba” (1871; Political prison in
Cuba), or to a generic Chinaman in the crónica “Los indios en los Es-
tados Unidos” (1885; The Indians in the United States) do not amount
to a substantial engagement with the Sino-Cuban community, but in-
stead evidence Martí’s deliberate effort to exclude them from the official
discourse and historical records.12 Kathleen López nuances what she
32 ❘ Chapter 1
calls the “full-blown Orientalist erasure” hypothesis, but still acknowl-

edges Martí’s uncanny omission in the context of his anti-imperialist
discourse: “José Martí imagined the souls of whites and black who died
together on the battlefield rising to forge a transracial Cuban union.
His writings on race in Cuba focus on blacks and mulattos, with scant
mention to the Chinese coolie past.”13
That Martí lived most of his adult life in exile partly explains that
he only begins to pay attention to Chinese people once he is outside
the island. At the age of eighteen he moved to Spain and later resided
in Mexico, Guatemala, and Venezuela, before settling in 1882 in the
United States, where he stayed until his ill-fated return to the Caribbean
in the mid-1890s. In fact, Martí memorable vignettes of New York’s
Chinatown turned some of his Chinese-themed crónicas, such as “Un
funeral chino” (1888; “A Chinese Funeral”), into stand-alone literary
pieces in his prolific journalistic career. In “Un funeral chino,” as well as
in the fragments on “Teatro chino” (1899; Chinese theater), and “Una
boda china” (1888; A Chinese wedding), Martí gracefully strolls the
streets, observes the rituals, and tries to interpret the enigmatic gestures
of Manhattan’s Chinese community for his avid audience of the Argen-
tine newspaper La Nación, reading him from the opposite edge of the
continent.14
The characterization of the Chinese as addicted to narcotics is a
recurrent trope in Martí and could well be understood as a byproduct
of the anti-Asian rhetoric of the Yellow Peril, pervasive at that time and
informed by the Western victory in the Opium Wars. In “El puente de
Brooklyn” (1883; “The Brooklyn Bridge”), Martí writes: “El chino es
el hijo infeliz del mundo antiguo: así estruja a los hombres el despo-
tismo: como gusanos en Cuba, se revuelcan sus siervos entre los vicios.
Estatuas talladas en fango parecen los hijos de sociedades despóticas.
No son sus vidas pebeteros de incienso: sino infecto humo de opio”
(“The Chinaman is the unfortunate son of the ancient world: thus does
despotism wring men dry. Like worms in a trough its slaves writhe
among vices. The sons of despotic societies are like statues carved out
of mud. Their lives are not censers of incense, but are rank with the
smoke of opium”).15 This passage indeed reinforces Martí’s Orientalist
association of the Chinese with despotism, vice, and animalization. But
a zoom out of this scene alleviates the stereotypical rendering of this
particular community, because, after all, Martí seems to apply epithets
to each of the many immigrant groups he encounters in the United
States:
este puente colgante de Brooklyn, entre cuyas paredes al-

tísimas de cuerdas de alambre . . . se apiñan hoy como en-
tre tajos vecinos del tope a lo hondo en el corazón de una
montaña, hebreos de perfil agudo y ojos ávidos, irlandeses
joviales, alemanes carnosos y recios, escoceses sonrosados y
fornidos, húngaros bellos, negros lujosos, rusos, de ojos que
queman, noruegos de pelo rojo, japoneses elegantes, enjutos
e indiferentes chinos. El chino es el hijo infeliz del mundo
antiguo: así estruja a los hombres el despotismo.
Between the bridge’s high walls of steel wire . . . there now

crowd together, as if into a row of gashes cut deep into the
heart of a mountain, avid-eyed Hebrews with sharp pro-
files, jovial Irishmen, fleshy, robust Germans, ruddy, muscu-
lar Scotsmen, handsome Hungarians, resplendent Negroes,
Russians with burning eyes, redheaded Norwegians, elegant
Japanese, and lean and listless Chinamen. The Chinaman is
the unfortunate son of the ancient world: thus does despo-
tism wring men dry.16
With the new Brooklyn Bridge as a frame of the scene and as a meta-
phor of transit, Martí portrays the mixed mass of foreign-born citizens
crowded together in awe of the majestic infrastructure project that sig-
nals the material prosperity of their adopted nation. Visibly dissimi-
lar from each other, these peoples are all identified by the most salient
features of their race according to the pseudoscientist standards of the
late nineteenth century: Northern Europeans are sturdy, hirsute, and
muscular; “Negroes” are shiny—and thus sensual; and the Japanese are
refined.
Rather than studying Martí’s representation of the Chinese within
their own distinct community, whether the Sino-Cuban or the migrant
New York settlement, a comparative analysis of labor migrations to the
Americas illuminates Martí’s less manifest views on Chinese culture.
I hold that Martí’s arguments take shape in relation to the discrepant
immigration legislations implemented in the Latin American countries
that published or reprinted his crónicas, and in the elaborate rhetorical
strategies by which the modernista writer fashions his voice in terms
of—and against—the editorial demands of the media outlets that had
hired him as a foreign correspondent. As Graciela Montaldo argues,
modernistas’ “modernity” lies beyond the original treatment of the sub-
34 ❘ Chapter 1
ject matter of their texts and takes shape in their unique intervention in
an ever-changing craft: “La literatura de la época ya era claramente la
transacción entre diferentes escrituras y el pasaje entre esas diferencias
constituye lo nuevo: una colocación entre la autonomía y la profesio-
nalización, entre la estetización y la divulgación. Quien sobrevivía a
las diferencias, colonizándolas y territorizándolas, era moderno” (The
literature of the time was already a transaction between different forms
of writing, and it is precisely in the passage between those differences
where the experience of the new happens: a place located between au-
tonomy and professionalization, between aesthetics and divulgation.
Whomever was able to survive those differences, by colonizing and ter-
ritorializing them, was modern).17
A letter by Martí published on March 31, 1882, in the Venezue-
lan newspaper La Opinión Nacional presents one of his most intricate
discussions of Chinese immigration to the Americas. Among the many
events happening in the United States during those weeks, Martí reports
on the public debates over a ban on travelers from China that would go
into effect in May of that year. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was
the first law implemented in the West to prevent members of a specific
ethnic or national group from immigrating to a nation-state. This proj-
ect, which was intended to last for ten years but became permanent
from 1902 until its repeal in 1934, sought to mitigate the free entry of
Chinese sojourners that had flocked to California and the Pacific North-
west to build railroads and canals. In Martí’s words: “Ya no podrán
venir, como venían, a modo de rebaño, y a millaradas, los hombrecillos
de ojos almendrados, rostro huesudo y lampiño, y larga trenza. Ya no
podrá el hombre de China, a no ser viajero, o mercader, o maestro,
o enviado diplomático, o estudiante, o trabajador que hubiese estado
en Norteamérica hasta noviembre de 1880,—los cuales han de traer
muy minucioso pasaporte,—pisar, en busca de trabajo, tierra norteame-
ricana” (It will no longer be possible for the small almond-eyed, bony,
braided, and hairless men to come as they did, in herds of thousands.
It will no longer be possible for the Chinaman to touch in [US] Amer-
ican soil to seek work, unless he is a traveler, tradesman, teacher, dip-
lomatic envoy, student, or resident alien—carrying proper and precise
documentation—having lived here until November 1880).18
Tighter legislation over immigration was not uncommon in progress-
oriented Latin America. To some extent, this was the result of the con-
trast between the composition of the spontaneous migration underway
since the midcentury and the demographics that the modernizing na-
tions sought to engineer. The laws varied widely across the continent,
particularly regarding Chinese immigration. Countries that still relied
on a large workforce for their plantation economy and infrastructure
projects signed diplomatic treaties of peace, friendship, trade, and nav-
igation with the Qing empire soon after the termination of the coolie
trade to secure the “free and voluntary” emigration of cheap wage la-
borers: Peru signed one in 1875, Brazil in 1888, and Mexico in 1899.
In the temperate Southern Cone, the written law did not restrict the
immigration of Chinese citizens but was forcefully in favor of Euro-
pean immigration. To mention just an example, Argentina’s 1876 Law
of Immigration and Colonization stipulated the sponsorship of trans-
portation costs, land, and provisions for Northern European families
willing to settle in the country. States closer to the ethnically mixed
Caribbean, like Colombia and Venezuela, had both promotional and
restrictive immigration policies. While these two countries also aspired
to “whiten” their populations with European settlers, their laws specif-
ically curtailed the entry of Asians. In Venezuela, for example, article 3
of the Immigration and Colonization Law of 1891 established that “no
individual of Asian nationality, nor arriving from the English and Dutch
Antilles will be accepted or hired as an immigrant.”19
Interestingly, Martí’s 1882 crónica on the Chinese Exclusion Act
written for the Venezuelan La Opinión Nacional had as its audience this
same liberal constituency. In her classic study La invención de la crónica
(1992; The American Chronicles of José Martí), Susana Rotker observes
that the Caracas-based broadsheet had a focus on education, industry,
and commerce in the rational mindset of Europe and North America,
because this newspaper “was still the newspaper of the illustrious, the
medium for the ruling, liberal class to promote its ideas.”20 Martí, who
condemns the Chinese travel ban, articulates his arguments in such a
way that they expose the contradictions of its “liberal” legislation. In an
anaphora that emphasizes the futility of the Congressional debates—
“in vain . . . in vain . . .”—Martí unpacks the arguments against the
travel ban precisely based on individual rights, free market, capitalism,
democracy, and freedom of speech, all of which his Venezuelan audience
would most certainly have agreed with but, like the majority of the US
representatives, probably ended up voting against:
En vano dijo un senador que la nación que hacía gala de lla-

mar a todos los hombres a su seno, no podía, sin que causase
asombro, cerrar sus puertas y negar sus campos a toda una
36 ❘ Chapter 1
raza respetuosa, útil y pacífica. En vano dijo un economista

que el Congreso de una nación, hecho a amparar los dere-
chos de los nacionales, no podía privarles del derecho de
comprar barato, y en mercado libre, el trabajo que necesitan
para sus industrias. En vano imponentes grupos en la alta y
baja Cámara decían que prohibir la entrada de hombre algu-
no, y de un pueblo entero de hombres, a esta tierra, era como
rasgar con daga la Constitución generosa de este pueblo, que
permite a todos los hombres el ejercicio libre y libre empleo
de sí. En vano toda la prensa del Este tenía a mal que en pro-
vecho de los inmigrantes de Europa, ambiciosos y voraces, se
compeliese a emplear trabajo caro a los fabricantes del Oes-
te, y se cerrase la entrada del país a los inmigrantes de Asia.
In vain a senator said that the nation that prided itself on tak-
ing in all men could not, without repercussions, close its doors
and banish an entire respectful, useful, and peaceful race. In
vain an economist said that the Congress of a nation, meant
to protect the rights of its nationals, could not deprive them
of the right to buy the labor required for their industries at a
low cost and in the free market. In vain important groups of
the Upper and Lower Chambers said that banning the entry
into this territory of any man, and more so of an entire group
of men, was like stabbing the generous Constitution of this
people, that grants all men the right to freely practice labor.
In vain all the Eastern Press has criticized that for the benefit
of ambitious and voracious European immigrants, business-
men from the West should be forced to employ expensive
labor, and deny entry to immigrants from Asia.21
The last sentence of this passage opens a mise en abyme of immigration,

by postulating the Chinese migrant not as an antagonist of US citizens
but of all the “ambitious and voracious” Europeans immigrants in the
United States. The paragraphs of this crónica dedicated to the Chinese
Exclusion Act close with a dictum that proves once again that Martí
rarely provides substantial racial arguments in favor or against a spe-
cific cultural group, but reads these groups chiefly in terms of their sta-
tus in the new social structure of the immigrant nation: “Y no es, no, la
civilización europea amenazada la que levanta como valla a los chinos
la espuma de sus playas: es la ira de una ciudad de menestrales que han
menester de altos salarios contra un pueblo de trabajadores que les ven-

cen, porque pueden trabajar a sueldos bajos” (No, this is not triggered
by a threatened European civilization using the foam of its beaches to
build a wall: but rather by an enraged city of artisans fighting for higher
salaries against a nation of workers that will defeat them, since they
accept lower wages).22
Herein lies the key. To the extent that the Chinese are victims, Martí
postulates, they do not need to be made so at the hands of a self-
proclaimed superior white race but of the Calibanesque United States;
of its voracious capitalist system and the miserable social inequality
that comes with it. Like in “El puente de Brooklyn,” a zoom out of the
section about Chinese immigration in the crónica sheds light on Martí’s
broader discussion of nineteenth-century labor migrations, since the
text carefully navigates the geography of the rapidly developing coun-
try, depicting the struggles of workers in each region. The report on the
strikes across the thriving industrial Northeast and agrarian Midwest
are straightforward about the social struggle that pits Gilded Age rob-
ber barons against unfortunate immigrants like Chinese coolies and also
against low-wage miners, millers, train workers, embankers, spinners,
soldiers, unemployed blacksmiths, women disguised as men so that they
can work, and prostitutes: “Vese aquí cómo los ricos se van agrupando
y espaldando, y buscando gobierno para sí, que les ponga a cubierto
de las demandas de los pobres. Y vese cómo los doloridos de otras tie-
rras, enardecidos por la dificultad que a su progreso opone el visible
concierto de los ricos, azuzan las iras y avivan la mente de los pobres
desasosegados” (Just observe how the rich gather and isolate, self-ruling
and shielding themselves from the demands of the poor. And see how
the wretched that come from other lands, enraged by the challenges the
blatantly rich impose on their prospects of progress, kindle the wrath
and unsettle the minds of the troubled poor).23 This confrontation of the
American rich versus the immigrant poor, however, becomes less palpa-
ble in Martí’s description of California, a region populated by internal
migrants; after all, the “californianos avarientos, que tienen celos de
los chinos sobrios” (greedy Californians jealous of the sober Chinese)
were for the most part Northeastern entrepreneurs and teeming masses
of pioneers of both US American and foreign origin.24 “Era el duelo
mortal de una ciudad contra una raza. Por mantener la esclavitud de los
negros hizo una guerra el Sur. Pues por lograr la expulsión de los chinos
hubiera hecho una guerra el Oeste” (It was a lethal duel between a city
and a race. To perpetuate Black slavery, the South waged a war. To expel
38 ❘ Chapter 1
the Chinese, the West was eager to go to war too).25 What the travel ban
reveals is not an underlying cultural crusade opposing the East and the
West, but the aporia of an economic model that both relies on and is
threatened by foreign labor.
In sum, Martí condemns the Chinese Exclusion Act for its contra-
diction of the principles of US liberalism and yet falls prey to such in-
consistent rhetoric in his own representation of foreign cultures. After
all, the Cuban émigré in the United States, who according to Koichi
Hagimoto finds himself in a terrain of contradiction and ambivalence,
repeatedly acknowledges the conflicting points of view over an issue
that he calls a “extraña lucha” (strange struggle), a “problema arduo”
(arduous problem), and an “acuerdo loco” (crazy agreement).26 Martí’s
originality lies in his keen journalistic intuition in featuring what would
become the first federal law to proscribe entry of an ethnic working
group on the grounds of the threat it poses to the good order of a lo-
cality, an argument that became a model of hemispheric jurisprudence
and also a precedent for the numerous attempts at regulating national
entry quotas, such as the 1924 Immigration Act targeting Japanese and
Southern Europeans, or the more recent 2017 executive orders against
citizens of predominantly Muslim countries. Still, Martí’s actual inno-
vation lies in articulating with astonishing clarity in 1882 something
that has become a commonplace today: the political uses of xenophobic
rhetoric or, to put it bluntly, what better democratic tool to criminalize a
foreign group that menaces the local economy than fueling injurious ra-
cial discourse through public opinion? On June 20, 1883, in La Nación
Martí recognizes his own use of such derogatory tropes by noting that
the stereotype of the Chinese as opium addicts might well be a deliber-
ate distortion perpetuated by their competitors on the job market: “Se
corre el riesgo que irlandeses y otras castas, movidos de odio al chino
sobrio que en el mercado de trabajo les saca codos y puede dejarlos sin
labor, de puro abaratarla, exageren el mal que el vicio del opio hace
en las clases bajas” (One runs the risk that Irishmen and other castes,
mobilized by their hatred toward the sober Chinese—who is better po-
sitioned in the job market and might take their jobs—and to diminish
him, they exaggerate the hazards of opium on the lower classes).27 In a
subsequent letter on the Chinese Exclusion Act for La Opinión Nacio-
nal dated on April 15, 1882, Martí envisions the proselytist efficacy of
racial slurs to capture the votes of naturalized immigrants in the upcom-
ing elections, celebrating that the incumbent president and Republican
candidate Chester Allan Arthur (1829–86) did not initially support this:
“Y para terminar: el Presidente Arthur sensatísimo, niega su firma al

acuerdo loco, por el que los representantes cierran esta nación, cuya
gloria y poder viene de ser casa de todos los hombres, a los hombres
chinos, por no perder en las elecciones próximas los votos de los celosos
irlandeses, cuyo trabajo burdo y caro no les da modo de competir con el
trabajo chino, barato y perfecto” (To conclude: President Arthur most
sensibly refuses to sign the crazy agreement by which the representa-
tives of this nation—that prides itself and thrives in being the home of
all men—close their doors to the Chinaman so as not to lose the vote of
the jealous Irishmen, whose crude and expensive labor cannot compete
with the cheap and perfect Chinese labor).28
Ja pon ist A rt i sa ns
If Martí offers an ambivalent portrayal of the Chinese migrant commu-

nities in the United States, Mexican José Juan Tablada is unequivocally
disparaging of the Chinese workers he encounters in Japan. Deploying
the full arsenal of modernista style, his Japanese crónicas, published in
the Mexican magazine Revista Moderna between 1900 and 1901, and
later compiled in the book En el país del sol (1919; In the land of the
sun), showcase a repertoire of blatant clichés of China. As an example,
just a short passage of the piece “Bacanal china” (Chinese bacchanalia),
about a festival at Yokohama’s Chinatown, provides countless explicit
racialized fantasies of backward and animalesque peoples:
Salen los chinos de sus “bungalows” y de sus sótanos y van

al campo, a sus famélicos ágapes, a macular con la grasa de
sus viandas el florido tapiz que tiende Otoño en las praderas
japonesas . . . Allá en los obscuros desvanes, en los hedion-
dos tapancos, quedó la pipa atascada de opio y la asquerosa
hembra china que cuando se levanta de su tálamo vacila,
intenta clavar en la estera las púas de sus pies atrofiados, pies
de cabra o de faunesa, y cae, por fin, si una mano de beluario
piadoso no se tiende para detenerla y volverla otra vez a su
cubil. Pero el tropel simiesco se solaza celebrando la fiesta
invisible y misterioso monarca.
The Chinese vacate their “bungalows” and basements and

head to the fields for their famished meals, tarnishing the
40 ❘ Chapter 1
flowery tapestry of the Japanese prairie in autumn with their

greasy food . . . They leave behind in the dark attics and
fetid garrets their opium-clogged pipes and their disgusting
females who hesitate to rise from bed and who, when they
try to pierce the mat with the spikes of their atrophied feet—
goat or faun’s hoofs—they inevitably fall to the ground
unless a merciful tamer holds them to prevent their fall
and places them back on their dens. The oblivious apelike
hordes, however, relax and celebrate the invisible feast and
its mysterious monarch.29
Portrayed as famished, addicted, and misogynistic and set in a dark and

fetid ambiance, the Chinese in the quotation display apparently idiosyn-
cratic customs such as opium smoking, oily cuisine, or foot binding. To
the Mexican poet forever captivated by Japanese culture, the world of
the migrant Chinese workers in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) is a constant
object of scorn.
For this second-generation modernista, usually considered the most
Orientalist of his peers, there is no such imaginary construct as the
“Orient” or the “Far East” but a clearly delimited East Asian geogra-
phy made up of crumbling or expanding empires. For Tablada, China
and Japan are disparate universes that only overlap in his own trans-
pacific imperial fabulations. “Bacanal china,” was, in fact, written in
the context of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), an antiforeign up-
rising that exposed China’s discontent with Western intervention into
its sovereignty through unequal treaties and unrestricted missionary
activity, a discontent that Tablada interprets as human carnage: “Hor-
das más salvajes que los ‘tai-ping’ y más funestas que los ‘Babellones
Negros,’ hacen el ‘scalp’ de todas las cabelleras rubias! Las patriar-
cales barbas de los misioneros sacrificados, los grumos de sus barbas
blancas se enredan en las zarzas, confundiéndose con las greñas de al-
godón que reinventan en las cápsulas maduras!” (Hordes, wilder than
the “tai-ping” and more lethal than the “Black Flag Army,” “scalp”
all the blond manes! The patriarchal beards of sacrificed missionaries,
the clumps of their white beards, tangle in brambles and mingle with
the cotton strands that burst like ripe capsules!).30 China’s clash with
the West, conveyed here in black-and-white imagery, is evoked as a
combat involving atavistic rites against benevolent clerics, not entirely
alien to agriculture and trade interests (“cotton”). In the heat of con-
flict in August 1900, Tablada projects the events of the Chinese siege
of the International Legations in Tianjin onto what he describes as

his asphyxiating Japanese residence, fatefully fortified by the Chinese
quarters of the port city: “Mi casa, por un excéntrico capricho, sale del
barrio europeo donde debía ser confinada, sale de su quietud nocturna
y de su puritanismo burgués, y por quién sabe qué veleidades de cu-
riosa indiscreta se empina sobre los barrios chinos, sobre la pululante,
hedionda y tumultosa ‘China Town’” (The eccentric whims of fate have
dictated that my house stretches beyond the European neighborhood
where it should have been confined to its nightly calm and its bour-
geois puritanism, and, due to who knows what curious indiscretion, is
closer to the Chinese quarters; to the swarming, stinky, and tumultuous
Chinatown).31
Japan’s entry into the concert of nations was a much calculated pro-
cess than China’s. Aware of China’s forced opening after the Opium
Wars, which followed the hegemony of the British East India Com-
pany (1600–1874) and the bulldozing advance of European colonies in
South Asia, the Meiji rulers resolved in 1868 to establish homologous
relations with the great powers by modernizing their country. What is
known historiographically as a restoration was indeed a comprehen-
sive transformation of the economic, military, and social structures that
better equipped the Asian nation for diplomacy. As it was modeled on
nineteenth-century European empires, the new state also absorbed their
expansionist drive: colonialism and the racist ideology that accompa-
nied it were already too entrenched in the West to allow an upstart,
nonwhite nation to enter the race for natural resources and markets as
an equal. Early on, the historically isolated archipelago conducted an
aggressive territorial expansion (occupying Taiwan in 1895, Korea in
1910, and Manchuria in 1931, as well as several territories along the
Pacific Rim) that would abruptly end in World War II. From Tokyo,
writing for La Nación, Enrique Gómez Carrillo captures the belliger-
ent stamina of the victorious Japanese in his coverage of the aftermath
of the Russian-Japanese War (1904–5): “Pero los japoneses, puestos a
soñar ensueños de grandezas, no se detienen fácilmente. El jurista Naka-
mura Shingo propone que con los millones de rusos se alquile en el
centro de Europa un terreno vastísimo, en el cual se establecería una
verdadera ciudad japonesa, para hacer ver al mundo ‘lo que es esta raza
privilegiada’ y para ‘comenzar a ejercer alguna influencia en el Occi-
dente’” (In their dreams of glory, the Japanese will not easily stop here.
The jurist Nakamura Shingo proposes that the million Russians rent a
vast space in the center of Europe, and set up a real Japanese city, to
42 ❘ Chapter 1
show to the world “what this privileged race is all about” and “to begin
to exert some influence in the West”).32
Japanese culture indeed exerted “some influence” in the West at the
turn of the century. An art critic and collector, Tablada celebrates the
generalized taste of contemporary artists for things Japanese, such as
Edmund (1822–96) and Jules de Goncourt (1830–70), Toulouse Lautrec
(1864–1901), William Morris (1834–96), or Edouard Manet (1832–93)
in the crónica “El Japón en Occidente”: “la gloria de los ilustres estetas
que fueron los de Goncourt, es hoy universalmente reconocida y el arte
japonés que su videncia suprema les hizo presentir, se impone hoy en el
arte de Occidente, trastorna los antiguos cánones, modifica totalmente
el arte de la decoración, cambia los puntos de vista del paisaje, llegando
a influir en la figura humana, aún en el retrato” (The glory of the illus-
trious aesthetes, the de Goncourts, is today universally acknowledged,
and Japanese art, which their supreme eye anticipated, dominates West-
ern art, recasting old canons, modifying the decorative arts, changing
the landscape’s perspectives, and impacting the human figure, and still
within the portrait).33 As a foreign correspondent, he defines for himself
the mission of disseminating the Japonist creed in Latin America him-
self: “en México poca idea tenemos de las innumerables y apasionado-
ras bellezas que ese arte encierra y conceptuamos tarea digna de quien
de arte se ocupe de revelar y propagar esas bellezas lamentablemente ig-
noradas por una gran mayoría” (In Mexico we have a very vague notion
of the countless and passionate beauties of this art; the task of the arts’
connoisseur is to reveal and propagate such unfortunately overlooked
beauties).34 Tablada is well known for his introduction of haiku poetry
in the Hispanic American lyric tradition, and for his essays on Japanese
visual arts. His own residence, built in the style of a Japanese pavilion
in the municipality of Coyoacán, as well as his personal collection of
Japanese prints, recently exhibited at the Palace of Fine Arts of Mexico
City, speak of his critical role in the circulation of Asian literary artifacts
in the Americas.35
Japonisme, or the Western exoticizing and somewhat trivial interpre-
tation of Japanese art, was also a carefully orchestrated cultural diplo-
macy strategy that leveraged the symbolic capital of Japanese aesthetics.
In a telling anecdote, Christopher Bush observes how the Asians prof-
ited from the fin de siècle enthusiasm for how those whom they con-
sidered minor pop artists such as Katsushika Hiroshige (1797–1858)
and Utagawa Hokusai (1760–1849) might fit in their larger imperial
scheme: “the low esteem in which ukiyo-e woodblock prints were held
at the time in their native country is apparent in the perhaps apocryphal

story of how they were first discovered in France: as packing material
for ceramics imported from Japan.”36 Along with ceramics and prints
of the “floating world” of geishas, kabuki theater, and the red-light
districts of Tokyo, Japanese craftsmen also flooded the streets of Paris
to instruct the West in their artisanal techniques. In the 1904 crónica
“Japoneses de París” (Parisian Japanese), Rubén Darío registers the
presence of these performers, students, landscapers, editors, journalists,
painters, and artists: “se les ve por todas partes, en el Barrio Latino, en
los jardines, en los teatros y music halls, en el bosque” (you see them
all around, in the Quartier Latin, in the gardens, in theaters and music
halls, in the park).37 Charmed by their refinement, Darío dedicates sev-
eral lines to Hata, the talented gardener of the symbolist poet Robert
de Montesquiou (1855–1921), who, it seems, was also a florist, painter
of watercolors, and artist of lights. The description of his physical ap-
pearance evokes the imaginaries of Darío’s arielismo: “Y su silueta, re-
gordeta . . . como la de un Calibán complicado de Ariel, de un Puck
robusto, alado y gesticulador” (And his plump silhouette . . . like that
of a Caliban complicated by Ariel, that of a robust, winged, and expres-
sive Puck).38 In Darío’s view, this accomplished immigrant embodies the
Japanese empire in his unique combination of the traits of a pragmatic
and utilitarian Caliban, a refined and spiritual Ariel, with a touch of the
whimsical and ethereal Puck. For Dario and many other modernistas,
Japan dislocates the imaginaries of imperialism from the Americas to
the world at large.
Emigration was a controversial issue of Japanese imperial foreign
policy, and Latin America played a key role in this debate. While the rul-
ers unanimously supported exchanges involving their best and brightest
scholars—who were often from the former samurai class—they were
torn about the fate of the lower classes. On the one hand, poor and
landless farmers (more numerous with the recent agricultural reforms),
less-skilled laborers, and the historic so-called Burakumin outcasts,
were perceived as undesirable for the nation and thus best suited for
emigration. By the same token, others argued, the relocation of such
commoners abroad could reinforce the Western image of Japan as an
uncivilized nation, and besides it was a risky humanitarian undertaking,
a lesson the Japanese had learned from the infamous Chinese coolie
trade.39 Because of critical pressures from overpopulation, the conserva-
tive faction reluctantly agreed to sign bilateral treaties of free immigra-
tion with Western countries through a policy of ishokumin (migration
44 ❘ Chapter 1
and colonization) by which the Japanese state purchased foreign land

for farmers to engage in agricultural and extractive production in en-
closed ethnic colonies.40 The cross-equatorial flow of dekasegi (mi-
grant workers) to South America boomed after the Tokyo earthquake
of 1923 aggravated the housing crisis, and the 1924 Immigration Act
banned the entry of Japanese nationals to the United States. This fortu-
itous swerve would initiate intense human traffic during the twentieth
century that enabled Brazil to become the home of the largest Nikkei
community in the world, which it is today, and Peru, to house a very
substantial one.
As Mexico had just signed diplomatic agreements with Japan (1897)
and China (1899) when Tablada visited the country for the first time in
1900, the issue of immigration was not a priority in the political agenda
of Tablada’s crónicas. I do not think that, in El país del sol, Tablada ad-
vocates for any kind of Asian migration—be it skilled or unskilled, Jap-
anese or Chinese—but rather for the importing of Asian techniques for
local manufacture. I follow here Laura Torres-Rodríguez’s hypothesis
that Tablada’s japonisme was chiefly a commercial venture. In Orien-
taciones transpacíficas Torres-Rodríguez argues that since the trip for
Revista Moderna was partly sponsored by Porfirio Díaz’s government,
Tablada also participated in this administration’s Pacific-oriented eco-
nomic modernization: “La comisión requería que se inscribiera en el
proyecto político y económico del régimen. El autor no sólo debía es-
cribir textos literarios, sino también reportar sus observaciones acerca
de las prestigiosas artes aplicadas japonesas” (The commission required
[that this trip] fit within the regime’s political and economic project. The
author was not just expected to write literary texts, but also, to report
his observations on Japan’s prestigious applied arts).41 I will return to
Torres-Rodríguez’s arguments more in detail in chapter 4 in reference
to Tablada’s avant-garde experimentation with Chinese handcraft tech-
niques and ideogrammatic poetry. Regarding the question of Asian la-
bor, I provisionally accept Torres-Rodríguez’s hypothesis that Tablada
is more concerned with imitating Japanese modes of production than
with importing Japanese products or peoples, because Asian artisan
techniques would play a crucial part for both the future of Mexican
modernity and for the history of Mexico’s folk art. Tablada’s recurrent
fabulations of the Pacific trade route of the Spanish empire between
1565 and 1815, “la feérica y prodigiosa nao de la China” (the fairy
and fabulous Manila Galleon), are best summarized in the introduction
to Adolfo Best Maugard’s Método de dibujo: Tradición, resurgimiento
y evolución del arte mexicano (Manual of drawing: Tradition, renais-

sance, and evolution of Mexican art), the massive institutional project
on art education with which Tablada collaborated in 1923.42 Autoch-
thonous art is defined here as a combination of pre-Columbian, colo-
nial, and contemporary art forms, the latter being a product of Spanish
and Asian influences:
Más tarde, las Naos de China nos trajeron nuevos elementos

de riqueza artística: el arte chino que especialmente en sus
productos de porcelana, invadió a nuestro país por la cir-
cunstancia de su comercio con Europa, pasando por México.
En un principio, el indio trató de imitar también esos produc-
tos, y se hizo de porcelana en Puebla, imitación de la china,
etc.; pero poco a poco, el indio se asimiló esos elementos de
belleza y, lo que en un principio fuera, como en casi todos los
pueblos primitivos, simplemente imitación, acabó por con-
vertirse en características del arte mexicano, hasta el punto
de ser hoy la expresión genuina de nuestro arte popular.
Later, the Manila Galleon brought us new artistic elements:

Chinese art, famous for its porcelain, invaded our country
by way of the commercial routes to Europe which crossed
through Mexico. At first, the Indian tried to imitate those
products too and came up with Puebloan style of porcelain
as an imitation of the Chinese, etc. But gradually, the In-
dian incorporated those beautiful elements, and, what was
at first simply imitation, as in all primitive societies, became
a typical trait of Mexican art, to the point that nowadays it
represents the genuine expression of our popular art.43
This achinado (Chinese-like) tradition by which indigenous craftsmen

“imitated” and “assimilated” Chinese and Japanese styles of furniture,
china, silver, and textiles that had been imported from Manila to Aca-
pulco, flourished without any form of apprenticeship from migrant
craftsmen. For example, local artisans from Lima fashioned unique
weavings featuring traditional Chinese motifs such as peony flowers,
phoenixes, and the qilin (a mythical creature found in Chinese textiles),
along with indigenous plants and fauna, blending imported silk with
local cotton, wool, and camelid (llama or alpaca).44 The very few Asian
migrants that settled in New Spain and in the Viceroyalty of Peru during
46 ❘ Chapter 1
the rule of the Spanish empire were either enslaved or occupied in urban
trades but did not form an independent artisan class.45
In sum, Tablada’s observations on the importing of Japanese applied
art techniques resignifies his relationship to Chinese labor in two crucial
ways. Despite his disparaging notes about the Chinese migrant workers
of Yokohama in El país del sol, the modernista in fact values Chinese
skilled labor and envisions it through the remote universe of transpa-
cific imperial networks where China had a much more advantageous
geopolitical standing than in the more recent coolie trade. Furthermore,
Tablada’s inscription of Mexico in the contemporary Japonist and in
the early modern chinoiserie global aesthetics forges a larger narrative
detailing the transpacific nature of Mexican culture and an artistic leg-
acy transmitted not through the physical displacement of its peoples or
products, but through the performance and reinterpretation of its arti-
sanal techniques. Thinking about the broader question of the writing
of China in Latin America, the modernista artifacts of the transpacific
trade do not constitute a fixed archive to be traced and reestablished in
written sources or museum collections; rather, they introduce a reper-
toire of embodied memory, of acts usually thought as ephemeral, non-
reproducible knowledge such as gestures, orality, and movement. I will
elaborate on the idea of repertoires as embodied archives in chapter 5.
Mig hty Merc ha nt s
If Martí and Tablada cast their gazes on the Chinese unskilled migrant
workers in imperialist United States and Japan, Enrique Gómez Car-
rillo (1873–1927) only has eyes for the prosperous Chinese merchants
throughout colonial Asia. By observing the social division of labor
caused by the mechanization of manufacture and the globalization of
trade at the turn of the century, Gómez Carrillo examines the outcomes
of centuries of Euro-Chinese exchanges in colonial ports throughout
Asia. His gaze emancipates the Chinese from their stereotyping as mere
manual workforce and instead foresees the leading role they would play
in global capitalism.
I will not be the first to claim that the Guatemalan writer, translator,
and diplomat Enrique Gómez Carrillo is perhaps the most fascinating
of all the modernistas. A prolific author of narrative and criticism, hon-
ored by the Académie Française and a darling of the Ibero-American
press, Gómez Carrillo epitomizes the bohemian fin de siècle spirit, his
life laden with turbulent affairs—including a short-lived marriage with

the future wife of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944); accusations
of espionage surrounding the Mata Hari scandal in 1917; and his prema-
ture death in Paris following years of excess. His tireless globe-trotting
and trained taste for cultural diversity, recorded in his two dozen pub-
lished travelogues, earned him the nickname “Príncipe de los cronistas”
(prince of the chroniclers). Gómez Carrillo is the modernista who trav-
eled the most and the farthest.46
In Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in
Latin America (2014), Mariano Siskind revisits Gómez Carrillo’s oddly
numerous eastbound trips and argues that the Guatemalan’s Orientalist
representations are grounded in a knowledge of the nineteenth-century
French Orientalist archive far superior to that of his modernista peers.
This Orientalist posture, Siskind notes, “is constantly interrupted—
indeed, disrupted—by his ability to analyze the material underpinnings
of the experience of colonialism, denaturalize his exoticizing expec-
tations, and insert counterpoints and dissenting voices that make for
a complex portrayal of the process of colonial modernization.”47 To
demonstrate this point, Siskind shows how in Gómez Carrillo’s trav-
elogues, codified images of, say, sensual dancers are juxtaposed with
militant anticolonial voices; how his sympathy for the Jews disrupts
modernista’s conventional constructions of Otherness; and how he de-
liberately bypasses a crucial trope of Orientalist travel literature, that is,
the shock of exoticism upon arrival at a new destination: “the absence of
an exoticizing gaze in Gómez Carrillo’s first impressions of Saigon and
Shanghai, in contradiction to the Orientalist vein of his traveling subjec-
tivity, can be understood in relation to the development of a cosmopol-
itan point of view that is able to produce an unlikely even, smooth, and
homogeneous global territory, a cosmopolitan continuity between Paris,
Saigon, and Shanghai,” to which Siskind later adds Buenos Aires.48 This
new, flat mappemonde emerges not as a product of the cultural mixture
of global migrations, but of the looming Parisian phantasmagorias that
modeled each corner of the planet on the aesthetic capital of modernity,
and whose spatial distribution traces the contours of a unified modern-
ist world that follows the shape of modernista cosmopolitan desire. Sis-
kind concludes that what makes it possible to produce universal spaces
out of Yokohama, Saigon, and Shanghai is that “they cease to be Japa-
nese, Vietnamese, or Chinese—that is, Oriental and therefore exotic—to
instead become instances of the global totality of cultural modernism/
capitalism.”49 While I entirely agree with Siskind’s idea about the es-
48 ❘ Chapter 1
sentially French mappings of Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s cosmopolitan

desires, I hold that his analysis of the material underpinnings of colo-
nialism in Asia shifts to China. In De Marsella a Tokio. Sensaciones de
Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón (1906; From Marseille to Tokyo:
Sensations of Egypt, India, China, and Japan) Gómez Carrillo is over-
whelmed by the Chinese merchant class. In the crónicas “Singapur: El
paraíso de los chinos” (Singapore: The Chinese paradise) and “Shang-
hai: Los chinos que trabajan” (Shanghai: The working Chinese), the
modernista sees beyond the cultural ubiquity of French modernity and
instead postulates China as the new powerhouse of global capitalism,
which marks its print through its diasporic merchant population. “Las
guías nos dicen que éste es el París del Extremo Oriente. Pero, en reali-
dad, los dos nombres chocan. ¿París? No. Ni Oriente tampoco. Es una
gran metrópoli de trabajo que se describe mejor con cifras estadísticas
que con frases. Es el mercado de la seda, del algodón y del hierro de la
China. Sus manufacturas son infinitas y formidables” (In travel guides
we read that this is the Paris of the Far East. But in fact, both names
are jarring. Paris? No. Nor the Orient. This is eminently a workers’ me-
tropolis best described in statistics than in phrases. This is the Chinese
market for silk, cotton, and iron. Its manufactures are infinite and for-
midable).50 If this landscape that the modernista captures from the ship
taking him to the port of Shanghai resembles any place in the world, it is
not the City of Lights but the historic merchant towns of the Hanseatic
League: “Sí, sin duda, este espectáculo no es nuevo. ¿Es Hamburgo o es
Amberes? Una por una, las altas columnas humeantes se alzan. Son las
avanzadas del industrialismo” (Indeed, this spectacle is not at all new.
Is it Hamburg or Antwerp? The smoky chimneys rise high one by one.
They are the vanguard of industrialism).51 The tall chimneys along the
river’s margin obstruct the views of the picturesque backgrounds of rice
paddies and seamlessly blend into the geometrical architecture of the
Bund conveying the familiar urban scenery of Northern Europe. Prussia
is, after all, for Gómez Carrillo, the constant reference point of Chinese
capitalist progress: materialization of Wilhelm II’s (1859–1941) heavy
industry ambitions (“Aquí en efecto, el fantasma que Guillermo II vio
en sueños, se convierte en realidad” [The ghost that Wilhelm II saw in
dreams, here becomes reality]); Chinese imitation of Krupp cannons;
and rapid replacement of German imports with local production (“Los
billares, los mostradores de bar, los tiros al blanco, todo lo visible decía
‘Made in Germany’ y presentaba los caracteres de la manufactura tu-
desca” [Billiards, bar counters, darts, all the visible things used to say
“Made in Germany” and displayed the character of Saxon manufac-

ture]).52 To the extent that there is a Yellow Peril, Gómez Carrillo retorts
rhetorically, this threat is neither racial nor military—like that posed by
the triumphant Japanese empire he documents in the subsequent chap-
ters of his book—but rather of an economic sort: “El peligro es pacífico:
no amenaza los puertos de Guerra sino los puertos comerciales. Sus na-
ves, en vez de cañones, llevan fardos de sedas, de lacas, de porcelanas, de
esencias: y pronto llevarán también cargamentos de lanas y algodones,
de carbón y de hierro, de drogas y cristales, de joyas y adornos, granos
y bebidas, de todo lo que la tierra y la industria producen” (This is a
pacific peril: it poses a threat not to military bases but to commercial
ports. Instead of canons, its vessels carry silk, lacquers, porcelain, spices;
and soon they will also carry wool and cotton, coal and iron, drugs and
crystals, jewels and ornaments, crops and drinks; anything produced by
the soil and industry).53 We read that the Chinese economy is expanding
at the turn of the century because of its rapid industrialization and the
recasting of China’s trade network. In the quote above, Gómez Carrillo
predicts that the Asians will compete as producers and exporters of
not only the chinoiserie so dear to the West (silk, lacquers, porcelain,
and spices) but also the commodities (wool, cotton, coal, and iron) and
elaborate manufactured goods (drugs, jewels, and ornaments). China
is depicted as no longer bound to foreign masters, but rather as a full-
fledged owner of the fruits of its soil, labor, and capital; in other words,
a free actor in the global market.
Of all places in Asia, Singapore is where Gómez Carrillo sees the
expansion of Chinese capitalism: “Mejor que en Pekin, los que estudian
el peligro amarillo, podrían, en esta isla ecuatorial, darse cuenta relati-
vamente exacta de lo que la raza china, una vez educada en los métodos
occidentales, logrará hacer” (Much better than in Beijing, those who
study the Yellow Peril will immediately notice in this equatorial island
what the Western-educated Chinese race is capable of achieving).54 Like
the treaty ports mentioned in this quote, Singapore was a culturally
mixed city at the turn of the century. A possession of the British Em-
pire since 1819, Singapore became the capital of the Straits Settlement
in 1836 thanks to its privileged location connecting the busy shipping
routes of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. While numerous
trading firms were set up by Europeans, Chinese, Arabs, US Americans,
and Indians, Chinese middlemen handled most of the trade between
the Europeans and Asians.55 Although Gómez Carrillo’s layover in Sin-
gapore is brief, he is quick to grasp the complex demographics of its
50 ❘ Chapter 1
vibrant Chinese population. Without calling them by their name, the

Guatemalan grounds his hypothesis on the assimilation skills of the
“great Chinese businessmen” in the Peranakans, a subethnic group that
descends from the first waves of Chinese settlers in the Malay Peninsula
between the fifteenth and seventeenth century (“Ni necesidad hay, para
comprender lo que en Singapur representa la raza amarilla de una larga
estancia y de un profundo estudio” [One does not need a lengthy stay
or an in-depth study to understand what the yellow race represents in
Singapore]),56 adding that they culturally differentiated themselves from
the more recent immigrants coming from South China: “Viendo a los
celestes mostrarse superiores a todos los que habitan en Singapur” (See-
ing the celestials display their superiority toward all the inhabitants of
Singapore).57
The prophetic portrayal of the China trade is based on Gómez Car-
rillo’s far superior knowledge of the infrastructure of the colonial world
through which he trekked, visiting British, French, German, and Rus-
sian imperial possessions, as well as Japanese and Chinese territories.
The trip that takes him from Marseille to Tokyo in 1906 adds to his
previous experience in European-dominated regions, such as the Mid-
dle East and North Africa, and exposes him to the intricate cultural
diversity of South and East Asian colonies in the sphere of influence of
China and Japan. Regarding the Chinese, Gómez Carrillo differentiates
internal migrants from native inhabitants and historic waves of settlers
within the same cultural group. Chinese might, Gómez Carrillo con-
cludes, is not defined within the confines of the imploding Qing rule,
but rather in the booming “ungrounded empire” of diasporic Chinese
merchants, middlemen, and brokers.58
If Martí’s discussion of immigration laws in the United States and
Tablada’s observations of Asian artisanship engage in local debates
about Chinese labor, Gómez Carrillo’s notes on the flourishing Chinese
merchant diaspora speculate about the positive long-term effects of
Chinese labor migrations to the Americas. Thus, modernistas did par-
ticipate in national debates on the transition of labor in Latin America,
not by addressing the political issue directly, but in the traffic of tropes
and themes across their traveling texts. As discussed above, typical turn-
of-the century topics such as global labor migrations, imperialism, or
the rapid expansion of capitalism, offer, when read in the light of the
“Chinese Question,” a fresh perspective on the unresolved issue of for-
eign labor in modernista prose.
Str a n ds of Mo de r ni t y
Along with themes that capture the experience of modernity, travel-

ing modernistas also document processes of modernization. Privileged
witnesses of what David Harvey describes as the “time-space compres-
sion” of the globe that came with the completion of the Suez Canal in
1869 and the regularization of transcontinental rail passenger service
in 1867, these writers’ fascination with the infrastructure of Oriental
tourism illuminates a much larger circuit of vessels crisscrossing the
oceans and transporting peoples in quite a different fashion than the
“lujo asiático” (Oriental luxury) that they experience as foreign corre-
spondents in Asia.
Let us return to Gómez Carrillo. The second chapter of De Mar-
sella a Tokio titled “Paisajes y emociones” (Landscapes and emotions)
chronicles the segment of the route from the Mediterranean Sea into
the Indian Ocean. Although the book later returns to the stopover in
Egypt, the crossing of the Suez Canal signals the expansion of Oriental
tourism: “estaban orgullosas de embarcarse en un buque de los que
van más lejos, en un buque de la carrera de la China y del Japón, en
un buque acostumbrado a escapar a la mousson del Océano Índico y
a los tifones del mar amarillo!” (they were proud to board a ship that
travels further, a steamboat going to China and Japan, a ship used to
escaping the monsoon of the Indian Ocean and the typhons of the Yel-
low Sea!).59 Unmoved by the smooth waters and well-trodden coast-
lines of the Middle East, the pages about the initial days of the journey
turn indoors to capture the lifestyle inside the emblematic vessel that,
since the mid-nineteenth century, shuffled leisure travelers and colonial
troops eastward and westward. We visualize the halls, smoking parlors
and promenade decks of the Sydney, a steamer of the French company
Messageries Maritimes, built as a mailing ship and later converted into
a passenger cruise. We experience the motion sickness familiar to pas-
sengers of railroad dining cars: “se mueve esto menos que un ferrocarril,
¿no es cierto?” (This should feel more stable than a train, shouldn’t
it?).60 We become intrigued by the audacious European women head-
ing to faraway places; the romantic sailors from the Mediterranean en-
amored of Homeric poetry; and the resilient colonial officers serving
overseas. As Gómez Carrillo summarizes the global spirit of the seafar-
ing microcosm in the favorite modernista topos of the cosmopolis, he
points to a Chinese passenger who stands out from the crowd:
52 ❘ Chapter 1
En esta cosmópolis flotante, entre los egipcios de perfiles de

ave de presa y los indios de grandes ojos ojerosos, entre los
japoneses cortos de talle y los anamitas femeniles, un perso-
naje singular, suntuoso, grave y enigmático, interesa espe-
cialmente. . . . Es un chino. Pero no es un chino vulgar, un
mercader, un banquero, no, ni siquiera un diplomático, sino
un sabio chino, un chino doctoral, un chino que si no fuera
imponente, sería caricaturesco.
Among the Egyptians with their aquiline profiles and the

baggy- and wide-eyed Indians, the short Japanese, and ef-
feminate Annamites of this floating cosmopolis, a unique,
sumptuous, grave, and enigmatic character catches one’s at-
tention. . . . He is Chinese. But not an ordinary Chinese, a
merchant, banker, nor a diplomat, even; but rather a wise-
man, a doctoral Chinese, a Chinese whom, were it not for his
magnificence, would be a caricature.61
The use of exotic epithets to describe the Asian passengers resembles

Martí’s stereotypical depiction of the immigrant physiognomies star-
ing at the Brooklyn Bridge. But this seaborne Chinese is unlike the
“ordinary” types of New York, or the bankers, merchants, and dip-
lomats seen in San Francisco, Yokohama, and Singapore by Tablada
and Gómez Carrillo himself. Onboard, this “doctor” diligently keeps
up with the research routine that took him to Italy and to Mexico for
over twenty years to study early Chinese migrations to the Americas.
Interestingly, what initially appears as a caricature of an Asian humanist
wearing a tunic and a braid, speaking in aphorisms, and assisted by an
entourage of servants carrying parchment scrolls (a parody Jorge Luis
Borges will exploit in his chinoiserie fiction, discussed in chapter 2) is a
global historian connected to the emerging milieu of social sciences in
the United States. Gómez Carillo reports his words: “Los sabios ameri-
canos me han ayudado mucho. Además de Masters, Lobscheid es parti-
dario de la América china. El gran Bancroft probó que por las venas de
los aztecas circula sangre mongólica. Yo, por mi parte, he notado que el
calendario mejicano y el chino son idénticos” (The American wisemen
have helped me a lot. Besides Masters, Lobscheid is a proponent of
Chinese America. The great Bancroft has demonstrated that Mongolian
blood runs through the veins of the Aztecs. I, myself, have observed that
the Mexican and Chinese calendars are identical).62 To the astonished
ears of the Guatemalan traveler, the modern Chinese scholar explains

in fluent Spanish the works of protoethnologists who in the last quar-
ter of the nineteenth century developed theories about pre-Columbian
transoceanic contact based on their studies of Indigenous cultures of
the American West, such as Hubert Howe Bancroft’s The Native Races
of the Pacific States (1886) and William Lobscheid’s Evidence of the
Affinity of the Polynesians and American Indians with the Chinese and
Other Nations of Asia: Derived from the Language, Legends and His-
tory of Those Races (1872). This Chinese scholar at the door to the Far
East is in fact pointing toward the Far West, to the transpacific routes
that hypothetically established the first human contact between Asia
and America long before the years of the Manila Galleon and of the
coolie trade, in the prehistory of oceanic migrations.
I propose that Gómez Carrillo’s politics of Oriental tourism in the
Suez Canal should be read as a point of entry to a corpus of migration
literature in the Pacific. I follow here Harris Feinsod’s observation about
the disorienting imaginaries of the sea in modernism. In “Canal Zone
Modernism” (2019), Feinsod suggests that the extraordinary oceanic
expansion of symbolic and material culture, well captured by modernist
artists, refers to a world literature and art at once connected by inten-
sifying flows and fortified by proliferating blockages: “literary works
situated in the micropolitical environments of ships, or at their various
ports of call . . . express a version of Aamir Mufti’s claim that world
literature, far from being a seamless and traversable space, has in fact
been from the beginning a regime of enforced mobility and therefore
of immobility as well.”63 I propose here to evoke a particular stance
of Chinese untranslatability: the travel bans, disposed cargo, and si-
lenced testimonies of oppressed Chinese migrant workers on their way
to Latin America. This is not a comparative exercise of reference or
citation since I do not think that Gómez Carrillo is explicitly referring
to the nineteenth-century coolie trade in the crossing of the Suez Canal.
The trope of the seaborne Chinese, however, gains novel and varied con-
notations in the itinerant afterlife of the crónica when reprinted in the
well-oiled network of newspapers and magazines across Latin Amer-
ica and Spain that indeed reported on Asian migrations. The image of
the Chinese scholar onboard a French steamboat in the Mediterranean
might convey a taste of exoticism in the Argentine La Nación or the
Spanish El Liberal where it originally came out, but less so in the mag-
azine Prisma of Lima or the Cuban Diario de la Marina where it would
appear alongside news of sugar, guano, and the plantation universe that
54 ❘ Chapter 1
still relied on the migrant Chinese workforce in those areas. More pre-
cisely, the figure of the Chinese scholar that theorizes early transpacific
migrations becomes heavily political when published next to news of
coolie auctions at docks, mutinies onboard Pacific clippers, and insur-
ance claims for human cargo thrown overboard. Rather than suggest a
fluid East-West translatability, this modernista maritime trope signals a
genealogy of forced displacement that does not flow as a solid corpus
in the Latin American literary tradition, but is, rather, diluted across the
United States, Peru, Cuba, and China. I echo Elliott Young’s observa-
tion that “there is a growing literature on the ‘many middle passages’
of forced labor around the world, but for the most part the story of
the thousands of Chinese who struggled and died on the open seas has
simply dissolved into the vast oceans between national histories.”64 The
following pages are an attempt to rescue such an archive in the Latin
American tradition.
The C oolie P assage A rc h i v e
It is in travel and maritime literature, two of the most popular literary

genres of the early nineteenth century, that the narrative of the unwrit-
ten coolie experience emerges from the margins.65 The coolie passage
archive names, for me, the dispersed corpus of sources depicting the
transportation of indentured laborers from China to Peru and the Carib-
bean in the second part of the nineteenth century. Although the ignoble
business linked to slavery during the heyday of abolitionism—occurring
for the most part in the international waters of the Pacific Ocean and
overseen by the conflicting sovereignties of its crews, carriers, and car-
goes—is well documented, the terrifying experience of such East-West
journey has gone largely unnoticed in Latin American literary histories.
Stories of Asian maritime trade were common in the US press, and
the most memorable account onboard a coolie ship is Edgard Holden’s
“A Chapter in the Coolie Trade,” published in Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine in June 1864. An open attack of bondage, the text, written
toward the end of the American Civil War (1861–65), provides a rare
first-hand account of a mutiny on the Norway clipper sailing from Ma-
cao to Havana in 1859 that bears striking similarities to the infamous
crossing of slave vessels through the Atlantic Middle Passage. In the
piece we read of the disparate headcount of sixty crew members and
passengers versus a thousand half-naked “sullen or desponding” Chi-
nese men confined in cluttered shelves in the lower deck. We visualize

through the text and its illustrations (see, e.g., fig. 1) how the barricades
and iron gratings placed on the hatchways of the recast freight carrier
break apart when swarming bodies crawl toward the upper deck. In the
heat of the riot, we sense the silent authority of the translators, half-
Portuguese half-Chinese middlemen versed in several Chinese dialects
who were “nowise friendly to the mass of coolies on board” but were
nevertheless the sole interpreters of their demands to the captain.66 In
Fig. 1. Edgar Holden, “Coolies embarking,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,

1864, 1. Courtesy of Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.
56 ❘ Chapter 1
the aftermath of the failed uprising, the appeased coolies roaming on

the deck echo the eerie characters of mutiny novels such as Edgar Allan
Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) or Herman Melville’s
Benito Cereno (1855). Like the character Amasa Delano of Massachu-
setts, disoriented at the uncanny docility of the rebel slaves on Captain
Benito Cereno’s ship adrift off the coast of Chile, the narrator of the
Harper’s article also brings the readers onboard to the Pacific for them
to judge the abuses of a new form of slavery.67
Mutinies on board coolie ships were frequent, and the mortality rate
was even higher than in African vessels because the journey across the
Pacific was longer and the ships heading to Cuba still had to circum-
navigate the continent through the Cape of Good Hope all the way
up the Atlantic, adding yet more mileage (approximately three months
total). The Chinese died of dysentery, scurvy, and pneumonia, as well as
all kinds of illnesses produced by the inclement weather and the fetid
hygiene conditions of the overcrowded vessels, which were regulated on
paper but rarely enforced in the lawless high seas. In his comprehensive
study of the coolie trade in Peru, Watt Stewart registers the exorbitant
death rates in ships arriving to the Andean country, around 10 percent
in the 1860s and between 14 and 31 percent in the 1870s.68 Albeit inex-
act, the causes of these casualties were common knowledge since local
newspapers such as El Comercio or La Patria published on the coolie
trade and other popular ventures. The South Pacific Times was one of
the loudest voices denouncing the trade. Printed during the 1870s in
the coastal city of Callao, this English-language periodical was an active
news outlet reporting on mercantile affairs as well as a promoter of Brit-
ish public interest among the Peruvian-Anglophone public. For exam-
ple, in a dramatic editorial from May 24, 1873, the narrator condemns
the harsh effects of the coolie passage with a vivid image of corpse-like
bodies disembarking at the port of Callao: “Thin and wan enough they
look—even the stoutest of them are, sometimes, mere bags of bones.”69
The international press was a crucial organ in the struggle for aboli-
tionism as well as in the termination of the coolie trade. Along with crit-
icism in English-language media, the full blow to the trade came with
the translation of the Cuba Commission Report. Published in 1876, this
text is the product of a multinational delegation sent by the Chinese
government to Cuba in 1874 to investigate the accusations of abuse
toward Chinese laborers. The commission was chaired by a French and
a British customs officers stationed in China as well as by several Chi-
nese officials who at that time were residing in Hartford, Connecticut,
as part of the Chinese Educational Mission (1872–81).70 Although no

Chinese commissioner held full diplomatic credentials or gubernato-
rial or ministerial office in China, their overseas residence in the United
States counted as political expertise, allowing them to function as offi-
cial representatives of the Qing government.71 Originally written in Chi-
nese and soon translated into English for immediate dissemination in
the press, the Cuba Commission Report represents an early example of
modern East-West diplomacy. The text seeks to construct a testimonial
narrative of the indenture of thousands of Chinese plantations workers
across Cuba organized in the form of a questionnaire. Focused on the
legal puzzles of each aspect of the trade, question four of the report
sheds ample light on the coolie passage archive: “Do the laws provide
adequately for the well-being of the coolies on the voyage?” The work-
ers’ replies, which verify general ill health as causes of death on board
the ships, emphasize abuse:
The deposition of Ch’en Hsio-Chou () and 1 other state

that more than 30 men were shot during the voyage. Chang
A-chin () deposes, “the surgeon was a foreigner, and
many died through his treatment; many died from confine-
ment in the hold, and others, decoyed unwilling to go abroad,
killed themselves.” Li A-ch’iang () deposes, “two men
were suspected by the deposes master of mutinous inten-
tions, and were hanged by his orders.” Liang A-yu ()
“two insane men were struck to death by the carpenter.” Lin
72
Chin () deposes “30 men committed suicide.”
Note how the repetition of ideas delivered in direct speech conveys a

common experience of the horrific passage. The statements were re-
corded in the various dialects that were spoken by the emigrants and
were intelligible to the Chinese officials and European commissioners
touring the Cuban plantations. Interestingly, the English translation
of the report retains the transcription of the logograms of the Chi-
nese names of the interviewees—most likely assigned at the time of the
interview—somewhat restoring the identity of the anonymous human
cargo, now turned into subjective migrant voices.
The desperation that led to mass suicide onboard is also voiced
through the testimonies of the Peru Commission, also conducted in
1874. But unlike the much-publicized Cuban Commission, the Peru-
vian one was a covert enterprise, chaired by the Chinese American Yung
58 ❘ Chapter 1
Wing (1828–1912) and partially funded by intellectuals and religious

men associated with abolitionist circles of New England. Although the
actual manuscripts of the three-months’ trip from Connecticut to Lima
in 1874 are scattered in records held at the National Library of China,
Foreign Ministry Archives in Lima, and Yale University’s Beinecke Li-
brary,73 Yung Wing’s memoirs from 1909 summarize part of the inves-
tigations. In his meeting at the Qing’s foreign affairs office immediately
after the trip, he underlines the shocking suicide sprees: “Then I told
him something about the horrors of the middle passage between Macao
and Cuba or Peru; how whole cargoes of them revolted in mid-ocean,
and either committed wholesale suicide by jumping into the ocean, or
else overpowered the captain and the crew, killed them and threw them
overboard, and then took their chances in the drifting of the vessel.”74
The most poignant account of the coolie passage is, in my view, the
short story “En alta mar” (1985; On the high seas) by the Sino-Peruvian
author Siu Kam Wen (1951–). Juxtaposing a storyline about two sick
men onboard a coolie ship with another about a junk packed with refu-
gees somewhere in the South China Sea, the narrator probes the minds
of the feverish emigrants. The character onboard the Luisa Canevaro,
an actual steamer of Peruvian registry infamous in British diplomatic
reports, lies unconscious as he wishes for his own death: “El hombre
que deliraba esperaba morir a tiempo, antes que el barco atracase” (The
delirious man hoped to die on time, before the ship docked at port).75 In
the fragmentary last paragraph of the story, the narrator leaves it to the
reader to determine if the character finally died or not:
El Luisa Canevaro llegó al Callao finalmente y el junco tocó

también puerto seguro.
Uno de los dos hombres enfermos murió y el otro sobrevivió.
Dejo a criterio del lector decidir cuál de los dos, el culí o
el refugiado, fue el feliz sobreviviente.
The Luisa Canevaro finally made it to Callao and the junk

also docked safely at port.
One of the two sick men died and the other one survived.
I leave it up to the reader to decide which of them, the
coolie or the refugee, was the happy survivor.76
The dilemma posed to the readers about the possible “happy survival”
of a Peruvian coolie opens a broader interrogation about the archive of
Chinese migrations to the Americas. In a direct interpellation of con-

temporary Spanish-speaking readers, the narrator of the story interro-
gates their affective preference for the survival of a fictional Peruvian
immigrant over that of a remote Southeast Asian. Furthermore, does the
allusion to the happy survival signal the fictional escape from death at
sea or the enduring prosperity of migrants in their new homelands? To
what extent is this ending (or this story, oeuvre, or sinophone writing in
general), crafted by a Chinese-born writer who now lives in Hawaii, but
whose entire work is written in Spanish and revolves around his years
in Peru, a statement of the fluid cultural memory of overseas Chinese
experience, which does not stream between fixed ports of departure and
arrival, but is diverted by the languages it navigates? Siu Kam Wen’s
diasporic fictions, Yung Wing’s multinational diplomacy, and the Cuban
laborers’ testimonies that voice the memories of Asian American pas-
sages, take shape through textual constellations that have gone unno-
ticed in master narratives of national identity in Latin America because
they are essentially hemispheric and transpacific, or, as Ana Paulina Lee
posits, “circumoceanic,” and thus slip through the artificial boundaries
of nation states.77
Now what about the perspective of Latin American intellectuals who,
in the spirit of nation building, went to China as diplomats, merchants,
or simple tourists in the second part of the nineteenth century? How
does the much publicized question of Chinese forced migrations unfold
in their Eastbound narratives during the heyday of Oriental tourism? In
other words, what is the contribution of Spanish and Lusophone travel
texts to the coolie passage archive?
As the pressure on the coolie trade grew internationally, Latin Amer-
ican diplomats were asked to account for it abroad. Amid negotiations
with Chinese authorities for a treaty of commerce and navigation be-
tween China and Peru, the experienced captain Guillermo García y
García (1847–79) responded in London with a report titled “Informe
que contiene importantes detalles sobre la conducta con los emigrantes
chinos y otros datos relativos a esta inmigración” (1873; Report deal-
ing with important details about the conduct of Chinese emigrants and
other issues related to this migration).78 An unapologetic defense of the
coolie passage, the document does not deny any of the accusations of
mistreatment, instead contextualizing them as a problem of sovereignty,
for which Peru is exempt from any blame. García y García acknowl-
edges the high death rates onboard, but is quick to add that such figures
are prevalent in foreign vessels consigned by Peruvian firms rather than
60 ❘ Chapter 1
in state-owned fleets, and are even higher when the carriers are slow
clippers rather than modern steamboats “construidos especialmente
para el transporte de grandes masas de pasajeros, con todos los últimos
adelantos que tanto la ciencia como la experiencia sugieren para llenar
todas las exigencias de higiene, seguridad y comodidad” (built espe-
cially for the transport of large masses of passengers, and furnished with
all the innovations that both science and experience recommend to fulfil
all the requirements of the hygienic, security, and comfort needs).79 The
questionable amenities of the vessels such as food, lodging, or enter-
tainment, García y García observes, surpass any possible scenario ever
experienced by the famished emigrants, who diligently comply with the
military discipline of the ship. To the accusations that the ship resembled
a prison, the Peruvian seaman enumerates the clearance points through
which the ships must pass in the jurisdictions of Hong Kong and Ma-
cao, which vested the British and Portuguese officials with the ultimate
authority over the supervision of the vessels. Besides, the coolies at the
Macao barracoons ready to board a ship headed to South America, he
affirms, were by no means abducted by his people; rather, they were sold
by Chinese brokers in a free-market operation.80
While García y García fashions the coolie passage as a lawful na-
tional enterprise, the Brazilian diplomat Henrique Carlos Ribeiro Lis-
boa (1847–1920) presents a hypothetical maritime scheme with no
legal loopholes. In his travelogue A China e os chins: Recordações de
viagem (1888; China and the Chinese: Travel memories), the Brazilian
imperial envoy to China had been very critical of the Hispanic coolie
trade, with the aim of persuading local legislators that his proposed
project for bringing Chinese labor to Brazil would not be a perpetuation
of slavery but rather a temporary migration.81 In the second part of his
report, published in 1894 as Os chins dos Tetartos (The Chinese on-
board Tetartos), Lisboa discloses his plan for the logistics of the transfer
of the workers and argues for the use of Chinese shipping companies as
the definite advantage over any previous attempt to transport Chinese
workers:
Para evitar os conhecidos abusos do transporte, seria preciso

applicar severamente rigorosos regulamentos que a pratica
tem demostrado serem de difícil e, por vezes, de impossível
execução. Effectuado o transporte em navios chineses, des-
aparecem quase completamente esses inconvenientes. Preve-
nidos como costumam estar contra os Diabos Estrangeiros e
especialmente os Cabellos Vermelhos, os emigrantes do inte-

rior pisam com mais satisfação e confiança o convez dos na-
vios cobertos pela sua bandeira e onde encontram quem falle
a sua língua, esteja ao par dos seus hábitos e mostre-lhes ca-
rinho ou sympathia. Pelo seu lado os armadores chineses já
conhecem os pontos fracos do caráter dos seus compatriotas
e não estranham, favorecem, ao contrario, certas exigências
de pouco custo que a falta desse conhecimento faz parece-
rem exhorbitantes ou descabidas aos olhos de armadores e
capitães europeus.
To avoid the infamous abuses of transport, it would be nec-

essary to severely apply rigorous regulations that in practice
have shown to be difficult and, at times, impossible to exe-
cute. If transported in Chinese ships, these inconveniences
are almost completely eliminated. Being dubious of Foreign
Devils and especially the Red Heads, as they usually are, the
emigrants from the provinces will confidently board ships
bearing their flags, where they will find others who speak
their language, share their habits, and show affection or
sympathy. For their part, as the Chinese seamen are familiar
with the weaknesses of their compatriots’ character, they are
not surprised and they favor rather, certain inexpensive de-
mands that, due to lack of knowledge, European shipowners
and captains may find exorbitant or unreasonable.82
The political move is evident: after half a century of fighting illegal hu-
man trafficking conducted in treaty ports, the reluctant Chinese author-
ities needed a very attractive deal to approve an official immigration
plan to South America. Lisboa’s suggestion of using the carriers of the
recently created China Merchants Steam Navigation Company would
secure new trade routes for the Chinese. The purpose of China Mer-
chants, established in 1872, was to capture part of the international
trade that had been virtually monopolized by foreign corporations
based in treaty ports. But Lisboa’s naive assumption of the solidarity be-
tween elite navy men and dispossessed peasants based on their common
national provenance reveals the Brazilian’s limited understanding of the
hierarchical Chinese class system, as well as his Western bias toward the
idea of national identity. That an “emigrant from the provinces” and an
educated civil official of the late Qing empire would connect affectively
62 ❘ Chapter 1
through symbols such as a flag or language is a cultural misunderstand-

ing as large as that between Western crews and apparently “exorbitant”
demands of the coolies Lisboa mentions in the passage. The Qing flag
did not signal an imagined community, and the common language used
by the imperial administration was virtually unintelligible to the illiter-
ate populations of the Pearl River Delta, where various regional dialects
are spoken. Furthermore, the premise of a triumphant national solidar-
ity collapses in the awareness that illegal emigration had been facilitated
largely thanks to Chinese brokers, who kidnapped and sold their fellow
countrymen to the European agents at the treaty ports.
Finally, the travel journal of the Colombian coolie broker Nicolás
Tanco Armero (1830–90) deliberately omits any reference to the coolie
passage. Arguably the most notorious labor agent in Spanish America,
from 1855 to 1873 Tanco Armero oversaw the buying, selling, and ex-
porting of over a hundred thousand Chinese coolies. Exiled to Cuba
in 1851, where he was hired by a Spanish trading company that dis-
patched coolie ships from the treaty port of Amoy (Xiamen) to the Ca-
ribbean, Tanco Armero left for China in 1855 and stayed there for three
years. His sojourn is recorded in a travelogue titled 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 shortly
after his return.83 As the title indicates, the book is divided into three
parts: the departure from Bogota to Europe, his impressions of China,
and finally, the return to Paris through Palestine. Organized chrono-
logically, the text combines a rich narrative of the voyage with a very
opinionated description of the Chinese people and their customs. A son
of the Colombian oligarchy, Tanco Armero’s sojourn in China is the
extended leg of the educated young man’s grand tour through Europe.
Yet, as an employee of a coolie firm, he also writes as a mercantile agent
globetrotting for profit.
In the book’s foreword, we learn that Tanco Armero goes to China
to conduct business vaguely related to Asian immigration. The pref-
ace celebrates the young man’s universalistic drive in the decision to
travel to the Far East, “without contemplating pecuniary estimations,
nor compromising his own interest,” since the Spanish company that
hired him apparently intended to replace the African slave force with
Asian cheap labor: “El señor Tanco no pensó como nosotros y aceptó
inmediatamente tan delicada comisión, sin detenerse en cálculos pecu-
niarios, sin temer comprometer sus intereses, fijándose solamente en que
la inmigración iba a destruir la esclavitud: tenía delante una cuestión
humanitaria” (Unlike us, Mr. Tanco accepted this delicate enterprise

on the spot, without delving into financial calculations and fearless of
compromising his own interest; his mind was fixed solely on the idea
that immigration would destroy slavery: he was facing a humanitarian
issue).84 Yet his six hundred pages barely mention his involvement in
the trade, using vague phrases such as “asuntos de la emigración” (em-
igration matters) or “los asuntos que me trajeron a China” (the issues
that brought me to China).85 Only once does the author explicitly state
having performed the duties of a coolie agent: “tan pronto como hube
despachado dos buques con colonos asiáticos para la isla de Cuba” (as
soon as I had dispatched two vessels with Asian settlers to the island
of Cuba).86 But that is it. The silence regarding his involvement in the
traffic of Chinese to the Americas is so loud that toward the end of the
book he refers to “los llamados coolies” (the so-called coolies), distanc-
ing himself from the affair as if his point of view were yet another mere
ethnographic observation from his travels in Asia.87
Tanco Armero’s book tells the story of a circumnavigation, of an
itinerary that begins with an exile from Bogotá to Cuba, continues in
Europe, and then ventures into Hong Kong. After that, dozens of ships
set sail across the Pacific circling the globe back to the Caribbean. But,
instead of orbiting the globe to track the coolie passage, the narrative
returns to the Mediterranean via the same routes of the Peninsular and
Oriental Steam Navigation Company transited in the outbound trip.
On the inverse itinerary through the Indian Ocean, Tanco Armero re-
ports once more on the thriving life on board the “floating cosmopolis”
that gathers colonial officials, adventurous women, and exotic charac-
ters from all parts of Asia. In the last stretch of the journey, precisely
in the crossing of the Suez Canal where Gómez Carrillo surrenders to
the Oriental luxury of steam navigation, Tanco Armero gives in to the
spleen of tourism:
Las mismas comodidades que brindan estos palacios flotan-

tes llegan a cansar, y los pocos días la vida se hace inaguan-
table: se cansa uno de ver cielo y agua, de leer, de dormir,
de comer constantemente, de beber a horas, de ver siempre
las mismas caras, y hasta se fastidia uno de sí mismo. Todo
se hace a bordo por necesidad, nada por gusto ni placer: es
que el hombre necesita respirar cierta atmósfera intelectual,
alimentar el espíritu con ideas e impresiones nuevos, y nada
de esto se consigue navegando.
64 ❘ Chapter 1
The amenities of these floating palaces get to be tiresome,

and after a few days life on board becomes unbearable: one
grows tired of staring at the sky and sea, of reading, of sleep-
ing, of eating constantly, of drinking here and there, of al-
ways seeing the same faces, and even of oneself. Onboard,
everything has a purpose, and is not done willingly or for the
sake of pleasure: men need to breathe some kind of intellec-
tual atmosphere, to nurture their spirit with ideas and new
impressions, all of which are impossible during navigation.88
Tanco Armero is fatigued at the end of the return trip from China but,
unlike the exhausted coolies after the crossing of the Pacific, what sat-
urates Tanco is the pleasure of travel. He now longs for the intellectual
and spiritual stimulation of the Biblical tourist points that he cannot
wait to visit in Palestine. This takes us back to Feinsod’s “canal zone” as
a choke point of maritime globalization. Like Gómez Carrillo’s disori-
enting threshold to the universe of forced migrations in the Pacific, the
Suez Canal in Tanco Armero’s narrative signals a revolving door that
opens onto the Far East, but immediately circles back to the cradle of
Christian civilization. It is as much a gateway to China as it is a layover
fraught with adventures that enhance the toil of his ultimate pilgrimage
to the Holy Land. When at the beginning of the trip Tanco Armero
acknowledges profit and curiosity as the motives of a trip he retrospec-
tively deems “pitiful,” he is by no means metaphorical in his way of re-
ferring to religious travel: “No teniendo en mira hasta aquí más que los
conocimientos que pudiese adquirir y las utilidades que reportarían las
grandes especulaciones que me llevaban a esas tierras, jamás me había
detenido a contemplar los riesgos de mi penosa peregrinación” (With-
out keeping anything in sight but the knowledge that I might acquire
and the earnings that might accrue from the major speculations that
took me to those lands, I had never stopped to consider the risks of my
pitiful pilgrimage).89 If Viaje de la Nueva Granada a China y de China
a Francia is the first travelogue ever published by a Latin American in
China, conceived at the peak of the coolie trade, and a rare Spanish-
language chronicle of the Opium Wars, it is at heart just another nar-
rative of a Christian journey that Colombian elites overtly encouraged
as an instrument of resistance to the liberal government’s secularization
project.90 The urge for transcendence expressed as travel fatigue—a fa-
tigue that grows during the overland route to Port Said since in 1860
the construction of the Suez Canal had only begun—becomes more
relevant if we consider that Tanco Armero would later participate in

Ferdinand de Lesseps’s attempt to construct the Panama Canal in the
1880s. Like his efforts in the infrastructure project that failed to open
the waterway connecting Pacific and Atlantic oceans, Tanco Armero’s
travelogue epitomizes the scuttling of the Chinese migrants’ archive in
the Latin American literary tradition.
The rapid expansion of fin de siècle travel infrastructure captured
in the crónica modernista would abruptly end with the start of World
War I when ocean liners were converted into troopships to ferry soldiers
back and forth between militarized ports. The global traffic of tourists,
but also of goods, mail, and migrant laborers, suddenly faced new re-
strictions imposed by belligerent states, which lasted well until the early
years of the Cold War and its renewed global networks of peaceful co-
existence. Chapter 2 frames the itineraries of Chinese artifacts to Latin
America during these convoluted decades of nationalism and war, when
knowledge about foreign cultures became a form of warfare played out
in the colleges and libraries of crumbling empires worldwide. I am inter-
ested in how the idea of world literature unfolds against this backdrop
in arguably the most cosmopolitan of Latin American authors, Jorge
Luis Borges, since his fiction and essays of this period abound with Chi-
nese philosophers, European sinologists, and chinoiserie goods. With
limited books or Chinese specialists to consult in Argentina, Borges de-
liberately misreads, misquotes, and fabricates Chinese literature. I hold
that such practice of comparative literature as a discipline forever medi-
ated by the geopolitics of Western centers of knowledge is a statement
on the potential of the edge as a site of translation of world literature.
Chapter 2
Sinology on the Edge

Borges’s Fictional Epistemology of China
The book that established Michel Foucault’s reputation as an intellec-

tual giant begins with an image of a made-up Chinese encyclopedia by
Jorge Luis Borges. In the preface to The Order of Things (1966), the
French philosopher claims that his archeology of the human sciences
was triggered by his bewilderment at the Argentine writer’s fictional
Chinese artifact: “a laughter that shattered all the familiar landmarks
of thought, breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes
with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing
things.”1 Anticipating crucial issues of poststructuralist thought, par-
ticularly Foucault’s massive revision of the empirical disciplines that
precede the modern human sciences, Borges’s “El idioma analítico de
John Wilkins” (1941; hereafter “El idioma analítico”; “The Analytical
Language of John Wilkins”) comes up with a curious Chinese text that
questions the very notion of classification. In this narrative essay Borges
observes the “ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies” of the English
scholar and bishop of Chester John Wilkins’s (1614–72) hyperrational
project for establishing a universal language.2 In doing so, he suddenly
recalls an attempt “attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese
encyclopedia called Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,”
equally perplexing in its classification because of the latter’s apparent
arbitrariness. In the book animals are categorized as
67
68 ❘ Chapter 2
(a) pertenecientes al Emperador, (b) embalsamados, (c)

amaestrados, (d) lechones, sirenas, (f) fabulosos, (g) perros
sueltos, (h) incluidos en esta clasificación, (i) que se agitan
como locos, (j) innumerables, (k) dibujados con un pincel
finísimo de pelo de camello, (l) etcétera, (m) que acaban de
romper el jarrón, (n) que de lejos parecen moscas.
(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones,

(c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f)
fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in
this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel-
hair brush, (1) etcetera, (m) having just broken the flower
vase, (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.3
The juxtaposition of creatures in such a hallucinatory order respects

no logical principle of exclusion and inclusion or rational formation
of groups, and, oddly, includes itself in the classification. Reflecting on
Borges’s whimsical series, Foucault claims that this strange taxonomy
stems not so much from the terrain of utopia as from that of hetero-
topia, the inconceivable space that undermines the very possibility for
language to describe it. Beatriz Sarlo agrees with Foucault that Borges’s
hilarious take is a critique not of some exotic cosmovision, but rather,
of any attempt to systematize the universe. In her influential Jorge Luis
Borges: A Writer on the Edge (1993), Sarlo argues that “in its hyper-
bolic form, the fake Chinese encyclopedia mimics other more rational
efforts that Western philosophers and linguists have made to explore
the mechanism through which we apprehend reality and the ways in
which we divide up the experiential continuum of time and space. All
these modes, says Borges under the cover of the Encyclopedia, are con-
ventions, because there exists no classification of the universe that is not
inconsistent and hypothetical. The reason is very simple: we don’t know
what is the Universe.”4
Despite the universalistic nature of Borges’s philosophical fiction, the
readers of “El idioma analítico” are still left to wonder about the spe-
cific choice of China as the site of the heteroclite encyclopedia, and why
this option produces such a strong rhetorical effect, best described in
Foucault’s laughter. An insatiable reader of both Western and Eastern
traditions, major and minor literatures, and philosophies and histories
from around the globe, Borges could easily have chosen to situate the
Sinology on the Edge ❘ 69
unsettling encyclopedia in any other remote setting within his colos-

sal bibliographical repertoire. Foucault thinks of China as a poetic
region whose name alone constitutes for the West a vast reservoir of
utopias: the Chinese encyclopedia from which Borges quotes and its
proposed taxonomy bring about a kind of thought without space: “in
our dreamworld, is not China precisely this privileged site of space?
In our traditional imagery, the Chinese culture is the most meticulous,
the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to temporal events, most
attached to the pure delineation of space . . . there would appear to
be, at the other extremity of the earth, a culture entirely devoted to the
ordering of space, but one that does not distribute the multiplicity of
existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to
name, speak, and think.”5 A first answer to “why China?” then would
be that a “Chinese epistemology” operates as the perfect antipode of
Western epistemology. If, as Foucault argues in The Order of Things,
the forms of representation in the West are sensitive to the epistemes of
the classical and modern eras, in China they are oblivious to any cul-
tural paradigm. In this line, when Borges displaces the encyclopedia—
the paramount epistemic artifact of modernity—to China, the tenets
that regulate the universe are symmetrically inverted, thus resulting in a
heteroclite classification.
But Borges’s disorienting textual construction of the reference to the
encyclopedia complicates the East-West dichotomy that Foucault takes
for granted. When the narrator of “El idioma analítico” claims to have
registered all the arbitrariness of the “desconocido o apócrifo enciclo-
pedista chino” (“unknown or apocryphal Chinese encyclopedist”),6 we
ought to wonder: unknown to whom? To the narrator of the essay in
Buenos Aires or to Dr. Franz Kuhn, the sinologist whom Borges indi-
cates as the informant? The reference to Kuhn is vague: there is no title
for the scholarly work that mentions this Chinese encyclopedia and,
besides, the modifier “certain Chinese encyclopedia” further blurs the
work’s identity. Although Borges uses the name of an actual sinologist
from the University of Leipzig who lived between 1884 and 1961, and
who was one of the most prolific German translators of Chinese liter-
ature of the twentieth century, the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent
Knowledge is nonexistent except in Borges’s own invention. This type
of false attribution combining erudition with imagination is recurrent in
Borges’s work. Yet it is precisely in this disorienting double textual con-
struction of the reference—an imaginary Chinese text mentioned by an
actual German sinologist quoted in an Argentine fictional essay—that
70 ❘ Chapter 2
fiction confronts the literary fact. By casting light on the mediation of

knowledge about China, the epistemological problem that preoccupies
the essay shifts from object to subject. In other words, the question is
no longer that of Chinese epistemology (albeit a timeless and mythical
one in the eyes of the West) but rather of an epistemology of China, that
is, a way of categorizing and systematizing knowledge about China.
Borges’s famous Chinese encyclopedia, I argue, opens a discussion on
world literature, humanism, and geopolitics of literary criticism at large.
My point here is that Borges’s writings of China are all about sinol-
ogy. A closer look at the numerous ways in which China comes up
throughout his work proves that Borges cares little about representa-
tions of China, the Chinese, or Chinese culture in general but is con-
cerned about the ways in which China becomes a humanistic object of
study within a disciplinary framework. Just like the eccentric encyclope-
dia, the Chinese protagonists of Borges’s fiction are textual constructs.
To name a few: a British sinologist and a Chinese professor of English
(“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” [1941; “The Garden of Fork-
ing Paths”]); the books saved from the Tartar invasions (“La muralla
y los libros” [1950; “The Wall and the Books”] and “El guardián de
los libros” [1969; “The Keeper of Books”]; a lettered pirate (“La viuda
Ching, pirata” [1936; “The Widow Ching—Pirate”]); an unapologeti-
cally exoticist French traveler in China (Un bárbaro en Asia [1969; A
Barbarian in Asia]); as well as a long list of actual Chinese philosophers,
writers, and scholars.
In this chapter I explore the writing of China in Latin America to claim
that Borges puts sinology on the edge. I argue that Borges insistently im-
plies that China, as we know it, is an artifice of an ongoing humanistic
enterprise to systematize and translate the vast archive of China into
Western terms: that is, it is an invention of philology. In the same way
that he scrutinizes any system designed to categorize the universe (the en-
cyclopedia, language, the library, etc.), Borges places at the center of his
writings of China the dynamics, politics and, most specifically, flaws of a
humanistic discipline that has insisted on making sense of China and has
inevitably fallen prey to its own misreadings. And it is precisely in those
interstices, gaps, and paradoxes that his fiction emerges. The first part
of the chapter explores the dramatic implications of putting sinology
“on the edge,” that is, putting it in a precarious position. Borges strips
sinology of its hermeneutical principles of explication and interpretation
of classical culture and, in turn, portrays its methods of superficial anal-
ysis of nontextual objects. In what is arguably his most famous short
story, “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking

Paths”), an English sinologist misreads a text and ends up murdered by
a Chinese spy; in a lesser-known story published a year later, “La pro-
longada búsqueda de Tai An” (1942; “Tai An’s Long Search”), an impris-
oned detective—described as a sinologist—solves an enigma related to a
Chinese jewel. A comparative reading of these two intriguingly parallel
stories illuminates the larger framework for the traffic of knowledge be-
tween institutional centers of Western humanism and far off areas of the
globe where the reading of foreign cultures is carried out through limited
archives, specialists, or established hermeneutical traditions.
I also understand “edge” in the geographical sense of the term. I
borrow the English translation of Beatriz Sarlo’s ideologem orilla to
describe the cosmopolitan margin of the world that Borges creates as
a privileged point of enunciation. For Borges, South America is indeed
a peripheral region, yet it is by no means a subaltern one: “Placed on
the limits between cultures, between literary genres, between languages,
Borges creates himself as the writer of the orillas, a marginal in the
center, a cosmopolitan on the edge. He entrusts literary processes and
formal procedures with the power to explore the never-ending philo-
sophical and moral questions. He constructs his originality through
quotations, copies, the rewritings of other texts, because, from the out-
set, he conceives of writing as reading, and he distrusts, from the outset,
any possibility of any literary representation of reality.”7 Along these
lines, I explore the writing of China from Latin America through the
rhetorical maneuvers by which Borges practices comparative criticism
in a cultural field seemingly ignorant of the study of China. The surpris-
ingly numerous reviews of contemporary German and English transla-
tions of Chinese classics that Borges wrote and published in the literary
magazines El Hogar, Sur, and La Nación in the late 1930s and early
1940s account for the edification of a Chinese catalog made of scattered
titles and indirect translations. Given Borges’s ignorance of Chinese lan-
guage and the lack of an institutional setting to produce scholarship
and translation of Chinese literature in Latin America, Borges invents
a critical infrastructure to practice comparative literature, and thus an-
ticipates his theories of translation and the fantastic. With this move,
he not only redefines the hermeneutical principles of comparative phi-
lology but also enacts, specifically, the criollo style of criticism that he
advocates for in Latin America in lieu of Romance philology, which
leads to a heated confrontation with the Hispanist intelligentsia exiled
in Buenos Aires since the Spanish Civil War.
72 ❘ Chapter 2
A ssassin ation o f t he Si no l ogi st
“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” dramatizes a fatal conversation

between a Chinese character and an English sinologist. Set in England
during World War I, the story unfolds as a testimony that revisits the
bellicose events of July 1916 as described in History of World War I
(1930) by the English historian B. H. Liddell Hart. We read that Yu
Tsun, a Chinese professor of English working as a spy for the Germans,
must communicate the secret location of a new artillery park before
being captured by the Irish Captain Richard Madden. He finds in the
telephone book “el nombre de la única persona capaz de transmitir la
noticia” (“the name of the only person capable of transmitting the mes-
sage”) and sets out to find him in a suburb of Fenton, in Staffordshire.8
He arrives at the house of Stephen Albert, a modest man who confuses
him with the Chinese consul and welcomes him in without hesitation.
Albert happens to be a sinologist and, coincidentally, is an expert on
the work of Yu Tsun’s ancestor, Ts’ui Pên, a famous civil servant who
renounced his post as governor of Yunnan Province to undertake two
tasks: to write a vast and intricate novel and to construct an equally
vast and intricate labyrinth. Albert has deciphered the enigma that Ts’ui
Pên’s labyrinth and novel are a single entity and keeps Ts’ui Pên’s origi-
nal manuscripts in his house. After an exchange about the fate of these
papers that traveled from China to Oxford, Yu Tsun shoots and kills
Albert. We finally learn that Yu Tsun has succeeded in conveying his
message: through the press coverage of the sinologist’s assassination,
Yu Tsun’s German superiors learn that the name of the artillery park is
in the town of Albert, in the Somme, and thereby attack it. Yu Tsun is
eventually arrested by Madden and sentenced to death; this testimony
reveals his last words.
How ironic is it that an erudite philologist, refined translator, and
interpreter of complex texts is murdered as the result of ill-fated linguis-
tic correspondence between his name and a topographical reference?
Even more ironic is that he is murdered by a Chinese person, who, in
addition, happens to be related by kin to his most distinguished object
of study. Sylvia Molloy understands Albert’s death in light of Borges’s
characters who are doomed by bad readings, that is, readings that have
usually been carried out reductively and inefficiently: Stephen Albert
is so confident of his successful reading of Ts’ui Pên’s labyrinth that
he disregards the exact moment and nature of the act of reading: “a
confrontation, forever in the present, with a mobile text based on other
mobile texts, never congealing.”9 Turning his back to Yu Tsun, Albert

reduces his careful deciphering of Ts’ui Pên’s labyrinth to only one of its
many possible situations, which he unwittingly provokes and then fixes
with his own death. According to Molloy, “death, in Borges, is a form
of irony. Cutting reductive readings short by putting an end, effectively,
to the reader, Borges criticizes the latter’s excessive respect for texts
wrongly considered quiescent. Death highlights a misguided fidelity
that is, after all, a form of readerly inattention.”10 The image of Albert
collapsing with his back turned to Yu Tsun and with Ts’ui Pên’s letter
in hand illustrates the hermeneutical preference for the reading object
rather than the reading action or, in Molloy’s words, the sinologist’s
“disregard for the exact moment and nature of the act of reading.”11
Just as the protagonist of “La busca de Averroes” (1949; Averroes’s
search) is unable to translate the word “theater” as he watches from
his window a group of children enacting a play, Stephen Albert fails to
read that the Chinese stranger in front of him is also writing something:
his own name. Yu Tsun is after all a Chinese writer, displaced from his
homeland and using a foreign language to produce a nonverbal text. Al-
bert’s fascination with the protocols of his discipline prevents him from
seeing this and dooms him.
Fascination is at the core of the West’s relation to China. The initial
European images of China reflect the enthrallment and fear of a com-
peting universalistic paradigm. D. E. Mungello calls “proto-sinologists”
the first generation of European savants who were overwhelmed by the
seventeenth-century Jesuit reports from Cathay, a mythical land that
they located in an alternative temporality and spatiality, while striving
to fit it into their universal scheme of the world.12 As I will discuss in
depth in chapter 4, language was a crucial object of fascination. Follow-
ing the rise of vernaculars in Europe and the parallel eager search for
an enduring lingua franca that would replace Latin, many philosophers
perceived Chinese as a model language whose ideographic principles
transcended regional and dialectical variations. This perception made
Chinese a much-discussed candidate in the search for a universal lan-
guage capable of recapturing the simplicity and clarity thought to have
been lost with the Biblical primitive language. Early European sinology
was concerned with classical texts, approaching them through explica-
tion and translation: any of the Chinese literati would have insisted that
the classics contained the fundamental principles on which the Chinese
system had always rested and operated. This philosophical argument
suited, by a different token, the Orientalist categorization of non-
74 ❘ Chapter 2
European cultures in the nineteenth century. In this view, rather than

partaking of the teleology of progress, China was thought to have a hi-
erarchical organization, immune from change and exempt from history.
But, unlike the expanding nineteenth-century European Orientalism,
which began to study the ancient scriptures of Mediterranean tradi-
tions now in the orbit of European empires, sinology remained largely
outside colonial interference and thus skirted its discursive authority.
As Edward Said claims about the strategic uses of philology for colo-
nial purposes, “to reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant
ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that
reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the
way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later
do with the Orient.”13 Thanks to China’s semicolonial status and the
limited European interference in its local governments, sinology fur-
ther strengthened the notion of China as a conceptual object isolated in
time and space, mediated by remote textual fragments and coded in an
opaque language.14
If Albert is a bad reader, it is because he fails to interpret Yu Tsun
not only as a writer but also as an individual with historical agency.
Throughout their conversation, Albert assumes he is talking to the
Chinese consul Hsi P’êng and not to Yu Tsun, let alone to a German
spy. Wartime rivalries unfold in the academic arena: Albert, a British
sinologist, and Yu Tsun, a former Chinese professor of English at the
Hochschule at Qingdao, enact a confrontation where knowledge about
a foreign culture becomes a strategic asset in a global conflict. Apart
from scholarly study, Albert discloses his connection to China through
imperial networks: “Algo de sacerdote había en él y también de ma-
rino; después me refirió que había sido misionero en Tientsin antes de
aspirar a sinólogo” (“There was something of a priest in him, and also
of a sailor. He told me later that he had been a missionary in Tien-
tsin before aspiring to become a sinologist”).15 Yu Tsun also leverages
the European colonial experience in China by putting his knowledge
of Britain to the service of the Germans during World War I. In Out
of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in
Borges (1993), Daniel Balderston suggests that it is reasonable to think
that Yu Tsun was willing to be sent on a new assignment—as a spy in
England—out of loyalty to the colonial masters who had trained and
employed him before the German possessions in Qingdao were seized
by the Japanese (who in World War I were allied with the British and
French).16 The opposite also can be argued since Yu Tsun is well aware
of the psychodynamics of colonialism: “No lo hice por Alemania, no.

Nada me importa un país bárbaro, que me ha obligado a la abyección
de ser un espía . . . Lo hice, porque yo sentía que el Jefe tenía en poco
a los de mi raza—a los innumerables antepasados que confluyen en
mí. Yo quería probarle que un amarillo podía salvar a sus ejércitos”
(“I did not do it for Germany, no. That barbarous country, which has
forced me into the abject position of being a spy, matters nothing to
me. . . . I did it because I felt that the chief looked down on those of
my race—on the innumerable ancestors who converge in me. I wanted
to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies”).17 Calling
Germany a “barbarous” country does not necessarily suggest a postco-
lonial inversion of power where the formerly colonized sees himself as
the civilized and gazes on the Other as the savage. Instead, this label ex-
presses a long-dated sinocentric assumption of China’s supremacy that
distinguished “civilized” Chinese from foreign “barbarians.” According
to Frank Dikötter, the outpouring of patriotic agitation after China’s de-
feat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 yielded to reformist ideas about
the survival of China as a racial unit and sovereign state in the face of
foreign aggression. This marked a transfer of China’s sense of identity
stemming from a unity based on culture, traditionally opposed to vari-
ous barbarians that could eventually be annihilated through the process
of absorption, to a unity based on race, faced with aggressive alien races
in an international context of the struggle for survival.18 Albert, an er-
udite in Chinese history, acknowledges this perception, and the ensuing
denomination, when talking with Yu Tsun: “A mí, bárbaro inglés, me
ha sido deparado revelar ese misterio diáfano” (“To me, a barbarous
Englishman, has been entrusted the revelation of this diaphanous mys-
tery”).19 Yet, with such denomination, Borges goes well beyond the Chi-
nese genealogy of the term “barbarous” and incorporates modernism’s
take on exoticism, which he draws from Henri Michaux’s Un barbare
en Asie (1933; A Barbarian in Asia), a travel journal that he translated
while he was writing “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” and which
came out in Editorial Sur in 1941. Michaux’s provocative title inverts
the Orientalist dichotomy of the European traveler in Asia, in line with
Victor Segalen’s (1878–1919) Essai sur l’exotisme. Une estétique du
divers (Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetic of Diversity) and the avant-
garde fascination with primitivism. By claiming a “barbarian” place of
enunciation, Michaux not only questions the superiority of the West but
also acknowledges that observation becomes unusual, if not inexplica-
ble, through such a lens. Un barbare en Asie shifts repeatedly from the
76 ❘ Chapter 2
banal to the epic and jumps to sweeping conclusions, as in the following

note about the Japanese: “A people, in fact, devoid of wisdom, simplic-
ity and depth, over-serious, though fond of toys and novelties, not easily
amused, ambitious, superficial, and obviously doomed by our evils and
civilization.”20 Michaux’s exoticism is a deliberate exercise of modernist
formalism that shows little concern for, and even less knowledge about,
the cultures from which it extracts aesthetic resources.21
The C hin oise r i e De t e c t i v e
Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (1942; Six Problems for Don
Isidro Parodi), one of the collections of detective fiction that Borges
wrote in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–99) under the
heteronym Honorio Bustos Domecq, includes a short story that also
dramatizes a conversation between a Chinese character and a specialist
in Chinese cultures. The expert in “La prolongada búsqueda de Tai An”
is identified as a sinologist: “un sinólogo como usted, un europeo entre
teteras” (“a sinologist, which you are; a European surrounded by the
tinkle of teacups”), although the parodic epithet designates him as a
Western consumer of porcelain.22 The creation of a chinoiserie philol-
ogist responds to Borges’s use of parody as a local and negative form
of writing, an elusive strategy that uses grandiloquent and baroque
registers to tackle the immediately referential. Through the exoticist
treatment of China, Borges lays bare the representative aesthetics of
nationalism by making use of its own literary procedures: local color,
dialogism, and realism.
The story begins with the visit of Shu T’ung, the cultural attaché at
the Chinese embassy, to the cell of Isidro Parodi, a former barber now
a jailbird detective. Fully relying on Parodi’s fame as a crime investi-
gator, Shu T’ung contacts him to solve the mystery of “the talisman of
the goddess,” which had disappeared in Yunnan Province twenty years
earlier and is said to have resurfaced in Buenos Aires. We learn through
his flamboyant words and those of Parodi’s colleague Gervasio Monte-
negro that the magician Tai An was sent from China to rescue the jewel;
that Tai An partnered with the Jewish cabinetmaker Nemirovsky and
then established a relationship with Madame Hsin; and that the three
hosted another Chinese man called Fang She, whom Tai An suspects to
be the thief of the jewel. An incident of arson sparks their enmity and
the eventual murder of Tai An. The second part of the story introduces
the testimony of Fang She, who visits Parodi in his cell, where together
they disclose the actual events surrounding the enigma. It turns out that
Fang She is the actual emissary sent in search of the jewel and that he
has successfully returned it to China hidden in Tai An’s corpse.
Characters shift positions in the story: the alleged detective becomes
the victim and the assumed criminal happens to be the actual detective.
As Gervasio Montenegro states in the pompous foreword to the collec-
tion, “La prolongada búsqueda de Tai An” presents “a new and original
treatment of the classic problem of the hidden object [that] Poe inau-
gurates with ‘The Purloined Letter.’”23 Following in the tracks of Mon-
tenegro’s statement, in The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the
Analytic Detective Story (1994), John Irwin studies Borges’s detective
stories that employ this stratagem of shifting the characters’ positions.
Irwin points out a particular moment in “La prolongada búsqueda de
Tai An” that complicates the object of Borges’s parody. The scene where
Tai An, Madame Hsin, Nemirovsky, and Fang She disperse into various
locations that form “an interesting shape on the map of Buenos Aires,
not unlike that of a triangle” evidently evokes the three to four oscilla-
tions governing the locations of the murders in Borges’s famous story
“La muerte y la brújula” (1944; “Death and the Compass”). Irwin sug-
gests that Borges and Bioy do not parody Poe’s original hidden-object
problem but rather duplicate the structure of “The Purloined Letter”
in their own story, thereby parodying the notion that it is possible to
produce an original treatment of this classic problem.24 I would like to
consider Irwin’s hypothesis on the shifting positions of characters in
“La prolongada búsqueda de Tai An” as Borges’s own parody of “El
jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”. I seek not to underline the ques-
tion of originality but rather to explore the epistemological shifts that
occur when the dramatic action changes locales. I suggest that Borges
parodies the investigative protocols of philology and detective fiction by
shifting characters between these two stories. “La prolongada búsqueda
de Tai An” is, in fact, one of the infinite forkings of “El jardín de sen-
deros que se bifurcan”:
En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta

con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras; en
la del casi inextricable Ts’ui Pên, opta—simultáneamente—
por todas. Crea, así, diversos porvenires, diversos tiempos,
que también, proliferan y se bifurcan. De ahí las contra-
dicciones de la novela. Fang, digamos, tiene un secreto; un
78 ❘ Chapter 2
desconocido llama a su puerta; Fang resuelve matarlo. Na-

turalmente, hay varios desenlaces posibles: Fang puede ma-
tar al intruso, el intruso puede matar a Fang, ambos pueden
salvarse, ambos pueden morir, etcétera. En la obra de Ts’ui
Pên, todos los desenlaces ocurren; cada uno es el punto de
partida de otras bifurcaciones. Alguna vez, los senderos de
ese laberinto convergen; por ejemplo, usted llega a esta casa,
pero en uno de los pasados posibles usted es mi enemigo, en
otro mi amigo.
In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with

several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the oth-
ers; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses—simultaneously—
all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse
times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then,
is the explanation of the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us
say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves
to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes:
Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they
both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work
of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the
point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths
of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this
house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in
another, my friend. (my emphasis)25
To illustrate Ts’ui Pên’s mazelike novel, in “El jardín de senderos que

se bifurcan” Albert makes up an impromptu story, which surprisingly
turns out to describe the exact same characters and subplot of “La pro-
longada búsqueda de Tai An”: “Fang [Fang She] has a secret [he is the
real emissary sent for the jewel]; a stranger [Tai An] calls at his door [to
steal the jewel]; Fang resolves to kill him.” The reappearance of char-
acters in Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi is a distinctive feature
of this collection. But since a minor character from Borges’s most im-
portant short story becomes the protagonist of a parodic piece written
almost simultaneously warrants analysis. “Who is the intruder?” “Who
kills whom?” “Who escapes?” wonder both Albert in his metanarra-
tive and Parodi throughout the investigation of the crime. In Ts’ui Pên’s
novel all these possible situations occur at the same time, yet in Parodi’s
story the apparent simultaneity of these actions is disruptive and re-
quires a detective to reconstruct the linear action and single resolution.

In Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi, Borges parodies his own phil-
osophical inquiry about the Leibnizian ordering of the world previously
explored in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” by subjecting it to
the teleological narrative of detective fiction.
In addition to the possible fictional convergences of the labyrinth
put forward by Albert in the above excerpt, Borges comes up with yet
another potential chronotope for Albert and Yu Tsun: he displaces their
conversation eleven years later to a city in Latin America. This second
forking of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” unfolds through dif-
ferent actors from separate contexts enacting a strikingly similar plot.
Both stories have at the center of the narrative a Western sinologist
(Albert/Parodi) who assists a Chinese consul (Yu T’sun/Shu T’ung) in
solving an enigma from Yunnan Province, which involves a third—
savant—Chinese character (Ts’ui P’ên/Tai An). While the former en-
counter takes place in England in 1916, the latter is set in Buenos Aires
in 1927. Also, the cosmopolitan humanist/scholar mutates into an im-
prisoned amateur detective, and the Chinese consul no longer represents
the classical literary culture of his lineage but rather the shiny materi-
ality of Chinese goods. On the edge, the sinologist becomes a an expert
on Chinese export artifacts.26
Chapter 1 of this book discussed chinoiserie as a transformative trend
in the arts that not only shuffled exotic artifacts across geographies but
also elevated commodities to the status of art. David Porter understands
chinoiserie as an epistemological reaction to the traditional European
gaze on China. In Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern
Europe (2001), Porter claims that the idea of China changed in the eyes
of the Europeans in the early seventeenth century because of various
factors: modern commercial dynamics that escalated the circulation of
“exotic” consumer goods in Europe, a new rationalistic paradigm, and
an enlightened sense of self-assurance that defined the matrix of cultural
fantasies and desires of a vast and materialistic audience.27 It was no
longer a small clerical elite who sought to understand China with phil-
osophical angst, but instead sizable numbers of fashion-conscious col-
lectors who began to approach the Chinese with light-hearted pleasure.
Also the second wave of interest in things Chinese reversed the tropes
and assumptions that had largely defined European ideas of China in
the preceding century. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) had gazed on China
as a cultural terrain to be mapped out and mastered through heroic
hermeneutics, but the seventeenth-century collectors gaily surrendered
80 ❘ Chapter 2
to illegibility: chinoiserie was a glamorization of the unknown and the

unknowable for its own sake. The second wave of interest’s focus also
differed: Jesuits had carried out the archaeological task of excavating
the classical Chinese canon in search of primitive origins and the struc-
ture of Confucianism, while the consumers of the second wave of chi-
noiserie celebrated the superficial, glossy sheen of the porcelain vase.
Porter concludes that chinoiserie emerged as a bold celebration of dis-
order and meaninglessness, artifice and profusion; an exuberant surren-
der to all that remained unassimilated by rational science and classical
symmetries. Thus chinoiserie defied the very preconditions of legitimate
representation.
The circulation of exotic consumer goods from China is abundant in
“La prolongada búsqueda de Tai An.” Apart from the missing talisman
of the goddess, the several narrators of the story mention a myriad of
imported artifacts such as teacups, tea leaves, wardrobes, screens, exotic
dragons, thousand-year-old lacquers, infinite bamboo lamps, an apocry-
phal Song dynasty vase, shelves of classical books, a straw hat, an um-
brella, marble, jade, silk, sandalwood, ivory, and porcelain. In addition,
the rhetoric of chinoiserie is embedded in the characters’ own language.
Shu T’ung exaggerates the courteous Chinese literary convention of us-
ing aphorisms and metaphors in what appear to be literal translations
of Chinese proverbs, with an exaggerated amount of irrelevant informa-
tion concealed by the verisimilar effect of transliteration. Two examples
illustrate this hilarious speech:
Esperar que la elocuencia y la información hablen por mi

boca es como esperar que la oruga hable con la mesura
del dromedario, o siquiera con la variedad de una jaula de
grillos labrada en cartón y exornada con los doce matices
razonables.
To expect eloquence and information from my mouth is

to expect the caterpillar to speak with the composure of
the dromedary or even with the rage of crickets in a cage
wrought of cardboard and painted in the twelve prescribed
colors.28
En verdad, si para calcular el valor de un incalculable gabán

de piel de nutria con ribetes de morsa, el juez más reputado
se atiene al número de polillas que lo recorren, así también
la solidez de un hombre se estima por el exacto número de

pordioseros que lo devoran.
In fact, if to assess the value of a priceless mink coat trimmed

with sealskin the greatest expert takes into account the num-
ber of moths that dwell therein, so too a man’s loneliness
is assessed by the exact number of beggars who feed him.29
Just like the heteroclite Chinese encyclopedia, the unexpected juxtaposi-

tion of Chinese elements in Shu T’ung’s speech makes the reader laugh.
Gervasio Montenegro is aware of the seductive flamboyance of such
style: “Apuesto que el doctor ha condimentado su narración con todo
ese misterio de Oriente, que es la marca de fuego de sus interesantes
monosílabos y hasta de su color y aspecto. Lejos de mí la sombra de
una censura al lenguaje bíblico, grávido de sermones y de parábolas: me
atrevo, sin embargo, a sospechar que usted preferirá mi compte rendu—
todo nervio, músculo y osatura—a las adiposas metáforas de mi cliente”
(“I’ll wager that the doctor has spiced up his story with Oriental mys-
tery, which is the hallmark both of his interesting monosyllables and his
color and appearance. Far be it from me to censure him with biblical
language, full of sermons and parables. I suspect, however, that you
would rather listen to my compte rendu—all nerve, muscle, and bone—
that to my client’s ponderous metaphors”).30 Borges openly borrows
the parodical Chinese orality from the humorous English writer Ernest
Bramah (1868–1942), to whom the story is dedicated.31 In a short biog-
raphy published in the magazine El Hogar in 1938, Borges reflects on
Bramah’s humorous English translations and tries them out in Spanish
himself: “Los libros de Bramah son de naturaleza paródica: fingen ser
traducciones del chino, y su desaforada perfección logró en 1922 un
elogio incondicional de Hilaire Belloc. Traduzco un par de apotegmas:
‘El que aspira a cenar con el vampiro, debe aportar su carne’; ‘Una
frugal fuente de olivas sazonadas con miel es preferible al más apara-
toso pastel de lenguas de cachorro traído en cofres milenarios de laca y
servido a otras personas’” (“Bramah’s books are parodic in nature: they
pass themselves off as translations from Chinese, and their boundless
perfection achieved the unconditional praise of Hilaire Belloc in 1922.
Here are two of his apothegms: ‘He who aspires to dine with the vam-
pire, must bring his own meat’; ‘A frugal dish of olives seasoned with
honey is preferable to the most resplendent pie of puppy tongues pre-
sented on thousand-year-old lacquered trays served to other people’”).32
82 ❘ Chapter 2
Montenegro understands Shu T’ung’s speech in classic Orientalist

terms: it is mysterious, seductive, and colorful. His attention is focused
on the sonic effect of the language rather than on its meaning. His
own fantasies of Chinese discourse determine his perception: he re-
fers to Shu T’ung’s “interesting monosyllables” as if his interlocutor
were speaking in Chinese and not in Spanish, which is the shared lan-
guage of the characters in the story. Montenegro claims that he will
also employ a similarly material approach to language—“my compte
rendu—all nerve, muscle, and bone”—and avoid the philosophical dis-
course of the Chinese, which he translates in Christian terms: “Biblical
language, full of sermons and parables.” Language, understood as a
cultural system to be analyzed by the sinologist-detective, is defined by
its sheer exteriority and its visible particularity. In this respect China
is constructed through a polyphonic narration that simultaneously
combines a parodic saturation of particular traits of the culture (Shu
T’ung) and a light-hearted Orientalist approach that blurs any specific
Chinese particularity and transforms China into a generic Oriental cul-
ture (Montenegro). Even if they differ in the product, both approaches
exploit local color in their portrayal of cultural difference. Vehement
critics of such particularistic aesthetic, Borges and Bioy project in these
characters the literary vices of their Argentine nationalist contemporar-
ies. Gonzalo Aguilar underlines the relevance of the local and negative
elements in the collection:
Local, porque en obras tan preocupadas por construirse en

la órbita de una literatura cosmopolita y de espacios imagi-
narios, con Bustos Domecq crean al autor provinciano que
exhibe todos los vicios del escritor nacional kitsch, que vive
de un sueldo del Estado y lo celebra con un estilo vehemente
y exaltado: Bustos Domecq, ser imaginario, es un juguete
de las determinaciones de contexto a las que Borges y Bioy,
como escritores de ficciones, intentan escapar. Y negativa,
porque aquellos valores que invocan en sus textos firmados
aparecen aquí invertidos, desplazados y como mirados en
uno de los espejos de ferias que deforman los cuerpos de los
visitantes. Si ya a principios de los años cuarenta, Borges y
Bioy se habían inclinado por una escritura tersa y sobria,
Bustos Domecq practica con desenfado los bucles de la or-
namentación y la proliferación barroca.
Local, because in texts so concerned with defining them-

selves within the orbit of a cosmopolitan literature and
imaginary spaces, manage to produce in the figure of Bustos
Domecq the provincial author who exhibits all the vices of
the kitsch nationalist writer, who lives off of the state and
celebrates it blatantly: Bustos Domecq, an imaginary being,
is a puppet of the contextual determinations that Borges
and Bioy, as fiction writers, seek to escape. And negative,
because those values invoked in their authored texts are here
inverted, displaced, and seen as through those mirrors that
distort the images of the visitors. If at the beginning of the
1940s, Borges and Bioy had opted for a smooth and sober
style, Bustos Domecq unleashes the twists of ornamentation
and baroque proliferation.33
Secluded in prison, the discourse of those who visit Parodi in jail be-
comes the sole resource for Parodi’s Chinese investigation. Unlike
Stephen Albert’s minute—yet fatal—exegesis of literary texts, Parodi
successfully reconstructs the Chinese enigma by listening attentively to
the polyphonic exoticist oral versions that give shape to his object of
study.
B or g es a n d Wo r l d L i t e r at ur e
Both Albert and Parodi are bad readers of foreign texts. Now what is it
that, for Borges, makes one a good reader of a foreign text? Right from
his first collection of fiction, Historia universal de la infamia (1935;
Universal History of Infamy), Borges provides a formula on how to
relate to foreign literatures. He comes up with six short versions that
rewrite existing European versions of Oriental fictions, biographies of
US American bandits and gunmen, almost insignificant episodes con-
cerning Chinese pirates, false Persian prophets, and Japanese warlords.
Beatriz Sarlo notes that within Western culture and its versions of the
Orient, Borges goes in search of marginal stories, alien to the great lit-
erary tradition and which, in some cases, reveal his taste for the detec-
tive genre or his devotion to adventure novels: “his sources are minor
or little-known books (except Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain)
which he reworks with the freedom of a marginal who knows he is writ-
84 ❘ Chapter 2
ing in the margins.”34 For Borges, there is no such thing as local litera-
tures or world literatures, but just literature, a universal category that
crosses the boundaries of nationalist ideologies. He hints to this idea in
his “Kafka y sus precursores” (1951; “Kafka and His Precursors”) by
stating that a writer does not automatically assume previous authors
from his national lineage as precursors, but instead creates his own. To
illustrate this point he claims to recognize Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924)
voice, habits, and gestures in texts from different geographies and ep-
ochs such as those by Aristotle (384–322 bce), Han Yu (768–824), and
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55). If Borges can do this, it is not because
Kafka deliberately ignored his Czech literary predecessors, but rather
because Borges is oblivious of them and can only interpret Kafka in
light of his own references.
In “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (1951; “The Argentine Writer
and Tradition”), written as a lecture in 1951 and published in 1953,
Borges takes this idea further when he suggests that the Argentine writer
has additional advantages in their way of relating to foreign literary
traditions. Similarly to Jews or the Irish, Argentines operate simultane-
ously in and out of their culture without feeling any special devotion to
it. This, for Borges, is the only possible way to innovate within Western
culture:
Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, esta-

mos en una situación análoga; podemos manejar todos los
temas europeos, manejarlos sin supersticiones, con una irre-
verencia que puede tener, y ya tiene consecuencias afortuna-
das . . . Por eso repito que no debemos temer y que debemos
pensar que nuestro patrimonio es el universo; ensayar todos
los temas, y no podemos concretarnos a lo argentino para
ser argentinos: porque o ser argentino es una fatalidad, y en
ese caso lo seremos de cualquier modo, o ser argentino es
una mera afectación, una máscara.
I believe Argentines, and South Americans in general, are

in an analogous situation; we can take on all the European
subjects, take them [on] without superstition and with an
irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate
consequences. . . . Therefore I repeat that we must not be
afraid: we must believe that the universe is our birthright
and try out every subject; we cannot confine ourselves to
what is Argentine in order to be Argentine, in which case we

will be Argentine whatever we do, or being Argentine is a
mere affectation, a mask.35
In this light, a peripheral writer relates to foreign traditions with a

rhetorically productive irreverence. Beatriz Sarlo’s ideologem “edge”
describes this locality that operates as a central premise of Borges’s lit-
erature: “a tension which runs through Borges’s work and defines it: a
game on the edge of various cultures, which touches on the borders, in
a space that Borges would call las orillas. In this way a writer emerges
who has two sides, who is, at once, both cosmopolitan and national.”36
The edge decenters the locality of the Argentine writer, and by extension
the South American writer too. In a similar metonymic gesture, Borges’s
claim about a writer’s patrimony equates the European tradition (Eu-
ropean themes) with the West (Western culture) and the universe as a
whole:
¿Cuál es la tradición argentina? Creo que nuestra tradición

es toda la cultura occidental, y creo también que tenemos
derecho a esta tradición, mayor que el que pueden tener los
habitantes de una u otra nación occidental.
What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer

this question easily and that there is no problem here. I be-
lieve our tradition is all of Western culture, and I also believe
we have a right to this tradition, greater than that which the
inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have.37
If the West is tantamount to the universe, we are left to wonder then,

what does this seminal essay on the ontological privilege of the edge as
the locality from which to write a cosmopolitan literature have to say
about the relation of the edge to non-Western traditions? Does the ir-
reverence suggested in Borges’s essay also apply to any cultural tradition
beyond the West? How does the edge operate as a locality from which
to read other edges, or, in the case of China, from which to read other
non-Western centers?
The surprisingly numerous reviews of Chinese literature published in
the literary magazines El Hogar and Sur as well as in the newspaper La
Nación between 1937 and 1942 account for the singular canon of sinol-
ogy that Borges assembles on the edge. Borges delimits a contingent
86 ❘ Chapter 2
corpus of Chinese literature, translates these works without the origi-

nals, and capitalizes on the constraints of the literary market to circulate
them. If we understand world literature in dynamic terms, “not an in-
finite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and
of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies
of material, available for reading established classics and new discover-
ies alike,” then I argue that Borges’s sinology is a metaliterary exercise
of World Literature, which postulates indiscipline and translatability
as a method.38 His reviews of Chinese literature explore and fictional-
ize the actual and potential forms of circulation of literature between
distant traditions. Given Borges’s ignorance of the Chinese language
and the lack of an institutional framework to produce scholarship and
translation of Chinese literature in Argentina, Borges is a distant reader
who relies on the work of foreign sinologists. Also, because of the cen-
tral place that he occupies in the Argentine cultural field in the 1940s
and the privilege that his own locality grants him in reading foreign
literatures, he circulates Chinese literature through fictional mediations.
Borges reviewed foreign literatures for various publications through-
out his life, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. The most important
venue for these was Sur, the literary magazine founded by the Ar-
gentine writer and patron of the arts Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979),
printed regularly between 1931 and 1970, and irregularly thereafter
“as an elegant fusion of fiction, poetry, philosophy, plastic arts, history
and social commentary.”39 Arguably the most important Latin Amer-
ican literary publication of the twentieth century, its pages were the
Spanish-language center of cultural debates for the Latin American,
North American, and European intellectuals who collaborated consis-
tently in it. Borges joined the editorial board of Sur at its inception
and there published the first versions of his most celebrated pieces of
fiction, hundreds of reviews, and his contributions to crucial literary
debates. From 1936 to 1939, Borges also served as director of the
section “Foreign Books and Authors” for the women’s magazine El
Hogar, where he published essays, reviews of literary and theoretical
works, and the later renowned “synthetic biographies,” short intellec-
tual genealogies of writers from around the world. Despite its generally
light consumption, El Hogar attained strong literary quality over the
years and included as collaborators central figures of the Argentine
intellectual field, such as Roberto Arlt (1900–1942), Ezequiel Martínez
Estrada (1895–1964), and Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963).
These reviews are an invaluable source to reflect on Borges’s own exer-
cises in literary criticism and his formulation of the precursors that will
inform his mature work.
A Person a l A nt h ol ogy
Among the many foreign texts that Borges reviewed for La Nación,
Sur, and El Hogar, during the period from 1937 to 1942 he penned
eight reviews of recent translations of Chinese classical works (table 1).
The reviews cover various genres and time periods and sample canon-
ical works of Chinese ancient and premodern literature translated into
German and English. There is an evident preference for narrative in the
choice to review three of the “Four Great Classical Novels” (Dream of
the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and Journey to the West/Monkey) and
the erotic narrative The Plum in the Golden Vase.40 Regarding poetry,
he includes the oldest collection of poetry (Book of Songs) and two an-
thologies of popular songs and fables (The Dragon Book and Chinese
Folk Tales and Fairy Tales). Lastly, there is a comment on a collection
of extracts of the philosophers Zhuangzi, Mengzi, and Han Feizi (Three
Ways of Thought in Ancient China).
At first glance, eight reviews on Chinese literature may appear a
rather meager figure since, in total, Borges wrote around one thousand
critical texts on literature from all latitudes and time periods. Yet, con-
sidering the almost invisible presence of Chinese literature in Argentina
in the 1930s, this number becomes relevant in significant ways. At that
time, no infrastructure existed for the study of Chinese culture in Argen-
tina. The pioneers in Asian Studies were amateur critics of comparative
religions who started publishing about Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam
in the late 1920s. But in the 1960s specialized Chinese Studies programs
took shape with the establishment of the Escuela de Estudios Orientales
and the Instituto Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Comparadas Ori-
ente y Occidente.41 Furthermore, at the time when Borges was writing
his reviews, Chinese translations into Spanish were scant since, with the
rare exceptions of individual figures like Marcela de Juan (1905–81)
who could translate directly from Chinese sources, sinology as an aca-
demic discipline had not developed in Spain as it had in the rest of Eu-
rope in the mid-nineteenth century.42 Because of this, the practice field
for translating Chinese literature into Spanish (mainly from prior trans-
lations) developed insufficiently in the larger Spanish-American market.
The limited circulation of Chinese literature in Argentina is noteworthy
88 ❘ Chapter 2
Table 1. Jorge Luis Borges’s reviews of translations of Chinese literature, 1937–42

Borges’s review European translation Original Chinese
reviewed source
“El sueño del aposento Franz Kuhn, Der Traum der Cao Xueqin, Dream
rojo, de Tsao Hsue rotten Kammer (Leipzig: of the Red Chamber
Kin,” El Hogar 1466, Insel-Verlag, 1932)* (Hongloumeng),
November 19, 1937 eighteenth century
“Chinese Fairy Tales Wolfram Eberhard, Chinese Various Chinese
and Folk Tales, Fairy Tales and Folk Tales fairy tales and folk
traducidos por Wolfram (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft tales
Eberhard,” El Hogar Library Editions, 1937)*
1477, February 4, 1938
“Die Raueber vom Franz Kuhn, Die Räuber: Shi Nai’an,
Liang Schan Moor, de Einer alten Chinesischen Water Margin
Shi Nai An,” El Hogar Ausgabe (Leipzig: Im Insel (Shuihuzhuan),
1503, August 5, 1938 Verlag, 1934)* fourteenth century
“Una versión de los Arthur Waley, The Book The Book of Songs
cantares más antiguos of Songs (London: Allen & (Shijing), tenth to
del mundo,” El Hogar Unwin, 1937)* seventh centuries
1515, October 28, 1938 bce
“Un museo de literatura Dora E. Edwards, The Excerpts of prose
oriental,” El Hogar Dragon Book (London: W. and poetry from
1544, May 19, 1939 Hodge, 1938)* different periods of
Chinese literature
“Clement Egerton, Clement Egerton, The Lanling Xiaoxiao
The Golden Lotus, Golden Lotus; A Translation Sheng, The Golden
Routledge,” Sur 60, from the Chinese Original Lotus / The Plum
September 1939 of the Novel, Chin p‘ing in the Golden
mei (London: G. Routledge, Vase (Jinpingmei),
1939) seventeenth century
Franz Kuhn, Kin ping meh
oder die abenteuerliche
Geschichte von Hsi Men
und seinen sechs Frauen
(Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1931)
“Arthur Waley: Three Arthur Waley, Three Ways Fragments of
Ways of Thought in of Thought in Ancient Zhuangzi, Mengzi,
Ancient China, Allen China (London: G. Allen & and Han Feizi, third
and Unwin,” Sur 71, Unwin, 1939) to fourth century
August 1940 bce
“Sobre una alegoría Arthur Waley, Monkey Wu Cheng’en,
china,” La Nación, (London: G. Allen & Monkey/Journey to
October 25, 1942 Unwin, 1942)* the West (Xiyouji),
sixteenth century
*Citations reconstructed by author, not provided in the review.
for other reasons, which have to do with the loosely articulated Chinese
immigrant population of the time. The trajectory of the Chinese in Ar-
gentina challenges the thesis by which the formation and circulation of
ideas about a foreign culture in a community is strongly shaped by the
transnational links of this culture’s corresponding immigrant group.43
Because the first Chinese immigrants who arrived in 1910 were few and
because they rapidly married and mixed with the local population, little
evidence remains of the formation or existence of institutions or asso-
ciations that promoted any literary material in Chinese or on Chinese
matters in the late 1930s and 1940s.
The criteria for Borges’s choice of titles to review, and his actual
access to such books, are matters for speculation. It is widely known
that he was familiar with the work of the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi
(365–290 bce) since he learned about them during his teenage years
from Herbert Allen Giles’s Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social
Reformer (1889), which he had acquired in Geneva and refers to as his
introduction to Oriental literatures.44 The original copy of this book
is available at the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges in Bue-
nos Aires, which gathers many of the volumes that Borges collected
throughout his life. This collection, however, does not include any of
the eight editions of the volumes reviewed for El Hogar, Sur, or La Na-
ción mentioned in the middle column of table 1. Among the two dozen
Chinese titles at the Fundación, there are later editions of these texts:
a 1984 version of Arthur Waley’s Monkey, as well as several German
and French editions of The Dream of the Red Chamber that are all
from the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese titles catalogued in the Borges
Collection at Argentina’s National Library (Biblioteca Nacional), which
comprises the personal books that Borges donated to the institution
when his tenure as director concluded (1955–73), do not correspond to
any of these editions either, as those are books on Chinese philosophy
and Buddhism, a topic on which Borges wrote extensively in his later
years.45 Borges might have gotten rid of the editions that he reviewed in
1937–42 at some point, since, as has been extensively demonstrated, he
periodically cleared his library, replacing old editions with newer and
more refined ones.
Reference books on China might have provided Borges with a gen-
eral understanding of Chinese literature. Herbert Allen Giles’s History
of Chinese Literature (1901) and Marcel Granet’s La pensée chinoise
(1934) are the two most frequently referenced texts in his fictional es-
says from the 1950s (see “Kafka y sus precursores” [“Kafka and His
Precursors”]; “Avatares de la tortuga” [“Avatars of the Tortoise”]; “La
90 ❘ Chapter 2
muralla y los libros” [“The Wall and the Books”]; and “Sobre los clási-
cos” [“On the Classics”]). Of special relevance is the eleventh edition of
the Encyclopedia Britannica, a favorite of Borges. He ironizes about his
generalist’s approach to China through such nonspecialized sources in
“Palabrería para versos” (1926; Talk on verse): “Mis autoridades para
este rato de sinología son F. Graebner (El mundo del hombre primitivo,
cuarto capítulo) y Douglas en la Enciclopedia Britannica” (My author-
itative sources for this moment of sinology are F. Graebner [The World
View of the Primitives, chapter 4] and Douglas, in the Encyclopedia
Britannica).46
The personal libraries of his cosmopolitan circle of friends could also
have been an additional source of Chinese readings. There is ample evi-
dence that Adolfo Bioy Casares was interested in Chinese literature; his
conversations with Borges on the subject recorded in the journal book
Borges (2009), their inclusion of Zhuangzi in their collaborative proj-
ect Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940; The Book of Fantasy)
discussed in the introduction, and Bioy’s own reviews on Chinese Liter-
ature in Sur, such as “V. W. W. S. Purcel: The Spirit of Chinese Poetry”
(1941). Such was also the case of the Argentine surrealist artist Xul So-
lar (1887–1963), who in 1924 interpreted the sixty-four hexagrams of
the Book of Changes (I-Ching) into visions, and later published it in an
invented neocriollo language under the title of Relatos de los mundos
superiores (Tales of the superior worlds).47
Yet these local factors do not amount to clues about the sources of
these book reviews. The dates of publication of the eight translations
reviewed for El Hogar, Sur, and La Nación suggest an immediate access
to recent publications. To some extent, it was common for publishers
to send recent titles directly to literary magazines like Sur or El Ho-
gar.48 This could explain the preeminence of Arthur Waley, the most
popular Chinese translator of the period, in Borges’s own selection of
Chinese texts. Even considering that Borges had a particular sympa-
thy for Waley’s nonacademic credentials and poetic sensibility (“Waley
es uno de los pocos sinólogos que es también un hombre de letras”;
“one of the very few Sinologists who happens to be a lettered person),49
Waley’s translations not only expanded the readership of Chinese po-
etry to a larger audience beyond academic circles in Britain but also
established a fruitful dialogue with the ideogrammatic experiments of
Anglo-American modernists (e.g., Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa), as
I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 4. The generalized interest in
Chinese literature prompted by the modernist sinophilia also accounts
for the decision of larger publishing houses like the British George Allen
& Unwin or Routledge to release new translations of Chinese classics,
since British sinology was in full swing in the interwar period.
It should be noted that in the 1930s a significant market existed for
books in French, English, and German language in Argentina because
the lettered elites were still educated in foreign languages and the local
publishing industry privileged European titles in its catalogs. As will
be discussed in chapter 3, after the so-called golden age of the pub-
lishing industry in Argentina (1935–55) that brought about the institu-
tionalization of translation into Spanish, the consumption of literature
in foreign languages diminished, and the nature of the reading pub-
lic changed significantly.50 In Borges, libros y lecturas: Catálogo de la
colección Jorge Luis Borges en la Biblioteca Nacional (2010), Laura
Rosato and Germán Álvarez reconstruct the circuit of the specialized
bookstores that Borges visited regularly in Buenos Aires, among which
are the English Mackern’s and Mitchell’s, the German Pygmalion, the
Goethe Institut’s Bookstore, and Librería Sarmiento.51 As the titles from
the collection held in Argentina’s National Library bear the seals of the
bookstores where they were acquired, their provenance can easily be
traced. Since most of the Chinese titles from the period cataloged at
the National Library were purchased in the mentioned bookstores, it
is possible that several of the Chinese translations reviewed for El Ho-
gar, Sur, and La Nación were also purchased there. These bookstores
were run by learned booksellers who imported specialized material on
demand. Such personalized dynamics of the literary market is a central
point in understanding the mechanisms by which Borges could have tai-
lored such a diverse array of sources. Rosato and Alvarez underline the
centrality of foreign languages in the construction of Borges’s personal
library:
fue el dominio del inglés, y también del alemán, lo que le per-

mitió acceder a temas y fuentes bibliográficas absolutamente
desconocidas e inaccesibles para el público de habla hispana.
Textos y autores que, aun en Europa eran considerados os-
curos, o menores para el canon literario. La lectura de estos
autores periféricos le proporcionó una inagotable fuente de
temas, citas y referencias plenas de originalidad.
Borges’s mastery of English, and also German, was the key

that gave him access to topics and bibliographical sources ab-
92 ❘ Chapter 2
solutely unknown and inaccessible to the Spanish-speaking

public. Texts and authors that, even in Europe, were still con-
sidered obscure or minor to the literary canon. The reading
of these peripheral authors provided him with an inexhaust-
ible source of topics, quotations and references fraught with
originality.52
In sum, Borges’s Chinese catalog, comprising German and English

translations, is not a reflection of the disciplinary frameworks or literary
trends of a peripheral market, but rather a deliberate construction made
by a cosmopolitan writer on the edge. Borges leverages two cosmopoli-
tan assets—a rich literary market and his multilingual education—to es-
tablish a fictional sinology. In this sense, these reviews are an invaluable
document of literary criticism and experimentation. They evidence the
personal Chinese catalog that would nourish Borges’s own literature in
the form of themes, quotes, and original references from a tradition that
is seemingly alien to the Argentine cultural field but central in Borges’s
literary cartography. In these eight reviews of Chinese literature, Borges
sketches an ars critica that attacks the hermeneutic method of philology.
First, his claims that translations are superior to originals question the
mandate that the philologist master source languages. Additionally, his
preference for the fantastic over realism contests the principle of mime-
sis, a hallmark of hermeneutical philology.
Opaqu e Tr a nsl at i o ns
In what I consider one of his boldest reviews, Borges capitalizes on the

constraints imposed by the war on the literary market and proposes a
novel model of world literature without books. The first lines of the
piece “Clement Egerton, The Golden Lotus, Routledge” reads
Quince tenaces años ha dedicado el sociólogo Clement Eger-

ton a traducir del chino esta novela erótica y trágica. 4 nobles
volúmenes abarca la traducción y vale—inaccesiblemente—4
guineas. Por esta razón y por otra (que es la segunda guerra
europea de nuestro siglo) no la tengo a mano para redac-
tar esta página. Conozco, sin embargo, la obra: hace un par
de años he leído sin tedio (y con algún horror agradable)
la versión alemana de Franz Kuhn: Kin Ping Meh, Leipzig,
1929. Ese volúmen está asesorándome ahora. Egerton suele

recurrir al remoto latín para velar las precisiones físicas del
autor; el doctor Kuhn no excluye la obscenidad.
The sociologist Clement Egerton has dedicated fifteen tena-

cious years to translating this erotic and tragic novel from
the Chinese. The translation consists of 4 noble volumes and
its—inaccessible—price is 4 guineas. For this and another
reason (the second European war of our century) I don’t
have it with me to draft these pages. I am, however, familiar
with the work: a few years ago I read—without boredom
and with some pleasant horror—Franz Kuhn’s German ver-
sion: Kin Ping Meh, Leipzig, 1929. I’m using this volume
as a reference right now. Egerton uses the remote Latin to
conceal the author’s physical traits; Dr. Kuhn does not hide
impropiety.53
Right from the opening paragraph of the review of the recent transla-
tion of the Ming dynasty novel Jinpingmei (c. 1610), Borges acknowl-
edges that he does not have the book on hand to write the commentary.
Because the recent title is too expensive and, anyway, the war obstructs
its shipping, he will base his notes on a previous German version by
sinologist Franz Kuhn (1884–1961) discussed above. This gesture could
initially be read as a lament, specifically that of the philologist detached
from his books, a model of the exiled intellectual like the haunting figure
of Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) bookless in Turkey. Yet it can also be
read in a positive light: even if the review is a genre that takes recently
published material as its object, Borges is not discouraged to carry on
without the source in hand. A few notes about Egerton’s years working
on the translation obtained from secondary sources. brief references to
the time and place of publication, and a close reading of the title (the
remark on the choice of Latin to conceal indecorous passages) account
for Borges’s review of the English version. We might presume he had
read a review of the book, since, looking at the two extant versions,
the information he provides is accurate. Yet, as Sylvia Molloy asserts of
Borges’s vague erudition:
Poco importa que Borges hable de obras que ha leído o que

aproveche los textos de quienes han leído las obras de las
que quiere hablar. Basta comprobar con qué ligereza se des-
94 ❘ Chapter 2
entiende del tradicional prestigio de la erudición. Ya lo se-

ñalaba Etiemble, hace varios años, que Borges se refería al
Hong Leou Mong, pero de tal modo que habría que ser muy
astuto para saber si lo ha leído (en una época en que pocos
lectores de extremo occidente habrían podido citar los títu-
los exactos de dos novelas chinas.”
It does not matter much whether Borges speaks about works

he has read, or if he uses other texts that refer to the works
that he wants to discuss. He flippantly bypasses the tradi-
tional prestige of erudition. Etiemble noted several years ago
that Borges would quote the Hong Leou Mong in such a
way that it would take a great deal of wit to tell if he had
actually read it [at a time when only few readers in the Far
West would have been able to quote the exact titles of two
Chinese novels]).54
What is the object of this review then? Borges claims to be familiar with
“la obra” but points to another version: “Franz Kuhn: Kin Ping Meh,
Leipzig, 1929.” The comparison of different translations is a recurrent
approach to Chinese literature in these reviews:
1.
He confesado que me aburren los cuentos de hadas; ahora

confieso que he leído con interés los que integran la primera
mitad de este libro. Lo mismo me pasó, hace diez años, con
los Chinesisch Volksmaerchen de Wilhelm.
I have confessed that I find fairy tales boring; let me now

confess that I have eagerly read those in the first half of this
book. The same thing happened to me ten years ago, with
Wilhelm’s Chinesisch Volksmaerchen.55
2.
De la novela traducida por Waley conozco una versión an-

terior, de Timothy Richard, curiosamente titulada A Mission
to Heaven (Shanghai, 1940). También he recorrido las ex-
certas que incluye Giles en su History of Chinese Literature

(1901) y Sung-Nien Hsu en la Anthologie de la littérature
chinoise (1933).
I have read an earlier version to Waley’s translation of the

novel, one by Timothy Richard, curiously titled A Mission
to Heaven (Shanghai, 1940). I have also skimmed the ex-
cerpts Giles includes in his History of Chinese Literature
(1901) and Sung-Nien Hsu in the Anthologie de la littéra-
ture chinoise.56
Borges follows the same methodology employed in his essays “Los tra-
ductores de las 1001 noches” (1936; “The Translators of The Thou-
sands and One Nights”) and “Las versiones homéricas” (1932; “The
Homeric Versions”), in which he analyzes different versions of Arabian
Nights and The Iliad, respectively, to reconstruct the original texts,
which he cannot access due to his ignorance of Arabic and Greek. But
going against what Borges calls the “superstition” regarding infidel
translations (best summarized in the oft-cited Italian sentence “tradut-
tore traditore”), his comparative method acknowledges the authority
of the translation but not that of the source text. Borges affirms the
essential fluidity of the original, which is nothing but a retrospective
illusion that emerges only after being contrasted with its subsequent
versions: “presuponer que toda recombinación de elementos es obli-
gatoriamente inferior a su original, es presuponer que el borrador es
obligatoriamente inferior al borrador H—ya que no puede haber sino
borradores. El concepto de texto definitivo no corresponde sino a la
religión o al cansancio” (“To assume that every recombination of ele-
ments is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft
9 is necessarily inferior to draft H—for there can be only drafts. The
concept of the definitive text corresponds only to religion and exhaus-
tion”).57 If nineteenth-century philologists sought to reconstruct na-
tional traditions by tracing the historical development of manuscripts
and diachronic analysis of language, Borges employs a similar method-
ology but with the exact opposite aim: to emphasize the literary value
of those versions and translations that are farthest from “original”
texts and have thus been further transformed in the several instances
of reading and have “gained in translation.” In this view of translation,
ignorance of the source language is by no means detrimental to a legiti-
96 ❘ Chapter 2
mate reading of foreign literatures, but rather a condition of possibility

of world literature.
Versions may vary in time and space, and even within the same
language, since there are different ways of translating. Borges further
develops this idea in these two essays on translation. He claims that An-
toine Galland (1646–1715), Edward William Lane (1801–76), Richard
Francis Burton (1821–90), Jean-Charles Mardrus (1868–1949), and the
other translators of The Thousand and One Nights, bring to a text a
set of cultural assumptions, historical backgrounds, and social condi-
tionings, in such a way that, even within the same nation and language,
any word from the original might have contradictory translations in
the target language. In the early essay “Las dos maneras de traducir”
(1926; “The Two Types of Translation”), Borges presents the two most
frequent methods of translation and associates them with a literary ide-
ology. Classicists prefer to paraphrase because they prize the work over
the artist; they seek smoothness in translation at the cost of “los local-
ismos, las rarezas, las contingencias” (localisms, quirks, contingencies)
and are willing to leave behind what is associated with the artist: the
specific elements of the poetic voice, the artist’s words, syntax, and met-
aphors (which, Borges reminds us in this essay, correspond to choices
of the language, not the artist).58 Romantics, on the other hand, revere
the poetic subject at the expense of the work of art, thus honoring the
literality of the author’s word choices. Even if Borges acknowledges that
both forms operate in tension with one another, he indicates a prefer-
ence for the paraphrase over the literal method.
Chinese literature—or any literature whose original language is in-
accessible to him—seems to further complicate this translation frame-
work, since the opacity produced by the source language obscures the
reader’s awareness of the styles of translation in play. In a review of
Arthur Waley’s 1937 translation of Book of Songs, Borges complains
about having to read “opaque” translations:
Al recorrer con entusiasmo y credulidad la versión inglesa

de cierto filósofo chino di con un memorable pasaje: “A un
condenado a muerte no le importa bordear un precipicio,
porque ha renunciado a la vida.” En ese punto el traduc-
tor colocó un asterisco y me advirtió que su interpretación
era preferible a la de otro sinólogo rival que traducía de
esta manera: “Los sirvientes destruyen las obras de arte,
para no tener que juzgar sus bellezas y sus defectos.” En-

tonces como Paolo y Francesca, dejé de leer. Un misterioso
escepticismo se había deslizado en mi alma. Cada vez que
el destino me sitúa frente a la “versión literal” de alguna
obra maestra de la literatura china o arábiga, recuerdo este
penoso incidente.
As I read the English version of a Chinese philosopher with

enthusiasm and gullibility, I came across a memorable pas-
sage: A one-legged man discards ornament, his exterior not
being open to commendation. In a footnote the translator
explained that his own interpretation was far better than
that of a rival sinologist who had translated the phrase this
way: Servants will tear up a portrait, not liking to be con-
fronted with its beauties and its defects. Thus, like Paolo and
Francesca, I stopped reading. A mysterious skepticism took
over my soul. Every time destiny puts a “literal” version of a
masterpiece of Chinese or Arabic literature in front of me, I
recall this painful episode.59
Putting himself in the shoes of the superstitious reader of translations,

disappointed at the impossibility of accessing the original, Borges de-
scribes as “painful” the incapacity to decode the original line in a lan-
guage that he cannot access, in this case Chinese. Because, even when
translating word for word from such languages, there are still various
possible translations into English, with no hints whatsoever as to which
one is the most “faithful.” Yet Borges plays the devil’s advocate in this
review, since he too is translating indirectly from the English versions
of the Chinese philosopher mentioned by the translator. The dispute
between the two sinologists in the quote happens to be real, and it is
found in the introduction to Borges’s favorite book Chuang Tzŭ: Mys-
tic, Moralist, and Social Reformer by Giles:
Only one previous attempt has been made to place Chuang

Tzu in the hands of English readers (Frederic Henry Bal-
four, The Divine Classic of Nan-hua. F.R.G.S., Shanghai and
London, 1881). In that case, the knowledge of the Chinese
language possessed by the translator was altogether too ele-
mentary to justify such an attempt.*
98 ❘ Chapter 2
*One example will suffice. In ch. xxiii (see p. 309) there

occurs a short sentence which means, “A one-legged man
discards ornament, his exterior not being open to commen-
dation.” Mr. Balfour translated this as follows: “Servants
will tear up a portrait, not liking to be confronted with its
beauties and its defects.”60
Now let us compare the two rival passages quoted in Giles’s preface
with Borges’s own translations of them into Spanish in the review of
Waley’s Book of Songs:
(Giles) A one-legged man discards ornament, his exterior not

being open to commendation.
(Borges) A un condenado a muerte no le importa bordear un

precipicio, porque ha renunciado a la vida.
(Balfour) Servants will tear up a portrait, not liking to be

confronted with its beauties and its defects.
(Borges) Los sirvientes destruyen las obras de arte, para no

tener que juzgar sus bellezas y sus defectos.
While Borges’s translation of Giles’s line evidences how he opted to

paraphrase, the translation of Balfour’s phrase imitates the original
word for word. Borges honors Balfour’s content and semantic fields
(servants, beauty, defects). Yet, in translating Giles’s, Borges retains the
general idea but changes the depiction of the circumstances. Giles de-
scribes a man who does not care about ornamentation, since his ampu-
tated leg already undermines his beauty. Borges paraphrases this idea
with the metaphor of suicide: a man who does not mind falling off a
cliff, since he is already sentenced to death. That is, even if the aim of
the example is to illustrate Giles’s distress and transliterate the two dif-
ferent English translations from the book on Zhuangzi, Borges engages
in the chain of translating. This adds yet another layer to the complex
framework of translation. Indirect translation evidences the simultane-
ous or multiple choices for literality or paraphrase since it since it puts
different layers into play. Yet again, this simultaneity is not a constraint
to access an alleged original, but rather an affirmation of the superiority
of the translation over the source text.
Mimesis
In a thorough study of the literary nature of Borges’s criticism, Sergio

Pastormerlo suggests that Borges should be read as a “writer critic,” an
advocate of a form of criticism defined in strictly negative terms vis-à-
vis conventional disciplinary rules:
Es difícil describir la crítica borgeana sin confrontarla con las

modalidades más académicas de la crítica universitaria. Decir
que no disimula las huellas de la subjetividad, que está escrita
en una primera persona de la autobiografía, que expone las
valoraciones de una manera bien directa, que se desentien-
de de los aparatos conceptuales de época y los circuitos de
lecturas obligatorias, que sus argumentaciones avanzan rá-
pidamente, que está regida por el arte de la brevedad y la
simplificación, que es entretenida, no equivale a decir, reitera-
damente, que es un negativo de la crítica académica?
It is difficult to describe Borgesian criticism without con-

fronting it with the most scholarly modalities of academic
criticism. Stating that it does not hide the traces of subjectiv-
ity, that it is written in the first person of the autobiographi-
cal style, that it exhibits judgments in a rather direct fashion,
that it pays little attention to the conceptual frameworks and
the obligatory literary circuits of the time, that its argumen-
tations move quickly, that it is directed by the art of brevity
and simplification, that it is entertaining, does not actually
amount to saying, once again, that it is the negative of aca-
demic criticism?61
Borges’s slippery use of literary criticism justifies its transversal nature:

it crosses genres, traditions, and trends without giving notice. It steps
away from the canon to follow a personal rather than consensual line
of argumentation.
In her analysis of Borges’s reading of Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red
Chamber, the highest achievement of the classical narrative produced
during the Qing dynasty, Haiqinq Sun claims that Borges’s review in El
Hogar is determined by the illusion of scale: it does not provide much
analysis to further understand the Chinese classic, since its central point
is to show the amazement of a Western writer at a novel containing
100 ❘ Chapter 2
more than one hundred chapters and more than three hundred charac-
ters: “different from most of the Hong Lou Meng’s scholars, Borges’s
focus is not on certain specific aspects of the novel, such as its charac-
ters, plots, narrative strategies, or historical contexts, but on the general
fact that a novel can have so vast a textual construction.”62 Borges is
indeed overwhelmed by this accumulation of characters that eventually
keeps him from following the plot: “la novela prosigue de una manera
un tanto irresponsable o insípida; los personajes secundarios pululan y
no sabemos bien cuál es cuál” (the novel progresses insipidly and irre-
sponsibly: secondary characters swarm so much that we lose track of
them).63 What might appear to be an impressionistic reading of Chinese
narrative is actually a bold critique of realism. In the review Borges is
overwhelmed only if we assume that he follows the mimetic principle
of the nineteenth-century novel by which characters represent social
types and interact organically in the plot, a principle that Georg Lukács
(1885–1971) referred to as the “biographical form” of the novel: “On
the one hand, the scope of the world is limited by the scope of the hero’s
possible experiences and its mass is organized by the orientation of his
development towards finding the meaning of life in self-recognition; on
the other hand, the discretely heterogeneous mass of isolated persons,
non-sensuous structures and meaningless events receives a unified artic-
ulation by the relating of each separate element to the central character
and the problem symbolized by the story of his life.”64 According to
Borges, the Dream of the Red Chamber is free of dramatic biographism,
since the mass of secondary characters takes over the narration without
articulating its action in relation to the hero, but instead “swarming” to
the extent that they blur the plot. Suspicious of realism, Borges further
mocks this representative device from the theory of the novel. In refer-
ence to the aforementioned Jinpingmei he argues that Chinese novels
have countless characters, because, along this rationale, the larger the
population of a nation, the larger the stock of characters: “Es fama que
las novelas chinas están abarrotadas de gente, como el Imperio Chino.
En el King Ping Meh, la pululación de Volk ohne Raum no es indesci-
frable, como en otros libros asiáticos” (It is well known that Chinese
novels are packed with people, just like the Chinese Empire. Unlike
other Asian books, in the King Ping Meh, the swarming of Volk ohne
Raum is not indecipherable).65 Even if the Jingpingmei reflects Chinese
demography, Borges notes that this particular novel is an exception to
the rule of the overpopulation of Asian books, since the usual “swarm-
ing” of characters can in fact be deciphered. The reason for this is clear:
the characters of this novel are “people without space,” as suggested by

the German words “Volk ohne Raum,” and thus have no bonds to a
specific country. Emancipated from any terrain, the characters are not
tied to a referential space and are thus free of any social—mimetic—
function. The use of this German expression to describe the emanci-
pation of characters from actual demographics has three distinct but
crucial implications for Borges’s notion of mimesis; namely, the oblique
treatment of reality, his theory of the fantastic, and the critique of phil-
ological hermeneutics.
First, Borges does read Chinese novels in allegorical terms, yet this al-
legorical reading does not link the novels to their context of production,
but to the context of consumption. The allusion to Nazism is evident
in the quote of the German slogan “Volk ohne Raum” used in 1939
to justify the military expansion to recuperate the “living space” (leb-
ensraum) of German populations locked out of German borders after
the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Fascism is a constant anxiety in Borg-
es’s texts from this period, yet this preoccupation takes shape obliquely.
Just like “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” is set in 1916 but ac-
tually reveals anxieties of World War II, Borges’s literature discusses
contemporary reality through a form of writing inherently defined by
literary autonomy. Numerous texts from this period point to cultural
problems that arose during the years of fascism without dealing with
them explicitly or referring to them politically or historically. As Annick
Louis observes in Borges ante el fascismo (2007): “Borges parece haber
propuesto en su ficción—a sus contemporáneos (argentinos)—una fór-
mula ilegible, intentó una estética donde lo que llamamos ‘realidad’
se vincula de un modo relativamente inédito o, al menos, inesperado
con lo literario: un modo oblicuo, lateral” (In his fiction Borges seems
to have proposed—to his (Argentine) contemporaries—an unreadable
formula. He develops an aesthetic where what we call “reality” is con-
nected in a relatively new, or, at least, unexpected way to the literary:
an oblique, lateral way).66 By using the expression “Volke ohne Raum”
to talk about Chinese fiction, Borges engages in a vehement critique of
authoritarianism, yet in an elusive way that privileges literary autonomy
over mimetic representation.
Second, it could be argued that by reading a Chinese novel to ac-
tually talk about German politics, Borges anticipates the postcolonial
critique of the imperative of national allegory in Third World. In the
oft-quoted article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism” (1986), Fredric Jameson suggests that fiction produced in
102 ❘ Chapter 2
Africa, South America, and Southern Asia could be represented as hav-

ing a single cultural logic, one inescapably linked to the representation
of the national: “Third-World texts, even those which are seemingly
private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic, necessarily proj-
ect a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of
the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled
situation of the public third-world culture and society.”67 Borges indeed
resists reading literature produced in China solely as a national allegory
of China, yet his geopolitical agenda is much more ambitious than the
critique of underdevelopment: not because China—or Argentina—are
allegedly part of the Third World and thus prone to adopting allegorical
forms of representation, but because allegory as such is a futile premise
of the realist novel. For Borges any representation of reality is an illu-
sion, more so if this reality is of a “national” nature. In other reviews,
Borges will go further by claiming that any realist reading of Chinese
novels is futile, since Chinese literature is essentially fantastic. One ex-
ample is: “Los chinos, en verdad, carecen de literatura fantástica porque
todos sus libros, en algún momento lo son” (The Chinese, actually, do
not have any fantastic literature because all their books, to some extent,
are fantastic.)68 Another example is: “La literatura china no sabe de
“novelas fantásticas,” porque todas, en algún momento, lo son” (Chi-
nese literature is alien to “fantastic novels” because all of them are, to
some extent, fantastic.)69
Like the critique of national allegory, these two statements are less
concerned with particularistic aesthetics than with Borges’s own dis-
trust toward the mimetic premise of the novel. By reviewing in total
four translations of Chinese novels (the novel being a secondary genre
for Borges), Borges further develops his theory of the fantastic outlined
in “El arte narrativo y la magia” (1932; “Narrative Art and Magic”),
an essay in which he deliberately chooses figures that are marginal to
the great tradition of the novel to illustrate the deficiencies of realism,
as well as its potential for the fantastic. The Chinese novel is also a
relatively marginal genre within the Asian tradition, Borges tells us in
the voice of the sinologist Stephen Albert in “El jardín de senderos que
se bifurcan”: “En su país, la novela es un género subalterno; en aquel
tiempo era un género despreciable. Ts’ui Pên fue un novelista genial,
pero también fue un hombre de letras que sin duda no se consideró un
mero novelista” (“In your country, the novel is a subsidiary form of
literature; in Ts’ui Pên’s time it was a despicable form. Ts’ui Pên was a
brilliant novelist, but he was also a man of letters who doubtless did not
consider himself a mere novelist”).70 Emir Rodríguez Monegal observes

that by studying realist marginalia, Borges prepares his readers for the
fiction that he will start publishing in the late 1930s: “En vez de fundar
una ‘poética de la narración,’ funda (echa las bases) de una ‘poética’
de su futura ficción” (Instead of founding a “poetic of narration,” he
founds [sets the foundations for] a “poetic” of future fiction).71 After
all, the apparently impressionistic note on the infinite “swarming” of
characters in Chinese novels turns out to be the narrative core of the
fantastic labyrinthine structure of Borges’s most idiosyncratic fiction;
in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” Ts’ui Pên unfolds the idea
verbatim: “Volví a sentir esa pululación de que hablé. Me pareció que el
húmedo jardín que rodeaba la casa estaba saturado hasta lo infinito de
invisibles personas. Esas personas eran Albert y yo, secretos, atareados
y multiformes en otras dimensiones de tiempo” (“Once again I felt the
swarming sensation of which I have spoken. It seemed to me that the
humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely saturated with
invisible persons. These persons were Albert and I, secret, busy and mul-
tiform in other dimensions of time”).72 In this light, Borges’s sinology on
the edge is not only a fictional epistemology of China but also a pretext
of fiction.
Last, reading a novel in terms of the context of the reader, as Borges
does, rather than that of the producer of the text, attacks the very prin-
ciple of philological interpretation: the philologist’s aspiration to iden-
tify with the author, which Edward Said describes as follows: “in order
to be able to understand a humanistic text, one must try to do so as
if one is the author of that text, living the author’s reality, undergoing
the kind of life experiences intrinsic to his or her life, and so forth, all
by that combination of erudition and sympathy that is the hallmark
of philological hermeneutics.”73 In the introduction to the fiftieth an-
niversary edition of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (originally published in
1953), Said reminds us of the formidable training of Romance philol-
ogists, who, apart from having insatiable erudition and proficiency in
classical and Latin-based languages, received formal training in various
humanistic disciplines so as to immerse themselves in “all the available
written documents in one or several Romance languages, from numis-
matics to epigraphy, from stylistics to archival research, from rhetoric
and law to an all-embracing working idea of literature that included
chronicles, epics, sermons, drama, stories, and essays.”74 As has been
discussed throughout this chapter, Borges’s erudition has nothing to
do with the scholarly expertise described above: albeit remarkable, it
104 ❘ Chapter 2
is contingent, asystematic, and alien in unique ways to the consensual

procedures of a learned community. What is at stake in Borges’s re-
formulation of philology is a critique of its nationalistic discourse of
origin, the ability “to re-establish that which appears to have been lost
in the dense proliferation of the past: the author’s scrupulous intent, the
text’s original form, and the nation’s immaculate and distant origins.”75
After all, during the highly productive Chinese years—when he wrote
fiction about sinologists and Chinese encyclopedias, and reviews of Chi-
nese literature—Borges was particularly concerned about the develop-
ment of philology as a modern scientific discipline in Latin America, a
concern best summarized in his famous 1941 essay “Las alarmas del
doctor Américo Castro” (“The Alarms of Doctor Américo Castro”).76
In this exceptionally playful review of the Spanish philologist Américo
Castro’s La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico
(The linguistic peculiarities of the River Plate region and their histori-
cal explanation), Borges dismantles Castro’s claim that Castilian Span-
ish has become corrupted in the River Plate region. Borges retorts to
Castro that local popular speeches, such as lunfardo or the gauchesca
speech, indeed diverge from the classical norms of Castilian, but so too
do regional forms and varieties of popular registers in other regions of
Spain like Catalonia, Andalusia, or Alicante. Borges’s attack is specifi-
cally on the protocols that legitimize knowledge about the Spanish lan-
guage in diverse Hispanophone areas and that imply imperial notions
of tradition:
Salvo el lunfardo (módico esbozo carcelario que nadie sueña

en parangonar con el exuberante caló de los españoles), no
hay jergas en este país. No adolecemos de dialectos, aunque
sí de institutos dialectológicos. Esas corporaciones viven de
reprobar las sucesivas jerigonzas que inventan. Han impro-
visado el gauchesco, a base de Hernández; el cocoliche, a
base de un payaso que trabajó con los Podestá; el vesre, a
base de los alumnos de cuarto grado. En esos detritus se
apoyan; esas riquezas les debemos y deberemos.
Except for Argentine slang (a modest dialect that no one

dreams of comparing to the exuberant caló of the Span-
iards), there are no jargons in this country. We do not suffer
from dialects, although we do indeed suffer from dialecto-
logical institutes. Those organizations thrive on condemn-
ing each successive slang they invent. They have improvised

gauchesco, based on Hernández; cocoliche, derived from a
clown who worked with the Podestá brothers; vesre, taken
from fourth-grade students. They are dependent of such rub-
bish; we owe and shall continue to owe those dubious riches
to them.77
As Fernando Degiovanni and Guillermo Toscano y García have argued

about this polemic, Borges associates the arbitrary nature of a discipline
to the ideological tenets of contemporary European totalitarianism.
After all, the quote’s evoking of “dialectological institutes” is a direct
reference to the Instituto de Filología of Universidad de Buenos Aires
chaired by Amado Alonso, founded in 1923 as a branch of the Centro
de Estudios Históricos de Madrid, and which became the center of His-
panist philology with the exile of Spanish intellectuals during the Span-
ish Civil War. By engaging in a linguistic polemic with Spanish scholars
of languages and literatures, Borges questions the Hispanists’ uses of
antiquity in their own imperial articulations of culture in South America
(as well as in North America, where Castro conducted an institutional
refashioning of the discipline). At the heart of his original interpretation
and explication of remote literary Chinese texts, Borges suppresses the
imperial aspirations of a decadent cultural universe striving to perpetu-
ate its cultural capital in a Hispanophone region that was no longer its
colony but a new edge for world literature.
The exile of Spanish intellectuals, educational institutions, and different

sectors of the publishing industry (imprints, translators, distributors,
etc.) in the midcentury was a watershed in the cultural life of Buenos
Aires, as it was in many other major cities of Latin America. Transfer-
ring the axis of the larger Hispanic cultural industry to South America
enabled the creation of new critical infrastructures, social relations, and
reading publics that paved the way for the “golden years” of the pub-
lishing industry in the region. Such expansion of series featuring works
of world literature became significantly relevant in terms the cartogra-
phy of the Cold War, particularly so with respect to the establishment of
Communist China in 1949 and its global translation initiatives. These
were nurtured by the local publishing boom, which gave rise to an un-
usual Chinese literary archive in Spanish, which I will discuss in detail
in chapter 3.
Chapter 3
The Twisted Networks

of Cultural Diplomacy
Global Maoism in Print
In 1954 the poets Ai Qing (1910–96) and Xiao San (1896–1983) expe-
rienced an emergency landing in Argentina.1 The aircraft transporting
the official delegates of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from Chile
back to their home country was forced to stop in Buenos Aires for re-
pairs. Despite the diplomatic constraints that prevented the two Chinese
citizens from setting foot in Argentina, the local authorities allowed them
to disembark briefly for refreshments. After hearing about the stranded
artists, a mixed group of local writers rushed to the airport to treat them
with bonbons, souvenirs, and books. Among them was the Communist
writer María Rosa Oliver (1898–1977), who had joined them at Pablo
Neruda’s birthday celebration a few days earlier in Santiago and also
during a meeting of the World Peace Council the year before in Beijing.
Present too was Evar Méndez (1888–1955), editor of the avant-garde
magazine Martín Fierro, who recounts this anecdote in a mea culpa
article about his utter ignorance of Chinese culture titled “Examen de
conciencia chino” (1955; Chinese examination of consciousness), pub-
lished in the Communist journal Cultura China. Méndez looks back
upon the two-hour airport meeting as a “miraculous opportunity” for
cultural exchange where, with the aid of interpreters—and despite the
107
108 ❘ Chapter 3
surveillance of security officers—intellectuals from the antipodes shared

their views on art, literature, and politics.2
This scene is symptomatic of the forms of circulation of Chinese
culture in Latin America during the Maoist years (1949–76). While
it acknowledges the existence of a solid infrastructure for the global
dissemination of Chinese culture through writers’ tours, promotional
travel, and translation programs, it also substantiates how informal
networks come into play when people-to-people diplomacy substitutes
public diplomacy. In the airport, an ultimate nonspace, intellectuals of
antagonistic ideological backgrounds came together to welcome, read,
and later publish fortuitous Chinese authors that are both novel and fa-
miliar and whose work helps the Argentines reflect on their own debates
on tradition and intellectual labor, as well as the relationship between
art and politics.
In chapter 2 I suggested that the mediation of European languages
and the prevalence of the bookstore over the library made Chinese lit-
erature accessible to a traditional readership with a taste for foreign
cultures. The establishment of the PRC in 1949 drastically changed this
scenario. It launched a massive cultural diplomacy program that re-
sulted in a torrent of translations pouring out from Beijing to differ-
ent corners of the globe and particularly the so-called Third World. In
Latin America this materialized in an unprecedented inflow of Chinese
printed culture in Spanish that began circulating through the networks
of the Communist Party and numerous distributors, publishers, and pe-
riodicals, thus widening the realm of consumption and critical readings
of Chinese culture. Viewing this high tide of socialist internationalism
from the perspective of world literature, it becomes clear that the cul-
tural diplomacy programs of the Maoist years ensured that Chinese
literature circulated beyond its national borders to unprecedented des-
tinations, and, as Nicolai Volland argues in Socialist Cosmopolitanism
(2020), Chinese socialist literature became part of a global circuit of
cultural production and consumption.3 Yet, as in all worldly expansions
of local canons, inevitable frictions striated the programmatic socialist
cosmopolitan impulse, giving its particular shape to this corpus. Instead
of consolidating such translations into an organized Maoist canon, the
larger structure of translators, distributors, and commentators in the
receiving countries subdued, scattered, and silenced them according to
the logic of their own cultural field.
In this chapter I argue that during the Maoist years the writing of
China in Latin America did not respond to the goals of Chinese cul-
The Twisted Networks of Cultural Diplomacy ❘ 109
tural diplomacy but rather to the dynamics of the local cultural field.
In what follows I claim that Latin American intellectuals used Chinese
cultural diplomacy initiatives to fulfill their singular aesthetic projects
rather than to rubber stamp Maoism, generating a unique corpus of
Chinese literature and criticism in Spanish. This is an effort to read
against the logic of cultural diplomacy as an effective tool of literary
criticism. In the following pages I reveal the limitations of imposing a
mode of reading at a global level but, in turn, I acknowledge the rich
infrastructure it provides to track the twisted itineraries of world liter-
ature. This approach not only sheds light on a constellation of Chinese
texts in Spanish translation that have never been studied before as a
consistent archive, but also exposes the political and aesthetic strategies
to overwrite that archive.
Cultural diplomacy is based on soft power; that is, the ability to
attract and co-opt rather than coerce.4 Because of its double nature as
a state-driven governmental practice of foreign affairs and an ideals-
based activity carried out by nonstate actors, cultural diplomacy offers a
productive framework to study symbolic transfers across borders. This
chapter is nurtured by the sociological premise that literature is both a
symbolic and a material phenomenon; after all, literature circulates in
the form of tangible artifacts mediated by concrete means. When texts
cross national borders in translation, they do so in the form of books,
journals, and cables, as well as through diverse cultural agents such as
publishers, diplomats, critics, and officials.5
Traveling to the PRC in the context of cultural diplomacy supposed
an unprecedented opportunity for Latin American intellectuals to en-
counter Chinese culture directly. Even if the Communist Party was the
main channel of transmission of Chinese cultural products during these
years, writing about China was an intellectual effort not limited to the
immediate political interests of the revolution but rather to the human-
istic allure of Chinese culture. Partly because the intellectuals involved
had varying degrees of commitment to the Communist Party—most of
them were “fellow travelers” rather than party leaders—and partly be-
cause the nature of their own literary projects, the rhetoric of the rev-
olution in the discussion of Chinese culture takes remarkably singular
tones from writer to writer.
My focus on the writing of China during the Maoist years examines
humanist Chinese culture in translation; that is, more specifically, the
literary publications that filter through the vast Chinese propaganda
apparatus, such as classical poetry, folk tales, or revolutionary operas
110 ❘ Chapter 3
that begin appearing in literary magazines and publishing series along-

side other, non-Chinese texts. As the Chinese revolution progressed, the
boundaries between the literary and the political became blurred and
any publication was political. Even if the Chinese stopped exporting
both traditional and modern cultural artifacts and opted for the doctri-
naire works of Mao Zedong’s thought, the Latin American promoters
of Chinese culture did not always share Mao’s interpretation of Marxist
aesthetics and in turn presented these materials in ways that responded
to their own artistic projects rather than the propaganda guidelines
coming from Beijing. On these grounds I contend that studying the
writing of China in distant and nonspecialized centers enables a more
ambitious discussion of the relationship between culture and politics in
times of ideological determinations.
To return to the central question of this book, how did Latin Amer-
icans interpret Chinese culture given the absence of an institutional
framework for the study of China? Postwar sinology took different di-
rections in this respect. In the United States it became a highly special-
ized field of research within universities and national security agencies,
in a similar move to Latin American studies, which became institution-
alized in that period. It was renamed China studies following the area
studies model that responded to the need for practical knowledge of
regions of strategic interests during the Cold War. Alongside social sci-
entists, “China watchers” based in Hong Kong became the main au-
thors of the English-language bibliography on Communist China.6 In
Europe the writing of China stirred a more public debate. After the
trauma of fascism and the reconsideration of whether social Darwinism
should have a place in the classroom, traditional sinology recovered
its romantic tone and “the admiration of Chinese Antiquity became its
ethos again.”7 Thus, when Maoist printed culture started to advocate
for total rejection of the past, a clash ensued between traditional sinol-
ogists and French left-wing intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)
and Louis Althusser (1918–90), and, especially, the Tel Quel group, who
read Maoism as a universal theory of cultural revolution through the
lens of structuralism and psychoanalysis.8
During the Maoist years the writing of China in Latin America un-
folded in literary circles, cultural magazines, and publishing initiatives
entirely outside academia and state agencies. Absent sinologists to pro-
vide an interpretation of the influx of Chinese texts in philological terms
or public strategists to decode them politically, the writing of China
was carried out by literary critics, writers, and intellectuals connected to
cultural diplomacy programs. These actors, who had no formal training

in Chinese or Asian cultures, did have prolific careers in translating and
publishing foreign literatures. The transfer of the book industry from
Spain to South America because of the Spanish Civil War facilitated the
creation of a large structure for publishing, printing, and editing world
literatures in the Spanish language. With universities intermittently
closed since the 1930s due to military governments, criticism developed
naturally outside the walls of academia and closer to this bustling, new
market. The porous nature of the intellectual field becomes even more
patent in what Guido Herzovich identifies in Argentina as a shift in the
terrain of literary criticism during the 1950s whereby criticism came
to perform an essential function for the circulation and appropriation
of books and literature.9 The massive expansion of the reading public,
as well as the founding of literary magazines and publishing houses
by new generations of immigrants, not only changed the face of criti-
cism but also reshaped the dynamics of the circulation of print culture
at large. In this chapter I focus on Argentina as a case study of Latin
America to claim that the writings of China from this period owe their
existence largely to the networks of Maoist diplomacy and mostly to its
impact on the local expanding book and translation industry.
To complement Cold War scholarship with the frameworks of
Translation Studies and World Literature, the chapter is organized into
three case studies that evidence the autonomy of the Latin American
actors involved in Maoist diplomacy. After an overview of the PRC’s
initiatives for the export of Chinese printed culture in Spanish, each of
the sections examines how local agents adjusted the institutions, can-
ons, and aesthetics of Maoist diplomacy for the purposes of their own
intellectual projects. “Cultural Association” examines the short-lived
Asociación Argentina de Cultura China (AACC; Argentine Association
of Chinese Culture) created in the early 1950s against the backdrop of
postwar “peaceful coexistence”. By analyzing the papers of its pres-
ident Fina Warschaver (1910–89), I demonstrate how her humanis-
tic efforts to foster cultural exchange were subdued by the orthodoxy
of the Soviet-leaning Argentine Communist Party. “Scattered Series”
traces translation flows and intellectual networks between China and
Argentina from the 1950s to the 1970s. Widening the lens on the cul-
tural Cold War in Latin America to include China, this section explores
the wayward trajectories of leftist intellectuals who gravitated between
the networks of Maoist diplomacy and the booming book market, us-
ing their artistic work to fight both for the Communist and capital-
112 ❘ Chapter 3
ist blocs. The last section, “Scarred Intellectual” claims that Ricardo
Piglia’s last published work Los diarios de Emilio Renzi (2015–17) de-
liberately appeases and silences the effervescence of his revolutionary
militancy of the 1970s.10
Maoist C u lt ur a l D i p l omacy i n L at i n Am e ri ca
The Third World occupied a critical role in the PRC’s diplomatic map
of the Cold War. But at its inception the general Chinese policy toward
Latin America was not so clear. Postwar “peaceful coexistence” had
immediate applications in the neighboring countries of Asia, but Latin
America was too far away to be a priority. Both geographically and his-
torically, it appeared as a region that was exceedingly remote to justify
dedicating resources to it at a time when the government was focused
on laying the foundations of the new state. But it was also a potentially
rich area for the propagation of a rural form of Marxism in the devel-
oping world. For example, the Spanish intellectual Victor Alba (1916–
2003) identified the communes as a key attraction for progressive Latin
Americans “enamored of the theocratic and Communist traditions of
the pre-Columbian age [Incas and Aztecs] as well as for conservatives
concerned with agrarian reform.”11 Similarly, because of opposition to
the United States, absence of foreign debt, and rapid industrialization,
different Latin American thinkers found in China a theory of govern-
ment that could be transplanted into their contexts. Like the Russian
revolution—and later the Cuban—the Chinese revolution offered a
new system of beliefs and ethical principles of modernity for peripheral
capitalisms.
The early years of Communist rule witnessed the emergence of deci-
sive initiatives for the promotion of Chinese printed culture in Spanish
that set the grounds for the ensuing continuous flow of information in
the decades to come. For years the Chinese invited scholars, liberal pro-
fessionals, and artists of non-Communist nations to visit the country in
supervised tours. This policy of propaganda and invitations, which had
its roots in Soviet diplomacy and was carried out similarly in Cuba, was
an effective means of building a positive international reputation in the
face of widespread nonrecognition. Visitors met with national delegates
and were showcased the feats of the new system, such as model facto-
ries, hospitals, and agrarian communes. They received publications and
brochures in various languages with the expectation that they would
write favorable reports about these facets back home. By using foreign-
ers as a tool to export Chinese culture, the Chinese sought to win allies
and neutralize opponents.12
Aside from guided tourism, other visitors stayed for longer periods
working as translators for the massive state publisher Beijing Foreign
Languages Press and as Spanish language professors at Beijing Univer-
sity. Among the most prominent “foreign friends” (waiguo pengyou)
were the Chilean painter José Venturelli (1924–88) and the poets Luis
Enrique Delano (1907–85) and Pablo de Rokha (1895–1968).13 The
list of short-term guests is too lengthy to enumerate, yet worthy of
mention are the Brazilian Jorge Amado (1912–2001) or Nobel Prize
laureates such as Pablo Neruda (1904–73) and Miguel Ángel Asturias
(1899–1974).14 These figures were instrumental in bringing Latin Amer-
ican readings into China and introducing Chinese works into their own
literary circles back home. Chapter 5 analyzes recent memoirs and doc-
umentaries by the children of these long-term visitors who grew up in
revolutionary China. As I argue later in the book, the narratives of this
second generation construct affective archives that contest their par-
ents’ ideas of international solidarity and political art.
Spanish-language periodicals were also translated for simultaneous
distribution worldwide through the China Publications Center (Guoji
Shudian, known today as China International Book Trading Corpo-
ration).15 The monthly magazine China Pictorial (1955) printed high-
resolution photo essays about the feats of the New China. The newsletter
Peking Review began appearing in the 1960s, and many other period-
icals on current affairs were added later, among them: China’s Sports,
Chinese Literature, The Chinese Trade Unions, Chinese Medical Jour-
nal, and Scientia Sinica, all in their Spanish versions.16 News, bulletins,
and pamphlets streamed from China in the form of not only magazines
but also cables. As early as 1949, the Chinese government set up the
New China News Agency (later Xinhua) in key cities across the world.
In Latin America the first permanent office opened in Havana in 1959
and cooperated with the also newly created Cuban news agency Prensa
Latina (Latin Press).
A brief note about visual media and scenic arts is useful to justify
this chapter’s emphasis on the written word. Visitors to the PRC never
failed to attend Peking Opera performances and screenings of revolu-
tionary films. But the role of theater and cinema in the international
propaganda scheme pales in comparison to both the considerable im-
pact of the written word abroad and to the domestic protagonism of the
114 ❘ Chapter 3
scenic arts, which I will discuss in detail in chapter 5 in relation to the

memories of performances during the Cultural Revolution. The case of
cinema is very telling. Film was the crucial pedagogical instrument by
which the Communist government sought to reeducate its more than
half-a-billion population. Yet, whereas mobile film projection units al-
most quadrupled during the Cultural Revolution, its use of a rare film
format (Super 8–8.75-mm format) precluded the use of these reels else-
where.17 According to Chris Berry, the reason why the PRC developed a
unique film stock was not only to enable films to reach the countryside
with highly portable projection teams but also to reduce dependency on
imports. The drawback to this was the limitation it imposed on exports.
Beyond the technological issue, the question of the cultural industry
remained. If commercial cinema had been a key tool of propaganda in
previous large-scale initiatives of cultural diplomacy in Latin America,
like the US's Good Neighbor Policy, the Chinese did not possess the
global geopolitical standing to employ the power of mass culture abroad.
First, very few Latin American countries other than Cuba had formal
diplomatic ties with the PRC until the mid-1970s, so all the branches of
the film industry (production, distribution, and press) faced inevitable
trade barriers. Besides, unlike the popular taste for Hollywood that had
facilitated the international success of, for example, the Brazilian bomb-
shell Carmen Miranda’s musicals in the 1940s,18 Chinese model operas
and ballets were too stylized, overtly politicized, and acutely dissonant
for a Western mass audience. There was still a veil of mystery around
the idea of China, which, coupled with the anxiety around Commu-
nism in democratic countries, made the mass export of Chinese cultural
goods virtually impossible. If China favored a model based on cultural
exchange rather than the US approach, rooted in media diplomacy, this
was largely because Chinese humanistic culture was highly developed
while its media was still not globally integrated.19 The PRC thus relied
heavily on the labor of elite left-wing intellectuals, who could use their
humanistic knowledge and political standing to transmit China’s high
culture to their local publics. To that end, the printed page was their
most effective tool.
C u ltu r a l Assoc i at i o n
The Asociación Argentina de Cultura China (AACC) was created as a

byproduct of guided tourism. In 1953, its founder, the Argentine writer
Fina Warschaver, toured Beijing and a few other Chinese cities after
visiting the Soviet Union with a delegation of the World Peace Council.
Enthused by the copious bibliography in foreign languages at her dis-
posal and confident about the socialist ecumenism of the postwar years,
Warschaver came up with the idea of founding a cultural association
for the promotion of Chinese culture back home (see fig. 2). She soon
joined the Chinese Faction of the Argentine Communist Party (PCA)
and gathered a group of writers and critics to organize events and col-
laborate in a journal titled Cultura China: Revista trimestral de arte,
literatura e información general sobre la Nueva China (Chinese culture:
Quarterly magazine on the arts, literature, and general information of
the New China).20 Partly because the global peaceful coexistence atmo-
sphere of the period, and also thanks to the unusual congeniality of lo-
cal Communists and liberal intellectuals gathered in a democratic front
against fascism (in its local version, Peronism), the Asociación operated
under conditions that seemed optimal for a successful experiment of
Chinese cultural diplomacy in the Third World but promptly faced in-
ternal backlash. Warschaver’s papers provide an invaluable entryway to
Fig. 2. Fina Warschaver at a public lecture after her trip to the People’s Republic
of China, 1953. Copyright © Archive Alberto Giudici Warschaver, Buenos Aires.
116 ❘ Chapter 3
the premises, prejudices, and fantasies of what it meant for an Argentine

intellectual to write about China in the early stages of the Cold War. As
I will argue shortly, the disagreement over the precise meanings of “cul-
ture” and “Communism” was what doomed the efforts of the AACC.
Employing the amicable rhetoric of peaceful coexistence, both the in-
signia of the association ( jiayou; “friendship”) and the first editor’s
letter of the journal Cultura China (fig. 3) define their goal as bringing
the culture of New China to the general public. The grounds for an
epistemological mission based on divulgation can be traced thoroughly
in a personal letter to the party leader where Warschaver encourages
only partial support for philological research on China: “No en vano
en todo el mundo existe una ciencia llamada sinología que estudia la
cultura china. La Asociación como organismo de relaciones culturales
debe auspiciar esos estudios; no como tarea exclusiva pero sí impor-
tante para aquellos que se interesan por ella” (It is not in vain that, all
over the world, there is a science called sinology that studies Chinese
culture. As an organ of cultural relations, the Association should spon-
sor this kind of studies; it should not do so exclusively, but as an im-
portant form of assistance for those who are interested in it).21 Although
the editor’s letter does not make specific recommendations, it does put
forward a novel understanding of term “culture,” which legitimates the
potential for studying the “New” China: “La cultura de un pueblo, sin
embargo, no la constituye solamente la manifestación de su actividad
técnica o intelectual. La cultura, de acuerdo a los conceptos más moder-
nos de sociología, abarca también las formas de vida y el trabajo anó-
nimo del conjunto social” (Nonetheless, the culture of a nation is not
just the manifestation of their technical or intellectual activity. Culture,
according to modern sociological standards, includes the lifestyle and
the anonymous work of the social body).22 The use of “culture” here is
in line with the Marxist redefinition of this keyword that shifts its scope
from the humanistic to the sociological; that is, an independent and ab-
stract noun that in the second postwar no longer referred exclusively to
the general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development,
but also to particular ways of life, whether of a people, period, group,
or humanity in general. Apart from translations of the poets Xiao San
and Ai Qing mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Cultura China
includes works on the lifestyle of common people and cultural policy
in general. In its second volume, for example, Warschaver shares her
impressions of a day spent in the rural outskirts of Beijing where she
exchanged views with villagers about the changes occurring in their
Fig. 3. Cover of the journal Cultura China (Asociación Argentina

de Cultura China) 1, no. 2 (1954–55). Copyright © Archive Alberto
Giudici Warschaver, Buenos Aires.
country. In the typical gesture of revolutionary travel writing from Latin

America, the ethnographic nature of the conversation with the locals
takes on the density of testimonio, by which an individual’s personal
history of oppression operates as a metonymy of the social body thanks
to the mediation of the sympathetic outsider.
The sociological approach to culture is also patent in the attention
paid to the official policies regarding the reinterpretation of the Chinese
cultural heritage. In tune with this, the two volumes of Cultura China
include translated reports on official initiatives such as the reopening
118 ❘ Chapter 3
of museums and the restoration of ancient pottery, or on the reading of

the philosophy of Confucius in the light of socialism. Fina Warschaver
legitimates the use of propaganda material by invoking the flexibility
of culture as an all-encompassing phenomenon that transcends the di-
chotomies between high and low or pure and didactic art. She redefines
the object of study “culture” in theoretical terms to enable a political
reading in view of interlocutors beyond the Party. Methodologically,
this gambit recasts the intellectual activity of writing about foreign cul-
tures from philological analysis to sociological commentary and thus
endorses the use of propaganda as reliable evidence for a humanistic
scrutiny of Chinese culture at large.
The dilemma surrounding Warschaver’s Chinese cultural project is
nowhere better rendered than in a long dispatch to the secretary of the
Argentine Communist Party Gerónimo Arnedo Álvarez (1897–1980),
written sometime in 1956. It must be noted that the AACC operated
before the Sino-Soviet split and thus responded to the structure of the
Soviet Communist Party. The typed nine-page letter provides an inven-
tory of complaints about the party’s neglect of her initiatives in the Chi-
nese Faction. To some extent, this letter is a reverse archive, a catalog
of the Chinese projects that never were. The letter is also marked by the
negative, since it is catalogued as a piece of Warschaver’s outgoing mail,
and not with a response from Álvarez, which one would expect to find
among her correspondence. Did the letter ever go through? Or was this
a typed copy for record purposes only? Whichever the case, the absence
of Álvarez’s reply in Warschaver’s papers suggests a mise en abyme of a
one-sided conversation on cultural exchange.
The main disagreements with the party hinged on who the interloc-
utors of the AACC should be, namely, its constituency and its opposi-
tion. Among the activities detailed in the minutes of the association’s
meetings, there are art exhibitions, lectures, and events to host visitors
to the country, such as the Chilean painter José Venturelli who was then
residing in Beijing. In her papers Warschaver advocates for a concilia-
tory attitude in all fronts. She complains about the lack of support from
the party in seizing the legal momentum to increase advertising in large-
circulation media. She also encourages the recognition of government
institutions and officials, to the extent that she forwards an invitation
to the opening of an art exhibit to the president of the nation and pub-
lishes his reply in the second issue of the journal.23 As a general attitude,
she vehemently opposes any combative public stance, which she consid-
ers a false legitimation of the ideological struggle.
Ultimately, though, what is at stake in Warschaver’s clash with the

party regarding the promotion of Chinese culture is a symptom of the
larger debate about the cultural role of the Communist intellectual. Ac-
cording to Adriana Petra, even if the PCA became the only socialist
organization to come up with a policy to regulate intellectual activ-
ity, which it integrated into its local and semi-independent structures, it
also made sure that it could appease the resistance of those intellectuals
who questioned the party’s control over their work. In her study of
Argentine postwar Communist culture, she concludes that the Commu-
nist intellectual is a torn figure: “To serve a universal and transcendent
cause, they accept dependence on an external, nonintellectual authority
that demands complete commitment and before which they must le-
gitimize themselves. However, as long as they maintain their identity
as intellectuals . . . can only be fulfilled within the framework of an
organization that bestows a meaning and an orientation on their work
that is not purely intellectual, thereby freeing them of the individualism,
elitism, and alienation of the capitalist world.”24 Herein lies the key
to Warschaver’s irreconcilable literary and political careers. Accused of
“bourgeois formalism,” her highly psychoanalytic novels were consid-
ered a diversion from Communist labor, and even progressive voices
within the party were wary of them. In reference to the publication of
her novel La casa modesa (Modesa house) in 1949, the socialist poet
Elías Castelnuovo (1893–1982) acknowledged the value of the formal
exploration of the flow of consciousness but was quick to discredit
her work because of her gender: “Leí su libro. Apreciación sintética:
bueno. Si se tiene en cuenta que ha sido escrito por una mujer: muy
bueno . . . Su fuerte, no obstante, a mi juicio, es su punto vulnerable.
Porque su fuerte—el psicoanálisis—es un arma de dos filos. Para fre-
cuentar los llamados ‘territorios nocturnos del alma’ y proyectar allí
alguna luz se requiere una valentía y una franquea difícil en el hombre,
casi insalvable en la mujer . . . Insisto, para su gobierno, que Usted tiene
condiciones literarias nada frecuentes en la mujer” (I read your book.
In short: good. Taking into account that it was written by a woman:
very good. . . . Its strength, however, is also its weakness. Because that
strength—psychoanalysis—is a double-edged sword. It takes courage to
explore the so called “nocturnal territories of the soul” and cast some
light upon them; this is a courageous task for a man, an almost insur-
mountable one for a woman . . . Let me insist that, given your gender,
your writing skills are extraordinary).25 Unabashedly discredited on the
grounds of the literary aspirations of a woman, Warschaver’s fiction as
120 ❘ Chapter 3
well as her contributions to the party’s discussions on matters of cul-

ture, were usually neglected and furthermore overshadowed by those
of her husband Ernesto Giudici (1907–91), a prominent party leader in
educational matters.
Warschaver’s chairmanship of the association and her general atti-
tudes toward the writing of China were sensitive to the major debates
within the Communist leadership during those years. As a young female
writer invested in an epistemological enterprise about a strategic for-
eign culture, she had to reconcile her work as a cultural critic with her
status as a party intellectual in a rapidly changing ideological scenario.
The deterioration of relations between China and the Soviet Union to-
ward the end of the 1960s, as well as the reconsideration of the role of
culture within the local Communist Party, terminally compromised the
humanistic efforts of her amateur association. Her resignation letter in
1956 confirms both her commitment to the party as well as her sarcasm
toward its red tape: “Una dirección que por unanimidad es estalinista
y por unanimidad es anti-estalinista posee un don de ubicuidad que
considero poco beneficiosa para el partido . . . Pido se me releve de
mi actividad como responsable en frente de China y se designe a otro
camarada en mi reemplazo. Fina.” (A leadership that is unanimously
both Stalinist and anti-Stalinist is a remarkably ubiquitous gift, which
I do not consider beneficial for the party. . . . I request to be discharged
of my responsibilities as head of the China front and to have another
comrade appointed in my name”).26 The AACC was a short-lived initia-
tive. It dissolved in 1956, printed only two volumes of Cultura China,
and its editorial board disbanded along the way. Party politics, gender,
and a hesitant foreign relations alignment generated insurmountable
resistance to her cultural program with China, which resulted in it being
subdued from within the same networks that had enabled it in the first
place.
Sc atter ed Se r i e s
In the seventeen years between the establishment of the PRC (1949)

and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1966), state-run pub-
lishing houses printed major popular novels known today as the Red
Classics (hongse jingdian). Initially in line with Soviet socialist realism,
these works envisioned a wide-ranging social transformation by creat-
ing models of the socialist new person in a more egalitarian and self-
less manner. Among their titles are Red Sun (1961), Red Crag (1957),
The Builders (1964), or Great Changes in a Mountain Village (1961).27
The meaning of the term “Red Classic” expanded over time to include
works from the entire Maoist period (and beyond) that continue to be
referred to, reworked, and parodied to the present day.
In a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies on global Mao-
ism in 2015, Liu Kang observes the paradox of including this body of
literary works in the Chinese cultural diplomacy program. Kang notes
that while Mao’s personal idea of world literature and arts was practi-
cally nonexistent—he had shown little interest in Western culture, and
paid scant attention to Soviet and Russian arts even though he was
inspired by the USSR—the Chinese Communist Party still established
a massive “external propaganda” machinery, translating and publish-
ing Chinese works of revolutionary literature and arts in hundreds of
languages, aimed particularly at the Third World, where the majority of
the peasant populations could be potential revolutionary allies. Kang
questions the diplomatic effectiveness of the Maoist aesthetic impera-
tive in Europe by arguing that French thinkers invented their version of
Maoism “from their thousand plateaus of intellectual, philosophical,
and psychoanalytical height, far removed from the impoverished vil-
lages and mountains of the Third World, where Chinese Revolutionary
Model Plays would have hoped to find their echoes.”28 Nicolai Volland
is more optimistic of the original cosmopolitanism of the Chinese so-
cialist canon, as he tracks the unexpected literary diversions of the Red
Classics, such as how little-known authors in China would suddenly be-
come stars in the Eastern Bloc thanks to transnational socialist institu-
tions like the Stalin Prize.29 Regarding the Third World, both Kang and
Volland note that no evidence to date has shown the actual reception or
influence of these classics.
The following pages are an attempt to answer this question and, in
the spirit of Kang and Volland, explore the afterlives of the Chinese
revolutionary canon in Latin America. A first approach to this ques-
tion would be to consult the inventory of Spanish translations of Red
Classics by the Beijing Foreign Languages Press and then track down
their journeys as reprints in local presses. Yet, given the difficulties in
obtaining access to the Chinese archives of this period, the titles have to
be traced entirely through their reception. In view of this, the following
hypotheses are based on the study of the circulation of Chinese printed
culture in Argentina. Why Argentina? Maoism penetrated very deeply in
Argentina. With the imprint of the New Left and the May 1968 move-
122 ❘ Chapter 3
ment, several Maoist groups emerged in dissidence from the Commu-

nist and Socialist parties’ guidelines. These, as Adrián Celentano has
demonstrated, produced a rich body of printed culture that nurtured a
local version of Mao Zedong’s thought in Spanish.30 But above all, the
city of Buenos Aires became the midcentury world’s primary producer
and exporter of literature in Spanish, and Chinese translations managed
to make it into these rich and new series in the most unexpected ways.
The epicenter of the book industry shifted from Europe to Latin
America during the Spanish Civil War with the exile of Republican pub-
lishers, who settled in Mexico and Buenos Aires, transferring the model
of what was a very prosperous business (to mention a few examples of
the most famous publishers of this period: Losada, Espasa-Calpe, Tor,
Claridad, and Sudamericana). Whereas in Mexico the new industry or-
bited mainly around the enormous state-sponsored Fondo de Cultura
Económica (1934), in Buenos Aires a bevy of publishers proliferated,
varying in size, audience, and intellectual spheres, paving the way for a
more diffuse but diverse scenario. Amelia Aguado identifies eighty-one
presses officially registered up until 1956 and ninety more thereafter.31
Many other invisible and short-lived publishers subject to the censor-
ship of the intermittent military governments should be added to this es-
timated figure. Also, as Gustavo Sorá observes, the unique relationship
between the book industry and the state in each of the two countries
led to a consistent distribution of dominant genres between Mexico
City (social sciences and humanities) and Buenos Aires (literature).32
The South American city had an educated immigrant population, pro-
fessional translators, and a wide variety of presses. In the 1960s and
1970s, the two massive enterprises Editorial Sudamericana (founded
in 1939) and Centro Editorial de América Latina (founded in 1966)
catapulted Latin American literature abroad and disseminated foreign
literatures in Spanish throughout the continent on a totally new scale.
Whereas most of the foreign titles favored the French, English, and Ital-
ian literary traditions, the publishing series evidence occasional prefer-
ences for Asian works.
Since there is no unified record of Chinese titles published in Ar-
gentina during these years, the following hypotheses are based on an
empirical reconstruction of Spanish translations of Chinese titles gath-
ered from scattered series of corporate and independent publishers
of the period (table 2 [appendix]). The roughly hundred titles of the
partial, albeit eloquent, resulting database were put together manually
by browsing bibliographies and search engines such as WorldCat and
the UNESCO database Index Translationum, and mainly by collecting

them individually from second-hand bookstores in Buenos Aires. This
list solely includes Chinese titles that are literary works, a criterion that
deliberately sets aside a large bibliography of travel narratives, social
commentaries, and political essays about China that were written by
Latin American authors and proliferated during those years. This sec-
tion specifically focuses on the translation of fiction, essay, poetry, and
drama written by Chinese authors. For its part, the term “Chinese Lit-
erature” is vague and heavily contested in Chinese Studies because of
the outstanding scope of this category. In addition to the debates about
the many periodizations within millennia of textual production, there
is scholarly debate about whether Chinese Literature encompasses texts
originally crafted in any Sinitic script or by ethnic Chinese authors;
within the borders of mainland China or in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and
other sinophone areas; or before or after 1949. For the purposes of this
study, I use the category “Chinese literature” to refer to any literary
work produced by Chinese-born authors that was translated into Span-
ish and published in Buenos Aires roughly between 1940 and 1980.
By looking at the titles of Chinese literature published in Argentina
from the 1940s to the 1970s, it becomes clear that none of the Red
Classic novels mentioned earlier ever made it to an Argentine publisher
during this period. Conversely, the list also illustrates the alternative
body of Chinese works that circulated the most in Spanish. Shorter
post-1949 pieces imported directly from the PRC such as the play Entre
marido y mujer (Between husband and wife) by the Beijing People’s
Arts Theatre appeared in the magazine Cultura China in 1954, and
the play Reacción en la aldea china: Pieza en un acto (Struggle against
Counter-struggle: A One-Act Play) by Li Chih Hua came out in 1956,
with a preface by Raúl González Tuñón. Sparse verses by Xiao San
and Ai Qing were printed in the special volume of the Communist pe-
riodical Cuadernos de Cultura in 1959 in translation by the renowned
poet Juan L. Ortiz (1896–1978). Several Argentine presses close to the
Communist Party (La Rosa Blindada, Nativa, Huemul, Ediciones del
Tiempo, Marxismo de Hoy, and De la Paloma) reprinted Mao’s writings
for years. La Rosa Blindada, the most prominent Maoist publisher in
Argentina, was highly invested in promoting the poetry of Mao and of
its young, local militants; yet its catalog does not reveal any piece of
Chinese revolutionary narrative or poetry in translation.
Instead, the titles examined indicate that this was a period of un-
precedented publication of general Chinese literature. Other than the
124 ❘ Chapter 3
revolutionary literature mentioned earlier, the bulk of translations ex-

amined happen to be either dissident works or pre-1949 works. While
several of these were already circulating within the frameworks of the
Ibero-American publishing market in translations from French and En-
glish, many others were introduced by the Cold War cultural diplo-
macy programs and then merged into local publishing series. What is
revealing is that some books were diverted from their intended ideolog-
ical itineraries because of agents moving between these two apparently
parallel frameworks. The combination of multiple infrastructures for
the circulation of Chinese works in foreign languages, a general public
ignorant of, but increasingly curious about, China, and particularly the
porosity of the local cultural field led to the formation of a heteroge-
neous, unique, and scattered catalogue of Chinese literature in Spanish.
C u ltu r a l Col d Wa r
The all-time Chinese bestseller in Spanish is Lin Yutang (1895–1976).

Hailed as a “Chinese philosopher,” Lin was the modern Chinese writer
and intellectual best known to the West in the twentieth century. Be-
cause of his Presbyterian education and longtime residence in the United
States and Hong Kong, his oeuvre was written for the most part in En-
glish and therefore easily available for translation. Editorial Sudameri-
cana published his work uninterruptedly from the early 1940s until the
1990s with record-breaking sales. Colophons evidence more than thirty
different titles in Spanish, many of which were reprinted up to a dozen
editions. A proclaimed spokesman of Chinese culture, Lin’s fiction pays
close attention to manners and customs. It is notable that a novel such
as Peonía roja (1961; The Red Peony) dealing with the love life of a re-
bellious widow in turn-of-the-century China came out in the Sudameri-
cana series “Horizontes” (Horizons) alongside Anglophone authors like
William Faulkner (1897–1962), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), or John
Steinbeck (1902–68). In the logic of the world literary system, as envi-
sioned by Franco Moretti, where the novel of the periphery is a priv-
ileged site of compromise involving foreign plot, local characters, and
narrative voice, it appears that in the case of Peonía roja, distance from
its original culture of representation emancipates Lin Yutang from the
peripheral dictum.33 Local color aside, thanks to English, Lin Yutang
enters Latin America eminently as Anglo-American literature. Just like
Borges argues in his reviews that Chinese novels are fantastic and thus
critiques the world-system mandate that pigeonholes the “peripheral”

novel as a national allegory, the editorial gesture of labeling Lin Yutang
as an English-speaking author also emancipates him from his alleged
marginal position.
Two other authors of Chinese origin come up in Spanish translation:
Sheng Cheng (1899–1996) and Eileen Chang (1920–95). The former
was a Chinese nationalist Kuomintang supporter who lived in Paris as
an exchange scholar during the 1920s. A reform-minded intellectual
associated with the May Fourth Movement (1919), Sheng advocated
for the opening of China to the West, a cosmopolitan gesture praised
by Paul Valéry (1871–1945) in the preface to Sheng’s novel Ma mère
(1928; A Son of China, 1930; Mi madre, 1942).34 This allegorical nar-
rative, as well the subsequent Ma mère et moi à travers la première
révolution chinoise (1929; My mother and I; Mi madre y yo a través de
la revolución China, 1956) weave personal memoirs of his childhood
in China with maternal stories into consoling symbols of universal hu-
manism, similar in tone to the literature of Lin Yutang.35 For its part, La
canción de arroz (1955; The Rice Sprout Song) by Eileen Chang, also
adds a different voice to the repertoire of Chinese literature in Spanish
translation during these years. As David Der-Wei Wang observes in a
recent edition of Chang’s novel, “her inquiries into human frailty and
trivialities, her stylized depictions of Chinese mannerism, and her cel-
ebrations of historical contingency made her a perfect contrast to the
discourse of mainstream literature, represented by Lu Xun, Mao Dun,
and Ding Ling.”36 Published originally in English, The Rice Sprout Song
is a ruthless critique of the hardships of domestic life on the eve of
Communist rule.
Bilingual, diasporic, and dissident, these three testimonial macronar-
rators were banned in China during the Mao era. Their emergence in
Latin America during these years can be regarded as part of the mo-
mentum for Chinese fiction amid the general interest in China. Yet this
particular sinophone success also attests to the bipolar logic of the Cold
War: the fiction that vilifies Red China erects an alternative canon to
the exemplary Red Classics. The Cold War, after all, was a heated con-
frontation of civilizations, fought eminently through diplomacy and
intellectual work on the capitalist and socialist blocs. Now, how does
the “cultural cold war” play out in the Latin America? How do the
networks of Communist and anti-Communist diplomacy between the
USSR, China, and the United States unfold in the Spanish-speaking
literary world? Whereas much attention has been paid to the Cuban
126 ❘ Chapter 3
revolution in the Soviet cartography of the Cold War, less has been re-
searched about the ways in which Chinese culture comes into play in
Latin America.
A closer look at the infrastructure of this alternative Chinese canon
in Spanish points to a crucial agent that further complicates the relation-
ship between diplomacy, the Cold War, and the writing of China in Latin
America: Victoria Ocampo. Argentine patron of the arts, arguably the
main cultural mediator of world literature in Spanish during the twen-
tieth century, Ocampo was also vice president of the Argentine chapter
of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the anti-Communist ad-
vocacy group founded in West Berlin in 1949 to challenge the Soviet
sympathies of many Western intellectuals and fellow travelers, particu-
larly among liberals and the non-Communist Left. Although it claimed
to be an independent organization, it was revealed that the CCF had
received funding from US intelligence agencies and private foundations
since its inception. Take La canción de arroz. Eileen Chang’s novel was
originally published in English in Hong Kong in 1955 under the spon-
sorship of the US Information Service, a public agency created in 1953
to understand and influence foreign publics.37 It was quickly translated
into Spanish in 1956 at the press of Juan Goyanarte (1900–1967), a
Spanish-born editor from Buenos Aires who was also a stakeholder in
Victoria Ocampo’s journal Sur. The translation was done by another
member of Sur: Alfredo Weiss (1899–1955), who was also responsible
for several Spanish versions of Lin Yutang, the Chinese bestselling au-
thor almost exclusively published by Sudamericana, the press founded
in 1939 by—yet again—Victoria Ocampo. My point is that while Sur
did not explicitly condemn the Chinese revolution in its pages (as it
did with many other crucial historical events of the twentieth century
that were the focus of special editions), its constellation of contribu-
tors, translators, and publishers were players of the cultural war that
confronted—and gathered—progressive intellectuals of diverse ideolog-
ical backgrounds at the beginning of the Cold War. I do not intend to
demonstrate here that Sur was directly involved in an organized anti-
Maoist campaign, but rather that the actors and institutions of its con-
stellation used the multiple critical infrastructures of cultural diplomacy
programs to read and comment on Chinese literature in terms of their
own literary agendas.
Because the disputes of the Cold War were eminently ideological, they
involved minute linguistic adjustments. For example, how to fathom
the concept of totalitarianism after the defeat of fascism? Sur, in line
with the social democratic ethos of the CCF, focused on the totalitarian
continuities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, insisting, as
Patrick Iber explains, in Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold
War in Latin America (2015), that “culture could flourish only in the
absence of state control and that a just society could not abandon free-
dom of thought in the way that Communism required.”38 Despite the
different nature of their political systems, Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union, as well as Maoist China and Peronist Argentina, were read by
the journal as equally oppressive regimes due to the extent of state in-
tervention. Such are the terms that introduce La canción de arroz in the
book’s inside flap:
La acción de la obra se desarrolla en la China actual. El Ca-

marada Ku es enviado por el gobierno central a una pequeña
aldea asolada por el hambre para catequizar a sus escuálidos
habitantes, para demostrarles la excelencia de los hombres
que gobiernan al país y cantar loas y augurios de una larga
vida de diez mil otoños para el general-presidente Mao y de
sólo mil años para el régimen que lo sostiene en el poder. Por
momentos, nos sentimos transportados a uno de esos peque-
ños pueblos agrícolas argentinos de la época recientemen-
te salvada, con sus débiles convulsiones de protesta, y los
torpes forcejeos, las mezquinas maquinaciones del caudillejo
ventajero imbuido de una autoridad dictatorial, envuelto él
mismo a su vez en la aplastante maraña burocrática.
The action is set in contemporary China. Comrade Ku ar-

rives at a famished village in the countryside as an envoy of
the Central Government to preach among its starving resi-
dents, display the excellence of their rulers, and sing odes and
auspices of ten thousands autumns for Chairman Mao—and
just one thousand auspices for the regime that holds him in
power. At times we are transported to those Argentine agrar-
ian settlements from recently salvaged times, with their feeble
attempts at protest, clumsy combats, and selfish deliriums of
opportunist warlords vested with dictatorial authority, yet
trapped in the overwhelming webs of bureaucracy.39
The book description, most likely authored by either Weiss or Goya-

narte, reduces Chang’s novel to a critique of personalism by tracing an
128 ❘ Chapter 3
analogy between Chairman Mao and President Juan Domingo Perón

(1895–1974). Still haunted by the trauma of Peronism (in the quote
the present is referred to as “the recently salvaged times,” signaling the
1955 coup that overthrew Perón), the Chinese countryside is portrayed
as an iteration of populist totalitarianism in Latin America: a place of
social inequality that allows for the cult of personality and the arbitrary
use of power of “opportunist warlords vested with dictatorial author-
ity.” Without a word on its style or genre, here the Chinese novel serves
as mere evidence for an argument on comparative politics. Although
Weiss was a peripheral member of the journal, he interpreted dissident
Chinese fiction in ideological terms and, additionally, translated dissi-
dent authors and curated a series of modernist poetry inspired by Chi-
nese lyric, such as those by Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and Saint-John
Perse (1887–1975). Weiss’s example evidences translation as a complex
process of intellectual adaptation that relies on market conditions and
personal agency.
The C hin ese Wr i t e r a nd T r a di t i o n
So far the flow of Chinese narrative identified in the present survey

follows the expected circuits of Cold War cultural diplomacy: revolu-
tionary works are published by cultural organizations connected to the
Communist Party, whereas dissident novels circulate through the net-
works of the liberal Left, intimately linked to anti-Communist inter-
national organizations. Poetry, however, complicates this scheme. The
French, English, and to some extent Spanish-language book markets
were the entryway for Chinese classical lyric, a genre published consis-
tently in Spanish throughout the twentieth century and, as I will discuss
in the chapter 4, yielded the most creative experimentation with any
non-European language. Popularized by the Chinese craze of British
sinology and Anglo-American modernism, poets dating from the centu-
ries bce to the Tang dynasty had been published since the 1920s both in
series that showcased poetry and world literature in Spanish. Originally
translated into French and English, they were later rendered in Spanish
by renowned poets as diverse as the Spanish exiles María Teresa León
(1903–88) and Rafael Alberti (1902–99) or Raúl Ruy (1937–83). In the
foreword to his translation Poetas chinos vertidos del francés (1977)
(Chinese poets translated from the French), the socialist-realist writer
Alvaro Yunque (1889–1982) falls prey to the Orientalist fantasy around
Chinese lyric: “China es un país de poetas. La poesía está íntimamente

vinculada a su existencia cotidiana. Es la expresión esencial de su espí-
ritu” (China is a country of poets. Poetry is an intimate part of its daily
life. It is the essential expression of its spirit).40 Rafael Alberti transcends
particularism and identifies the Tang in a way that is evocative of Bor-
ges’s claim of universality in “El escritor argentino y la tradición”: “los
inmortales de la poesía china son patrimonio de la humanidad” (the
timeless Chinese poets are part of the world’s heritage).41 Tang poetry, I
argue, is the literary token of sinophilia, which has elevated it into the
ultimate form of Chinese literature that transcends epochs and political
views and is thus appropriated by a wide variety of writers and publics.
The glaring contrast between the formats of the seven Spanish-language
Tang anthologies surveyed here is evidence of their vast audience. Just
compare the leather binding, profuse ornamentation, and lacquered
motifs of the limited printings of La flauta de jade (1951, Editorial
Guillermo Kraft; The jade flute) and La poesía china durante la época
Tang (1952, Sociedad de Amigos del Arte Oriental; Tang dynasty Chi-
nese poetry) with the tiny font and pulp sheets of the slim paperback
Los poetas de la dinastía Tang (1970, Centro Editor de América Latina,
1970; Tang dynasty poets), published much later. While the former was
conceived as a luxury object geared to a public with a taste for art, the
latter was part of a massive encyclopedic project that contemplated the
mass distribution of books in newsstands, priced “cheaper than a kilo
of bread,” according to its editor Boris Spivacow.42
Mao Zedong himself was a fervent reader of Tang lyric. In fact,
Mao’s own poetry follows classical Chinese verse. Although the poems
he began writing in the 1920s are for the most part exaltations of the
feats of New China, their themes—the imposing beauty of the land-
scape, war, or mythological figures—echo those of Li Bai (701–62), Li
Shangyin (c. 813–58), or Li He (790–816). A good grasp of classical let-
ters and calligraphy is required to fully indulge in these pieces. Because
poetry in various forms was an important part of the state examinations
since the Tang dynasty, Mao also participated in this ancient tradition of
classical scholar-officials, all of whom wrote verses at least occasionally,
and some even in multiple volumes.43 But there was a generational gap
between him and the younger officers of the PRC. In the foreword to a
1974 edition of Los 37 poemas (Thirty Seven Poems), the Uruguayan
writer Sarandy Cabrera (1923–2005) is puzzled at the reticence of his
colleagues at the Beijing Foreign Languages Press to comment on the
chairman’s oeuvre: “Pregunté a varios compañeros de trabajo si podían
130 ❘ Chapter 3
entender los poemas de Mao y me contestaron que tenían algunas difi-

cultades para hacerlo. Les pido que me los traduzcan y me dicen que no
se animan, aun siendo ellos mismos trabajadores intelectuales” (I asked
several colleagues at work if they could understand Mao’s poetry but
they replied they had a hard time with it. I ask them to translate some for
me, yet, despite being intellectual workers, they do not dare to do this).44
Every edition of Mao’s poems had footnotes illuminating the obscure
classical references and allusions. Besides, Mao repeatedly claimed that
this style of poetry was a mere distraction that was part of his private
life, not to be encouraged in the younger generation of artists, who had
been instructed to portray the reality of the masses. The double stan-
dard of Mao as a poet of the old forms and an ideologue of proletarian
art is a paradox that runs through every aspect of Maoist cultural policy
and, consequently, of Maoist diplomacy. The crucial question was how
to reconcile thousands of years of tradition in a cultural model that
sought to do away with the past? How to capitalize such captivating
artistic legacy as a tool to gain recognition abroad? Tang poetry offered
a pedagogical opportunity. In his guidelines defining the task of the new
Chinese writer in 1954, Mao Dun (1896–1981), minister of Culture
and chairman of the China Writers’ Association, compared the new,
empowered characters, such as heroes of the National Liberation Army,
volunteers, model factory workers, peasants, members of youth leagues,
women, and children, to those who had been “exploited and oppressed”
in the past.45 A few years later, Fina Warschaver would publish such a
reading of Tang poetry in Cuadernos de Cultura, the same journal that
had published Mao Dun’s text in Spanish:
Una visión nada plácida de la vida palaciega es la que acom-

paña la biografía de estos grandes poetas. Ellos cumplen la
misión de fustigar la injusticia de los poderosos, recogen el
dolor anónimo del pueblo, golpean la conciencia dormida de
los gobernantes, denuncian la corrupción administrativa y la
rutina, cantan a la libertad. A veces personalizan sus críticas
y surge nítido el retrato; por ejemplo, en el poema de Po
Chu-i “Las sonrisas de Li Yi-fu,” donde la hipocresía de este
funcionario de la corte imperial se expresa gráficamente así:
“En la frente una cara sonriente, detrás una daga que mata.”
The biography of these great poets yields a rather unpleasant

vision of courtly life. They serve the purpose of punishing
the injustices of the powerful, collecting the anonymous pain

of the people, striking a blow to the numb consciousness of
their governors, denouncing administrative corruption, or
singing songs of freedom. Sometimes, they personalize their
criticism and thus make their point. Like in Po Chu-i’s poem
“Li Yu-fu’s smile,” which renders the hypocrisy of an impe-
rial officer in the following, graphic terms: “A smiling face in
the front conceals a lethal dagger in the back.”46
By exposing the dark side of life in the courts, Tang poetry becomes
an eloquent testimony of social injustice and domination. Warschaver’s
stress on the sociological reconfigures the genre from an exquisite art
form to a revolutionary genre of massive reach. Such was the gesture
that also monopolized the work of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the key figure
of modern Chinese literature and one of the few authors that survived
the revisionism of the Mao years. His use of the vernacular (baihua)
instead of the literary language (wenyan) and his criticism of feudal
customs garnered him the unequivocal praise of Mao as a soldier of
proletarian literature. When in 1956 the Communist press Editorial
Lautaro published Diario de un loco, the first ever Spanish-language
edition of Diary of a Madman, the biography on the front flap identi-
fied the then-unknown author in such militant terms: “Fino, humano,
dramático y sarcástico, su literatura está identificada con las luchas del
pueblo chino, con ese inmenso continente artístico, territorial y humano
que es China” (Subtle, humane, dramatic, and sarcastic, Lu Xun’s liter-
ature sympathizes with the struggles of the Chinese people; with that
immense artistic, geographic, and human continent called China).47
Whereas only a few Tang anthologies were exported to Latin America
via the Beijing Foreign Languages Press, most of the Spanish editions of
Lu Xun from this period came from the state press.48
Guided readings of the classics, reviews of the folkloric repertoire,
and adjustment of operatic scripts were common policies in the PRC
to make traditional culture fit into the revolutionary scheme. Despite
occasional phases of pluralism like the Hundred Flowers Campaign
(1956), intellectual freedom was very limited throughout and became
less tolerated over time. For example, the aforementioned poet Ai Qing,
who had traveled the world as cultural delegate of the New China, was
persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–58) and sent to
Northeast China for reeducation. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76)
escalated to an attitude of complete tabula rasa with the past. This en-
132 ❘ Chapter 3
compassed the classical and traditional, imported foreign culture, and

even works created during the first seventeen years of Communist rule,
when the arts had been managed in Mao’s name, by people he no longer
trusted.49 The campaign to destroy the “Four Olds” (customs, culture,
habits, and ideas) targeted writers and literary works, as well as histor-
ical sites, artifacts, and archives. Concurrently, it created an unprece-
dented new proletarian ideal true to a radical interpretation of Mao’s
vision of the arts at the Yan’an Forum in 1942. For a decade, cultural
production became circumscribed internally to the eight model operas
and ballets (yangbanxi), and the single Chinese author that crossed bor-
ders in translation was Mao Zedong. Thus, it is intriguing that the sur-
vey of translated books indicates that it is during this latter iconoclast
stage that a fair number of Spanish translations of Tang narrative, op-
era, folktales, and oral literature appear for the first time in Argentina.
More intriguing is the fact that all these titles bear the print of a name:
Bernardo Kordon (1915–2002), president of the Sino-Argentinian
Friendship Association, cultural agent of Maoism in Argentina. This is
where the twisted networks of cultural diplomacy come fully into play.
Maoist A g e nt a nd Si no p hi l e E di to r
Mesmerized by a performance of the Peking Opera at the Colón Theatre

in Buenos Aires in 1956, the writer Bernardo Kordon visited China in
1957 and soon became the president of the Sino-Argentine Friendship
Association. Although the exact dates of his tenure are not clear, records
indicate him as the intermediary between local intellectuals and Chinese
officials up until the early 1980s. In the span of these decades, Kordon
made eight trips to China and published five travel narratives on the
achievements and transformations of the socialist nation of which he
was so fond. Both a sinophile and a Maoist, he distanced himself from
the Argentine Communist Party after the Sino-Soviet split but, surpris-
ingly, never joined either of the two pro-China parties that emerged
thereafter. An active writer, translator, journalist, publisher, and printer,
Kordon curated a personal collection of Chinese literature in Spanish
thanks to his privileged—and oscillating—position in the Chinese cul-
tural diplomacy scheme and in Buenos Aires’s vibrant publishing scene.
Apart from Cuentos de la dinastía Tang (1965, Capricornio; Tang
dynasty short stories) and Cuentos chinos con fantasmas (1969, Juárez
Editor; Chinese stories about ghosts), Kordon translated tales, apho-
risms, legends, and ancient stories in the anthology Así escriben los chi-
nos: Desde la tradición oral hasta nuestros días (hereafter Así escriben
los chinos; 1976, Ediciones Orion; Chinese writing: from oral traditions
to the present), reprinted in 1981 as El cuento chino (1981, CEAL; The
Chinese short story). Contrary to Fina Warschaver’s sociological grasp
of Chinese culture through an overall illustration of its arts, economy,
and current affairs, Kordon retains the mimetic ideal of philology, by
which a nation is best depicted in its primitive, indigenous—folkloric—
expression (the feats of the New China, of which he talks abundantly,
are published in a separate bibliography of travel writing).50 This is a
singular form of criticism that delimits an ancient corpus to search for
the origin of a vernacular culture, but that, unlike philology, disregards
erudition, explication, and interpretation:
En esta ocasión, deliberadamente he prescindido de toda refe-

rencia erudita, tanto para no fatigar al lector con anotaciones
infinitas—e inútiles casi siempre, dado lo alejado de nuestros
respectivos contextos históricos—como para dejarlo librado
al puro goce estético, al ritmo pleno del relato. También, y
correlativamente, he buscado recortar la zona más antigua
de la narrativa china, pero destacando su vertiente popular y
bullente, antes que la más clásica y dogmática.
In this case, I have deliberately omitted any erudite references,

in order not to burden the reader with endless footnotes—
endless and usually useless given the distance between our
respective historical contexts. Also, to let the reader embrace
the pure aesthetic pleasure and the sheer rhythm of the nar-
rative. At the same time, I have tried to delimit the most an-
cient part of Chinese narrative, highlighting its popular and
vibrant corpus, rather than its classical and dogmatic one.51
According to the preface, the distance between the context of produc-

tion and reception of the text is such that any possible explanation is
futile. Therefore, it is up to the reader to “embrace the pure aesthetic
pleasure and the sheer rhythm of the narrative” without any explica-
tion. Chinese literature, Kordon appears to suggest, is to be enjoyed,
not understood. As the quote concludes, the preference for narrative
over lyric also responds to the distaste of “dogmatic” genres, like the
extremely formulaic Tang poetry.
134 ❘ Chapter 3
A marked distrust for any form of pedagogical literature is also ev-

ident in the absence of translations of contemporary authors, which is
in keeping with the stances defined by Mao at the Yan’an Forum. The
single post-1949 short story Kordon includes in Así escriben los chinos
is omitted in the reprint of the anthology in 1981, after Mao’s death.
The closing paragraph of the 1976 preface evidences the reluctance to
incorporate this story even during the Mao years:
Y por último cierra esta antología un cuento que ejempla-

riza la actual literatura china que comienza a formarse con
el aporte de “campesinos, obreros y soldados” impulsados a
tomar el pincel, que en China tanto sirve para escribir como
para dibujar. A esta literatura que expresa la cotidianidad y
sus transformaciones pertenece “El retrato”, un cuento del jo-
ven escritor Feng Tchang, que vive en Nankin, donde escribe
una novela sobre la construcción del gran puente que desde
hace poco cruza el legendario Yangsen en su parte más ancha.
The last short story of this anthology is an example of con-

temporary Chinese literature, which begins to take shape
thanks to the contributions of “peasants, workers, and sol-
diers,” who are encouraged to pick up the brush, which in
China is a tool for writing as well as drawing. “The portrait”
belongs to this literature that depicts daily life and its trans-
formations. Its author is the young writer Feng Tchang, from
Nankin, where he is currently writing a novel about the re-
cent construction of a great bridge that crosses the widest
section of the legendary Yangsen.52
Unlike the enthusiasm evident in the introductory discussion of the

other stories, the tone here is neutral: Kordon merely situates the piece
in literary history and provides a basic biography of the author and
a minimal outline of the plot. The use of quotation marks to refer to
“peasants, workers, and soldiers” as writers underscores how this state-
ment is quoted rather than voiced. Furthermore, the subsequent refer-
ence to the paintbrush in the structure “the brush, which in China is a
tool for writing” builds the expectation of the trope of the revolutionary
writer, who uses arms and letters interchangeably (“a tool for writing as
well as fighting”), but revisits the ancient type of the calligrapher who
literally uses the brush to write and draw (“a tool for writing as well as
drawing”). The final visual image conveys—with ample irony—a nos-

talgic feeling for the iconic landscape of Jiangnan. The lower Yangzi
River Delta fashioned as a land of beauty and refinement in the arts of
the classical period becomes the mere topography of a recent massive
infrastructure work, the new protagonist of the story.
How did this cultural agent of Maoism defy the aesthetic imperative
he was supposed to represent and in turn put forward his own? The
material conditions of his work provide a clue. Contrary to the rigorous
bureaucracy watching over official Chinese institutions, there was min-
imal enforcement from China for its cultural ambassadors locally. In
his autobiography the Argentine intellectual Juan José Sebreli (1930–)
remembers the precarity of the Friendship Association: “una organiza-
ción fantasma compuesta casi exclusivamente por Kordon y su mujer,
Marina, en posesión de un sello de goma y un papel con membrete. Me
adherí junto con algún otro, el crítico literario Jorge Raúl Lafforgue y
creo que nadie más” (a phantom organization consisting merely of Kor-
don and his wife, Marina, that just had a rubber stamp and letterhead
paper. I was one of its few members, together with the literary critic
Jorge Raúl Lafforgue and probably nobody else).53 Besides, like many
other intellectuals in the orbit of China, Kordon was a “fellow traveler,”
somebody who sympathized with the party’s goals but was not bound
to its authority (and thus did not suffer the leadership’s verticality as
Fina Warschaver did with the AACA). Furthermore, for South American
intellectuals, traveling to China meant traveling the world. The long
journeys to Asia included stopovers in Paris, and thus those immersed
in the allure of Chinese culture could further fill their luggage with Eu-
ropean translations of Chinese works.54 The aforementioned Jorge R.
Lafforgue (1935–2022), a key figure in the Latin American publishing
scene, recalls dragging hefty suitcases filled with books across the many
airports between Beijing and Buenos Aires in 1965.55
Just as the archive of Chinese literature in Spanish is scattered across
publishers and series, so is Kordon’s own dossier. Probably to avoid
any form of surveillance from Chinese authorities, although most
likely to escape the local censorship of the intermittent military gov-
ernments—he went into exile for a brief period in 1969—each Chinese
work he edited, translated, or prefaced came out in different presses,
including his own label Capricornio, issued at his family printing busi-
ness. Kordon’s mark on the Spanish-language Chinese archive should be
tracked beyond the books or magazines that indicate his name in any
of these trades. Instead, it should be viewed as made possible by the po-
136 ❘ Chapter 3
rous configuration of the cultural field in which editors, writers, critics,

and scholars worked together in parallel to the university, which was
shut down after the 1966 coup. The epitome of this intellectual solidar-
ity is the aforementioned CEAL, an unprecedented editorial enterprise
to massively produce low-cost editions of literature, arts, and general
knowledge to compensate for the university’s neglect of its educational
mission in times of coercion. Among the five thousand titles published
between 1966 and 1995, CEAL included Tang poetry and narrative an-
thologies, Lu Xun’s novels, art books on Chinese painting, and mono-
graphs of ancient and modern literature in series curated by Kordon
and Lafforgue: “Por Bernardo leí entonces muchos textos de la litera-
tura clásica china, de la cual yo tenía un conocimiento bastante precario
. . . . Con él compartí la admiración por la poesía de Li Tai Po y de Tu
Fu, disfruté los trabajos de Lu Sin, el escritor contemporáneo favorito
de Kordon, y recuerdo que antes de viajar dejé corregidas las pruebas de
su antología de Cuentos de la dinastía Tang, que tradujo del francés y
que se publicó bajo el sello Capricornio” (It was through Bernardo that
I read a good deal of Chinese classical literature, with which I was only
barely familiar . . . . I shared with him the admiration for the poetry of
Li Bai and Du Fu, I enjoyed the works of Lu Xun’s—Kordon’s favorite
contemporary author—and I recall that before traveling I completed the
proofs of his anthology Tang Dynasty Short Stories, which he translated
from the French and published in the press Capricornio).56 Herein lies
the originality of the Chinese literature archive in Spanish. This archive
is heterogeneous, slippery, and unforeseen: it was 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. Distance, no doubt, plays a key role
in the fragmentary nature of such body of works, since many of the
Spanish translations were completely new, and those who read and cir-
culated the literature of the antipodal country intervened from their
literary expertise rather than as specialists on Asia. Perhaps this lack of
professional training is what explains the absence of Spanish versions
of the Red Classics—or any other long-format narrative, like the novels
reviewed by Borges in the 1930s and 1940s—and, in turn, the preemi-
nence of shorter pieces such as short stories, poems, or essays.
But distance is not the one explanation for this scattered archive. Im-
mediate neighboring countries can produce an equally dispersed body
of works in translation. Gustavo Sorá demonstrates in Traducir el Bra-
sil: Una antropología de la circulación internacional de las ideas (2003;

Translating Brazil: An anthropology of the international circulation
of ideas) that Argentina was the second place—after Paris—where the
largest volume of Brazilian fiction was translated during the twentieth
century.57 Yet, as Sorá argues, the body of Portuguese translations of
the literature of neighboring Argentina was scattered, concealed, and
even unknown to its authors for a long time, leading to the general
impression of remarkable ignorance between geographically proximate
cultures. The lack of a state-sponsored editorial policy to translate, ed-
ucate in, or promote the literary works of either the closest or furthest
possible foreign culture, left this task entirely to the cultural field, where
critics, writers, and translators circulate titles, authors, and genres out-
side the framework of their culture of origin in light of personal prefer-
ences and singular aesthetics of their catalogs. The particular “critical
infrastructure,” whose origins Guido Herzovich identifies in the simul-
taneous expansion of the book industry and the eruption of literary
criticism in the 1950s, provided a malleable arena for the circulation
of Chinese literature in the cultural field during the Maoist years. The
vibrant milieu, reconstructed in this chapter as comprised of numerous
independent literary journals and presses headed by young, middle-
class, left-wing writers and critics, was the major context that diverted
Chinese literature from its ideological itineraries of cultural diplomacy
and channeled it through critical ones.
Sc a r r ed In t e l l e c t ua l
If Warschaver and Kordon had read China in a culturalist vein, paying

attention to forms of representation and literary history, the younger
representatives of the New Left read Chinese culture solely in theoret-
ical terms. The significant “China” in the artistic-cultural field of the
1970s no longer evoked Peking Opera, tradition, or even socialist real-
ism, but rather Mao’s vision of the revolutionary intellectual. With the
radicalization of Maoism as an international theory of revolution to-
ward the late 1960s, the proportion of cultural delegations to the PRC
diminished in comparison to cohorts of guerrilla trainees, and Mao’s
writings almost entirely replaced the previous general interest printed
culture that had flowed from Beijing.
No other Argentine publication illustrates the theoretical shift in the
reception of Chinese printed culture more vividly than the literary jour-
138 ❘ Chapter 3
nal Los libros (1969–76). Forerunner of Punto de Vista (1978–2008),

this mythical periodical was the Spanish-language gateway for the new
critical trends in literary theory like structuralism, semiology, and psy-
choanalysis. Edited by writers and scholars identified with the revolu-
tionary Left such as Beatriz Sarlo (1942–), Carlos Altamirano (1939–),
Héctor Schmucler (1931–2018), and Ricardo Piglia (1941–2017), Los
libros quicky shifted its lens from offering an ambitious review of ev-
erything published in the social sciences and humanities to studying
the conditions of production of culture or, as its subtitle had it after
1971, a “political critique of culture.” In its most effervescent Maoist
stage, the magazine dedicated an entire volume to the legacy of the Cul-
tural Revolution in China. Apart from translated pieces from the French
magazines Cinétique and La Chine, and the Italian Quindici, it included
two essays on Mao by Ricardo Piglia: “Mao Tse Tung: Práctica estética
y lucha de clases” (Mao Zedong: Aesthetic practice and class struggle)
and “Lucha ideológica en la construcción del socialismo” (The ideolog-
ical struggle in the construction of socialism).
In Marx and Freud in Latin America (2012), Bruno Bosteels uses
Piglia’s two articles in Los libros as the ideological backdrop against
which to read the fiction that Piglia had written at the time. In a very
thorough analysis of Piglia’s short story “Homenaje a Roberto Arlt”
(Tribute to Roberto Alrt) included in Nombre falso (1975, Fake name),
Bosteels suggests that, aside from the Argentine writers Roberto Arlt
and Jorge Luis Borges, Mao Zedong is a veiled precursor of that story.
In “Homenaje,” Bosteels claims, the combination of Arlt and Borges
in the treatment of plagiarism tackles the politico-economic dimension
of revolutionary action. Following the premise that epigrams, be they
falsely or correctly attributed, are a source of ideology in Piglia, Bosteels
reads all kinds of thematic and stylistic textual appropriations in the
story. Falsification, he argues, not only brings about a new literary aes-
thetic but also attempts, by attacking the very principle of the private
appropriation of the written, to annihilate the cult of originality that is
the basis of aesthetic judgment throughout modernity.
Bosteels stresses the differential ideological value of this story, which
has been overlooked by mainstream scholarship on Piglia’s ideas on pla-
giarism, usually concerned with Respiración artificial (1980, Artificial
Respiration) and the later historical context of dictatorship. He also high-
lights the rare historiographical appeal of the articles in Los libros for the
general study of Maoism in Latin America, remarkably timid in criticism
(despite the abundance of primary sources) and unjustly silenced by its
own protagonists. While Bosteels laments that many former Maoist in-
tellectuals such as Beatriz Sarlo are adamant about the futility of looking
back on their militant years, he is more optimistic about Piglia’s ambi-
guity toward his own Maoist past. Bosteels acknowledges the “strange
omission” of the two Maoist articles in the most complete bibliography
of Piglia’s work as a critic and author of narrative fiction and in Conv-
ersación en Princeton (1999, Conversation in Princeton), but ultimately
hopes that Piglia “perhaps never renounced his Maoist past.”58 The sec-
tion of Bosteels’s book titled “In the Shadow of Mao” is “an attempt to
fight against this cursed tendency toward intellectual orphanhood and
forgetfulness.”59 In what follows I do not intend to challenge Bosteels’s
analysis of “Homenaje a Roberto Arlt” nor provide theoretical grounds
for Piglia’s possible retrospective glance over his Maoist militancy. In-
stead I examine one of the last pieces of Piglia’s work, to shed light on
how the use of epigrams might suggest Gao Xingjian (1940-) as a veiled
precursor that reconfigures Piglia's own position vis-à-vis the revolution-
ary process, Chinese culture, and world literature. If Piglia’s fiction of the
mid-1970s is marked by the shadow of Mao and the New Left, his later
years reveal the shadow of Gao and the Communist exile.
The most immediate source to explore Piglia’s look back on Maoism
would be the travelogue of his three-months trip to China in 1973 (fig.
4), which can be consulted at Princeton University, together with his
complete papers. Although this text never saw the light, Piglia intended
to revise it and publish it alongside his last works from the series Los dia-
rios de Emilio Renzi (The Diaries of Emilio Renzi). His untimely death in
2017 affected this plan, and even if news articles occasionally announced
it, close collaborators confirmed that the Chinese journal would not be
published without careful editing.60 The single excerpt of the journal that
was indeed edited and published came out in the literary supplement of
the Argentine newspaper Clarín on April 27, 2012, and was reprinted a
week later in the Spanish daily El País. Titled “Un día perfecto” (A per-
fect day) and only a thousand-words long, the piece offers a fair number
of cues to speculate about Piglia’s later ideas on Chinese culture, world
literature, and the configuration of a cosmopolitan intellectual.
The opening lines of “Un día perfecto” set the overall retrospective
tone of the text: “Aquí, en la costa oriental, el sol se pone en la bahía.
Alguien recordó que el atardecer no existía como tema poético para los
griegos. Todo el mérito era para el amanecer y sus múltiples metáforas:
la aurora, el alba, el despertar. Recién en Roma, con la declinación del
imperio, Virgilio y sus amigos empezaron a celebrar el ocaso, el crepús-
140 ❘ Chapter 3
Fig. 4. Ricardo Piglia’s poses alone in the countryside during his visit to the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China, 1973. Copyright © Marta Eguía de Piglia. Courtesy of
Ricardo Piglia Papers, Princeton University Special Collections, Princeton, NJ.
culo, el fin del día. ¿Habría entonces escritores del amanecer y escritores
del crepúsculo? . . . ¿Cómo podríamos definir un día perfecto? Tal vez
sería mejor decir, ¿cómo podría yo narrar un día perfecto?” (Here, on
the Oriental coast, the sun sets over the bay. Somebody once said that
sunsets were never a trope for the Greek. They only credited sunrise
and its multiple metaphors: daybreak, dawn, the awakening. It was as
late as Rome, with the decline of the empire, that Virgil and his friends
began to celebrate dusk, sunset, the end of the day. Would you say there
are sunrise writers and sunset ones? . . . How could we define a perfect
day? Or rather, how could I narrate a perfect day?).61 These first lines
suggest that in a parallel move to the setting sun, empires decline and
writing also comes to an end. Following this hypothesis, a nostalgic
Piglia gazing at the glare of the summer twilight in Uruguay anticipates
his attempt to look back and narrate a perfect day. Yet the initial de-
scending metaphor is marked by a paradox. Hinting to the playful geo-
graphic ambiguity of “Oriental” as both Asian and Uruguayan, the text
in fact opens with a scene of disorientation: in this particular Orient, the
sun sets in the East. We are left to wonder, then, how much contradic-
tion will the narrative of his perfect day entail as well?
The text immediately goes back in time with an entry from July 6,
1973, that reproduces the typical tone and tropes of the socialist trav-
elogue, which as Sylvia Saítta has demonstrated in Hacia la revolución:
Viajeros argentinos de izquierda (2007, Towards the revolution. Left
wing Argentine travelers) inaugurated a way of narrating the revolution
that quickly evolved into a transnational genre.62 Young Piglia describes
his triumphal landing in Beijing, his first encounters with the uniformed
youth, and his impressions of the massive Tiananmen Square. Political
excitement turns into erotic bewilderment: “Me siento tan desorientado
que me enamoro de la primera mujer que me habla” (I feel so disoriented
that I fall in love with the first woman that talks to me).63 In the closing
line of the text, Piglia answers the question from the first paragraph
with a rhetorical question. The remote spatial and temporal distance
that separates him from his younger self indeed forces him to reexam-
ine the “perfect” nature of that thrilling day. Between parentheses that
increase the rhetorical effect of the question, he wonders: “Tenía treinta
años. Estaba del otro lado del mundo. ¿Sería así un día perfecto?” (I was
thirty years old. I was on the other side of the world. Is that what a per-
fect day might be like?).64 But the crucial answer lies in the penultimate
passage, where Piglia recalls the origin of his Chinese trip in another
flashback within what is already phrased as reminiscence:
De pronto una tarde me encontré en la calle Corrientes con

Bernardo Kordon, a quien yo le había publicado los Cuentos
completos en la editorial donde trabajo. Nos sentamos a to-
mar un café, charlamos de bueyes perdidos y al rato Kordon
sacó una libretita y me preguntó si quería viajar a China.
Había una vacante, Edgar Bailey a último momento no ha-
bía querido ir. Mucho quilombo, le dijo Edgar. Kordon es
presidente de la Asociación de amistad Chino-Argentina, va-
rios escritores nacionales ya han viajado al Celeste Imperio,
como él lo llama. No tengo ninguna obligación, y si quiero
publicar algo sobre China a la vuelta, mejor. Pensé que podía
escribir un diario de viaje que al mismo tiempo fueran las
observaciones de un hombre solo.
Walking down Corrientes street one afternoon I suddenly

ran into Bernardo Kordon, whose Complete Short Stories I
had published in the press I work for. We stopped for coffee,
chatted about this and that, and out of the blue Kordon took
142 ❘ Chapter 3
out a notebook and asked me if I wanted to travel to China.

There was a spot, Edgar Baily had cancelled last minute.
“Too much of a hassle,” Edgar had said. Kordon is the pres-
ident of the Sino-Argentine Friendship Association, and has
sent many other national writers to the “Celestial Empire,”
as he calls it. I am not bound to do anything upon my return;
if I want to publish something, all the better. I thought I
could write a journal that included one man’s observations.65
Once again, cultural diplomacy is marked by chance, literary friend-

ship, and personal projects. According to Kordon, Piglia can travel, even
without having to make any publication commitment whatsoever. The
travel journal Piglia fantasizes about is equated to what he calls “obser-
vaciones de un hombre solo.” Herein lies the key. Is he referring to the
writing of China as a solely individual enterprise, detached of an insti-
tutional or ideological framework, like Warschaver’s or Kordon’s? Or
does “one man’s observations” stress the existential solitude—the bad
conscience—of the intellectual in face of the masses? The image of a man
separated from the crowd is, after all, recurrent in “Un día perfecto”:
1.
Un campesino de sombrero redondo que trabaja solo en un
campo de arroz. Creo que va ser el único hombre solo al que
voy a ver a partir de ahora.
2.
En el aeropuerto de Shanghái me separan del resto de los
pasajeros.
3.
. . . voy solo en la noche estrellada.
4.
Por fin entramos en la plaza Tien An Men, infinita y vacía.
5.
. . . (la campanilla) suena en algún lugar lejano. Nadie viene.
1.
A peasant with a round hat, working alone at a rice paddy.
I think he is the only man that I will see alone from now on.
2.
At Shanghai’s airport I am separated from the rest of the
passengers.
3.
. . . alone I travel under the starry night.
4.
We finally enter Tiananmen Square, infinite and empty.
5.
. . . (the doorbell) rings in the distance. Nobody comes.
Following Bosteels’s premise that epigrams are the source of ideology in

Piglia’s writing, I also read the phrase “un hombre solo” as an epigram:
“at times these are relatively autonomous phrases interpolated into the
body of the text, while at others they establish authentic maxims, or
rules of thought, at the beginning of a book or chapter. In each case,
they serve to condense the ideology of literature as well as its critique on
the part of Piglia.”66 In this light, I argue that the phrase “observaciones
de un hombre solo” echoes the Spanish title of Gao Xingjian’s novel El
libro de un hombre solo (2001; One Man’s Bible), revealing that the
new veiled authority of the phrase that condenses the stance of Piglia’s
Chinese journal is none other than that of a Maoist dissident.
Gao Xingjian’s El libro de un hombre solo is a personal memoir of
brutality in red China. The novel follows the style and themes of the
“Scar Literature” genre that emerged in China after the death of Mao,
gathering Chinese writers for whom fiction was the only way to heal the
wounds of the past decades. Gao, seeking to avoid censorship and po-
litical persecution, left for France in the 1980s and has remained there
ever since. In 2000 he was the first Chinese national to receive the Nobel
Prize for literature, an award condemned by the Chinese authorities.
The parallelisms between the narrators of El libro de un hombre solo
and “Un día perfecto” are remarkable: the novel’s unnamed main char-
acter is an alter ego of Gao, a successful writer who travels the world
and in the solitude of hotel rooms is confronted with memories of his
past. The biographical trajectories are also parallel: two male authors
from the same generation who embraced the revolutionary utopia of
the 1960s from opposite edges of the planet and later became reputable
world authors consecrated through translation and cosmopolitan liter-
ary networks. My hypothesis on the epigram is my analysis of what I see
as an eloquent parallelism. Yet the question remains: did Piglia actually
read Gao? It is likely that he was at least familiar with his work. That
the first Chinese-born author to win the Nobel Prize for literature was
an outspoken critic of Maoism might have caught his attention to some
degree. More specific networks of world literature probably exposed
144 ❘ Chapter 3
Piglia to his work. Perhaps the French literary residency Maison des
Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs in Saint-Nazaire, where they both
participated in the 1980s, was a source of contact. Or Piglia’s Princeton
University years, where an exiled Chinese author living in France could
have easily made it into world literature syllabi and symposia. Even
in Buenos Aires, through Yu Lou (1984–), Piglia’s most recent Chinese
translator, Gao might have come up in conversation at some point.67
Whether deliberate or not, the reading effect of the epigram is autono-
mous. It closes Piglia’s unstable relationship with his Maoist past and
provides a conclusive answer to it. Pace Bosteels, there is an obvious
ambiguity over Piglia’s silence regarding Maoism in his later years. The
fact is that an Argentine (ex-?) Maoist and a Chinese dissident share
something in their understanding of literary practice to the extent that
they rely on basically the same epigram.
A final twist in Piglia’s use of epigrams though opens the interroga-
tion again. The introductory paragraphs of “Un día perfecto” reappear
verbatim in the final pages of the third tome of Piglia’s last published
work, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi (The diaries of Emilio Renzi). Also
titled “Un día perfecto,” the new fragments omit both the reference to
the Uruguayan sunset and to Piglia in the scene of writing. Immedi-
ately after the question “¿cómo podría yo narrar un día perfecto?” (how
could I narrate a perfect day?)68 the diary moves on to a different entry.
Both the connecting phrase “por ejemplo” and the entire recollection of
the first day in China have disappeared. In that case, is the 2012 “Un día
perfecto” actually a published excerpt of the Chinese journal or Emilio
Renzi’s diaries? If it is the latter, just like the “strange omissions” of the
Maoist articles in Piglia’s collected works noted in Bosteels’s book, the
final volume of Los diarios de Emilio Renzi fully overlooks the Chi-
nese episode. This deliberate traffic of epigrams, authored by Gao or
Piglia himself, would suggest then that Piglia’s ambiguous relation with
Maoism is by no means a product of “orphanhood and forgetfulness,”
as Bosteels laments, but a programmatic ideological take on memorial
literature.
The retrospective glance at the Maoist experience has become partic-
ularly relevant in recent years with the fiftieth anniversary of the Cul-
tural Revolution and the commemorative work around it. In chapter
5 of this book I analyze recent memoirs and documentaries produced
by children of Latin American intellectuals who settled in China to
serve the revolution and whose art provides a singular take on intimate
genres and political legacies, as well as the historical value of affective
archives. In this chapter, by contrast, I have provided a macro-analysis

of Maoist diplomacy by studying its institutions, canons, and aesthetics
in Latin America. Rather than a local iteration of global Maoism, I have
demonstrated that its twisted networks and intellectual flows nurtured
singular aesthetic projects in the reading of Chinese humanist culture at
large. In the absence of formal repositories, I have taken a sociological
approach to translation to gather titles, articles, and letters never studied
before as a consistent archive. Methodologically, I have read paratexts
such as book covers, inside flaps, and forewords, as legitimate spaces
of critical intervention. The following chapter engages further with the
material circulation of the Chinese poetry studied in this chapter but
in regarding the optical and haptical experimentations of the ideogram
of the avant-gardes throughout the twentieth century. Translation, as I
will argue shortly, is also an act of media transfer that implies physically
transcreating media across cultural boundaries.
Chapter 4
The Surface of the Ideograph

Visual Poetry and the Chinese Script
At the center of Daniel Santoro’s drawing Días peronistas (2002; Per-

onist days), the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón embraces
his wife Eva as they stand on a neoclassical pedestal amid a stream of
iron bars and arabesque greenery (fig. 5). Evoking fascist symbology,
the benevolent-looking leaders embody the industrial strength that is
shown as emerging from the nation’s fertile soil. Yet, suspended above
the figures is a set of Chinese characters that disrupt the aesthetic con-
ventions of this iconography, or at least, of its manifestation in South
America. Is this a nod to Maoist visual culture? Even if Mao’s pro-
paganda machine coincided with the triumphant imagery of Peronism
that Santoro retrospectively reworks, a hypothesis on connected history
would refer not to the political regime in the antipodes (which Perón
distrusted, by the way) but rather to its past. The rows and columns of
Chinese signs in fact compose two poems of the Tang dynasty: “Deer
Park” by Wang Wei (699–759) and “Quiet Night Thoughts” by Li Bai.
The sudden emergence of a textual fragment from the golden age of
Chinese literature in the Argentine’s uber-political artwork poses larger
questions about the historical interpretation of classical culture, the
translation of a text from Asia to South America, and, specifically, the
media transfer between poetry and painting.
147
148 ❘ Chapter 4
Fig. 5. Daniel Santoro, Días peronistas, ink on paper, Manual del niño pero-
nista, 2003. Copyright © Daniel Santoro.
If there is any historic connection between classical Peronism (1946–

55) and the Tang dynasty that Santoro’s drawing appears to suggest, it
is that both represent the heyday of their respective civilizations. The
red characters arranged vertically to the left echo the title of the draw-
The Surface of the Ideograph ❘ 149
ing, also printed in Spanish at the center of the page. ri ming

guang (“day/sun,” “bright,” “light”) is a literal (albeit ungrammatical)
translation of “sunny day,” which is the meaning attributed to the Ar-
gentine idiom “Peronist Day.”1 The brightness metaphor woven by the
Chinese words signals both the saying in Spanish as well as its pictorial
representation: the splendor of Peronism in the drawing of the two lead-
ers, and the grandeur of Chinese culture in the poems, from where the
three red characters are drawn.2
The discussion about the poetics of the Chinese script expands if
we consider the material production of its signs, the physicality of a
writing system that has fascinated the Western imagination for cen-
turies. A long-time student of Mandarin, Santoro also uses his artist’s
sketchbooks as language workbooks. In his published exercises Manual
del niño peronista (2003), political and psychoanalytical motifs coexist
with radicals, logograms, and sentences apparently transcribed from a
textbook of Mandarin for beginners, such as “Hello, how are you?” or
“I am your friend, are you mine?”3 Far from calligraphy, which would
imply attention to design and instrumentation in the production of aes-
thetically pleasing writing, Santoro’s handwriting is hastily scratched in
marker pen, and alternates traditional and simplified characters, ren-
dering curious versions of classical Chinese lyric in the standardized
script of the PRC. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of text and image in
Días peronistas resituates the Tang lines back to their original medium:
painting. The quartet “Deer Park” is in fact only a fragment of a larger
poem written over a massive horizontal landscape scroll, whose original
is lost and the earliest surviving copy is from the seventeenth century. A
conscious examination of the materiality of the Chinese script opens a
cross-cultural consideration of the nature of writing, poetry, and media.
Santoro’s example anticipates the hypothesis that will run through the
current chapter: Chinese scriptural poetics penetrated in Latin America
not in the continent’s textual tradition but in its visual arts. It was not
traditional lyricists but visual poets and plastic artists who innovated
poetically with the surface of the Chinese script. If the Chinese language
was conceived as the paradigmatic counterexample of phonetical writ-
ing from early modernity to poststructuralism, Latin American poets
exploring the limits of the word and the image largely ignored what Chi-
nese signs represented, but still represented them in their own ideogram-
matic poetry. José Juan Tablada crafts pictographic glyphs with silk,
pottery, and other transpacific imports of the Manila Galleon; Haroldo
de Campos recreates the architecture of classical quartets in concrete
150 ❘ Chapter 4
grids and mimics the cinematic experience of unfolding handscrolls via

modern design; Severo Sarduy tattoos ideograms and uses acupuncture
needles to puncture writing on the body. In this vein, translation does
not entail the linguistic transfer from an original text, but rather the op-
tical and haptical transcreations of an interface across space and time. I
retrace this “paleographic” approach to Latin American ideogrammatic
poetry in the reconstruction of a decades-long exchange between these
and other poets and artists obsessed with Asia such as Octavio Paz or
Salvador Elizondo (1932–2006). If there is a uniquely Latin American
critique of logocentrism, I conclude, it is the deconstruction of Western
writing through the manipulation of the ideograph.
C hin ese Text s
To claim a superficial, exterior, slight, or minor echo of Chinese poetics

in Latin American letters is not to say that Latin American poets were
never interested in China. As I discuss at the beginning of this book,
modernistas recreated a personal Orient via the portrayal of Asian
artifacts and peoples. It can also be argued that colonial connections
played a role: Brazilians were somewhat closer to China thanks to the
Lusophone poetry of Macao, which used a local patois that combined
Portuguese and Cantonese. But if the general modernista enthusiasm
for Oriental themes can be traced to direct sources (trade, immigration,
colonialism, etc.), the exposure to Chinese literature is still inescapably
tied to the French language, namely, to the anthologies Le livre de jade
(1867) and La flûte de jade. Poésies chinoises (1920).4 The former was
one of the earliest substantial compilations of Chinese poetry in any
European language. Translated by Judith Gautier (1845–1917) and her
Chinese tutor Ding Dungling (1831–1886), the anthology was a com-
mercial success, reprinted several times, and for generations the princi-
pal source of Chinese lyric for the general public in the West.5 In “La
muerte de la emperatriz de la China,” Rubén Darío’s sinophile character
Recaredo “adores Judith Gautier,” and Gautier, in turn, “adores Chinese
princesses” in Darío’s poem “Divagación” (“Digression”).6 Machado de
Assis (1839–1908) used Gautier’s volume in 1870 for his eight poetic
adaptations of the Tang in “Lira Chinesa” (Chinese lyre) as did José Juan
Tablada for his homage to Li Bai in Li-Po y otros poemas (1920).7 If, as
chapter 2 demonstrates, sinology was fostering translations of Chinese
lyric into English, French, and German in the first half of the twentieth
century, modernismo only had ears for French. As Mariano Siskind ob-
serves in Cosmopolitan Desires, Rubén Darío’s idea of the universe, and
his resulting vision of the Orient, is inevitably determined by a French
standpoint: “Even if Darío’s world does not extend far beyond Spain,
France, and Western Europe (because his Japonaiseries and Chinoiseries
are not attempts to reach Japan or China but rather exoticist repre-
sentations at the heart of nineteenth-century French culture), he sees
that narrow map as the extent of a world that is universal because it is
devoid of marks of cultural particularity or Latin American local color.
What Darío cannot see—what his modernist subjectivity prevents him
from seeing—is that his world is imprinted with some of the most sa-
lient markers of French culture.”8 For modernistas at large, the sonority
and visuality of Chinese poetry were framed by the harmony of French.
In his later years Octavio Paz (1914–98) lamented that Chinese po-
etics had so faint an echo in Latin America. Paz is without a doubt
the intellectual that engaged most systematically with Asia through
Indian philosophy, Japanese aesthetics, and Chinese art. Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s he took diplomatic positions in Tokyo and New
Delhi, where he complemented his readings with impressions of daily
life that form the basis of the poems of Ladera este (1978; East Slope)
and the essay Vislumbres de la India (1995; In Light of India). Paz’s
Asian sojourn was also central for developing works that engage most
explicitly with the limits of writing, mainly Blanco (1966; Blanco) and
El signo y el garabato (1973; The sign and the scribble). In Asia he also
became immersed in kavya and tantric poetry, as well as in the structure
of Sinitic and Sanskrit languages, which he never read but dared to
study to translate Matsuo Basho’s haikus (in collaboration with Eikichi
Hayashiya [1919–2016]) and Tang poetry (in consultation with Wai-
Lim Yip [1937]). The insights from this lifelong East-West exploration
manifest as much in his personal inquiry into the connected histories of
Mesoamerica and the Indian subcontinent as in key themes in his work
such as poetry, antiquity, rituality, eroticism, or language. In short, Paz
read, wrote, lived, and loved Asia.
Paz was the single Spanish-language contributor to book Nineteen
Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987) by the US poet and essayist (and
Paz’s friend and translator) Eliot Weinberger (1949–). Weinberger’s
essay is a clever review of the successive translations of Wang Wei’s
famous poem “Deer Park” (the one on the left in Santoro’s Días per-
onistas). With a similarly witty take on translation as Borges’s in “Los
traductores de las 1001 noches,” Weinberger compares twenty versions
152 ❘ Chapter 4
of the short Chinese quartet in English, French, German, and Spanish,

thus tracing the evolution of the art of translation. A longtime friend
and collaborator, Paz wrote the afterword to the book, which starts off
with a regret:
[Weinberger’s] examples come from English, and, to a lesser

extent, from French; I am sure that a parallel exploration
of German or Italian would produce similar results. Wein-
berger cites only one Spanish version, my own. There may
be another, and perhaps one or two in Portuguese. One must
admit, however, that Spanish and Portuguese do not enjoy a
corpus of Chinese translation similar in importance or qual-
ity to that of other languages. This is regrettable: the modern
era has discovered other classicisms besides that of Greco-
Roman culture, and one of them is China and Japan.9
The note on the discovery of classicism is a reference to the historical

sense of Anglo-American modernism: “the drive that compels a man to
write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling
that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it
the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous exis-
tence and composes a simultaneous order.”10 Tradition, in the words of
T. S. Eliot, is not a fixed canon but, rather, a flexible set of conventions
to be molded by younger generations. Although Paz does acknowledge
modernismo’s cosmopolitan “discovery” of Greek and Latin antiquity
(a “discovery” made by the French neoclassicists), he calls for a broader,
farther-reaching cosmopolitan attitude, one that extends to the Chinese
and Japanese classical periods. Here Paz is thinking of Pound, who
stretched the boundaries of tradition through translation and became,
in the oft-quoted words of T. S. Eliot, “the inventor of Chinese poetry
for our time.” In an operation that Haroldo de Campos understands as
the epitome of “transcreation,” Pound used translation to criticize his
own linguistic instrument and subject it to the most varied diction for
poetic creation:
Thus, Pound . . . embarks on the task of translating Chinese

poems and Japanese Noh plays; Provençal troubadours;
Guido Cavalcanti; French symbolists; and making use of his
experiences in the handling of Laforguean logopoeia (“the
dance of the intellect among words”), he rewrites Propertius
in “vers de société” and translates the Trachiniae of Sopho-

cles into a colloquial American speech driven by the beats of
slang. His work is both criticism and pedagogy, since while
it diversifies the possibilities of his poetic of idiom, it also of-
fers up to new poets and readers of poetry a whole repertory
(often unsuspected or obscured by the conventions of aca-
demic taste) of basic poetic products, now reconsidered and
revivified. “Make it new”: give new life to the valid literary
past via translation.11
Translation becomes here an exercise of creative writing, a gloss of

world literature in poetic form. Later in the afterword to Nineteen Ways
of Looking at Wang Wei, Paz concludes that the absence of such poet-
translators explains the unfortunate missed connection between Latin
America and Asia:
The translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry into En-

glish have been so great and so diverse that they themselves
form a chapter in the modern poetry of the language. I find
nothing similar in French, although there are notable trans-
lations, such as those by Claude Roy or François Cheng.
Certainly, we owe to Claudel, Segalen, and Saint-John Perse
poetic visions of China—but not memorable translations.
It’s a pity. In Spanish this lack has impoverished us.12
This fragment reveals two substantial premises on the infrastructure

of world literature or, in other words, on the conditions of possibil-
ity so that a text can cross cultural boundaries. Again, like Borges, for
whom Arthur Waley’s “delicate versions of Murasaki are classic works
of English literature,”13 Paz also considers that a text in translation in-
augurates a new poetical lineage in the target language. Borges’s the-
ory of translation is more radical though, since he posits that the utter
opacity of the source language is not detrimental to a good translation
(as discussed in chap. 2, the further away from the original, the richer
a text the translation becomes). Paz, instead, holds that when it comes
to poetry “memorable translations” (neither “notable” nor “poetic”)
are only executed by translators who are good poets and have a good
grasp of the source language. Paz’s taxonomy of translators in the above
quote has geopolitical implications: linguistic groups with more poet-
translators (such as the English) produce richer poetry than those with
154 ❘ Chapter 4
good individual philologists and good poets (France), and evidently

more than those in want of either (Spanish). This yields the conclusion
that translation is a necessary condition for a text to enter a new cul-
tural sphere; yet poetic translation is what enriches it.
Even though Paz acknowledged the avant-garde innovations of the
Mexican Efraín Rebolledo (1877–1929) or José Juan Tablada’s Japo-
nisme, he was not off the mark when in 1987 he bemoaned the virtual
absence of poet-translators working from Chinese into Spanish. Direct
translation from Chinese into Spanish is a relatively recent phenomenon
enabled by the growing interest in China at the turn of the twenty-first
century as well as by the formal training of scholars and poets in Chi-
nese. Miguel Ángel Petrecca’s (1979–) translations of modern and con-
temporary Chinese lyric; Fernando Perez Villalón’s (1975–) Tang poets
seen through Pound and Haroldo de Campos; and Guillermo Dañino’s
(1929–2023) extensive volumes on Du Fu, Li Bai, and Wang Wei are
probably the most remarkable examples of recent direct translations of
Chinese poetry in the region.14 As shown in chapter 3, the coincidence
of Maoist cultural diplomacy and the midcentury publishing boom did
produce an original catalogue of Tang lyric in Spanish. But those were
indirect translations by poets utterly unfamiliar with the Sinitic script.
Some had read some Chinese literature; others sympathized ideologically
with Communism and interpreted classical voices accordingly; the finest
ones happened to be residing in China at the time of translation, and
their versions are marked by ongoing conversations with renowned art-
ists (Juan L. Ortiz, to mention the most salient one).15 In line with Borg-
es’s model of indirect translation, all these translators relied entirely on
European specialists when it came to grappling with the original text.16
Paz’s verdict on poetic translation is particularly fruitful for con-
sidering classical Chinese as a source language, given the many layers
involved in the translation of an “original” hand-painted poem, in an
unpronounceable language, and in a grammar that does not inflect
subject, tense, or number. To exhibit this palimpsest feature of Chinese
poetry, some bilingual editions include a transcription of the Chinese
characters, as well as their transliteration to the pinyin romanization
system, the literal correspondence of each Chinese word, and finally, the
paraphrased version.17 Each of these steps implies not only a semantic
transference of meaning between languages but also a morphological
transformation, a phonological reconstruction, and a spatial reorgani-
zation of signs. This palimpsest feature of translation could be a fac-
tor when dealing with any language that uses nonalphabetic writing
systems. Yet, in a discussion of poetic translation, the Chinese script is

imbued with a set of myths that project the ideas and desires of both
Westerners and the Chinese. First, the Chinese script is the main ele-
ment that has forged the myth of an enduring “Chinese civilization,”
which has vested what we now call “China” and “Chinese culture” with
an aura of permanence and immutability. This dates back to the early
modern figurations via Jesuits’ accounts that saw in the ancient Chinese
script the formula for a universal language. In both a philosophical and
practical sense, a pictographic system like Chinese, thinkers speculated,
would render the immediate connection to the spirit as well as operate
as a lingua franca at a time when Latin was fading due to the emergence
of European vernaculars. In this “Chinese prejudice,” Jacques Derrida
sees a limited initial attempt to overcome the metaphysics of phonetic
writing: an attempt “recentered upon ahistorical grounds which recon-
cile the logico-philosophical (blindness to the condition of the logico-
philosophical: phonetic writing) and the theological points of view.”18
The infatuation with the Chinese script faded in the nineteenth century
with the advent of evolutionary philosophies of history. According to
Christopher Bush in Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing and Media
(2009), these theories “doubly banished the exteriority, formalism, and
lifelessness of writing: temporally, to a prehistorical past, and spatially,
to the East. While the latter gesture was consistently reinforced by the
isomorphism of every aspect of Oriental cultures (all static, fossilized,
ahistorical, materialist, spatial, despotic, and ideographic), the former
relied on a normative teleology that opposed these qualities to the West
(dynamic, historical, spiritual, temporal, free, and alphabetic).”19 Bush
argues that the reemergence of Oriental writing at so many pivotal mo-
ments of modern critical discourse would seem to suggest an overturn-
ing of inherited images of the Orient as the antithesis of the modern.
Yet the ideograph’s traditional associations were precisely those that at-
tracted the experimental aesthetics of European modernism at large, he
claims. With all its errors and fallacies, Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscript,
“The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” edited and
published by Ezra Pound in 1920, generalized the notion that Chinese
poetry was inseparable from its writing system, that its poetic nature
resided precisely in the dense metaphorical quality of its signs.20 While
this is only true of a very small percentage of Chinese logograms, the
idea of poetry as a sequence of clear images became Pound’s ars po-
etica in Cathay (1915) and moved into the English tradition. As Bush
concludes
156 ❘ Chapter 4
The “ideograph” is conventionally understood as a form of

writing that is ancient and Chinese. It is neither. The ideo-
graph is a modern Western invention, one contemporane-
ous with, and related to, such other modern inventions, such
other forms of writing, as the telegraph or the cinematograph
(the ideograph posits language’s reduction to a reified, al-
most technical medium, on the one hand, and a revelation
of its material being in an explosion of textures, tones and
shapes, on the other. . . . For modernists, the ideograph was,
in a word, a way of thinking about language as writing.21
An imaginary construction of a startlingly rich script, vested with a

significant historical aura, and yet terribly alien to Latin American po-
ets, who barely engaged with it in their translation work, the ideograph
has only superficially touched the Latin American lyric tradition. Along
these lines, Octavio Paz’s theory that poetic translation is the most pow-
erful form of translation that enriches a cultural tradition would yield
to the conclusion on the untranslatability between China and Latin
America. But, following Emily Apter’s embrace of “untranslatability”
as a fundamental principle of comparative literature, I take a step away
from habitual frameworks of adequatio in Translation Studies and re-
frain from measuring “semantic and stylistic infidelity to the original
literary text,” to emphasize language over literature, and determine “se-
mantic loss and gain as a result of linguistic erosion or extinction.”22
C hin ese Text ur e s
This brings me back to the second part of my hypothesis that in Latin

America the poetics of the Chinese script unfolds on the surface. This
claim is a methodological one, which envisions the surface not as a
residual external category that conveys the inaccessibility of an alleged
essence within but as the opposite. I follow Giuliana Bruno’s notion of
“surface” as texture as the locus where the artistic experience unfolds
at its fullest. In Surface Matters: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and
Media (2014), Bruno elevates the visual object from a strictly optical to
a haptical phenomenon, that is, relating to the sense of touch: “the re-
ciprocal contact between us and objects or environments indeed occurs
on the surface. It is by way of such tangible, ‘superficial’ contact that we
apprehend the art object and the space of art, turning contact into the
communicative interface of a public intimacy.”23 Bruno explores crit-

ical operations in film, architecture, and performing arts that unfold
on the surface, with the broader aim of articulating the surface as a
site of mediation, transfer, and transformation. The surface understands
the object of art as a set of material relations: “Many changes affected
by the migration of images manifest themselves texturally as a kind of
surface tension, which affects the very ‘skin’ of images and the space
of their circulation.”24 I suggest that switching the focus from the lin-
guistic to the visual illuminates a whole new dimension of the Chinese
script. In this light the ideograph is no longer conceived as mere text but
as texture too. I am interested in how the optical and haptical aspects
of the surface of Chinese glyphs (calligraphy, font, style, spacing, etc.),
as well as the surfaces on which they are inscribed (paper, silk, parch-
ment, scrolls, porcelain, and skin), pose crucial questions about media,
technology, and tradition that are overlooked in the effort to decipher
linguistic meaning in a cultural context that is largely blind to it. In this
vein I am thinking of writing in terms of what Roland Barthes defines
as “scription,” the muscular act of tracing signs. In his “Variations sur
l’écriture” (1973; Variations on writing), Barthes moves away from the
metaphorical implications of writing to explore its corporeality: “that
gesture by which the hand holds a tool (awl, cane, pen) places it on
top of a surface, and slightly pressures or caresses it tracing regular, re-
current and rhythmic forms (to put it bluntly: let us not forcefully talk
about ‘signs’).”25
The invitation to explore the haptical dimension of Chinese writing
entails a consideration of the tangible signifying elements of literary
languages, some of which are linguistic and some technological, such as
supplies, instrumentation, and site of inscription. These aspects become
more intriguing when considering translation between distant regions
of the globe and remote epochs. I take on Haroldo de Campos’s master
concept of transcreation to acknowledge, with Borges, that the further
source and target texts are, the richer the translation process becomes:
we may say, then, that every translation of a creative text will always
be a “re-creation,” a parallel and autonomous, although reciprocal,
translation—“transcreation.” The more intricate the text is, the more
seducing it is to “re-create” it. Of course in a translation of this type, not
only the signified but also the sign itself is translated, that is, the sign’s
tangible self, its very materiality (sonorous properties, graphical-visual
properties.)26 As a radical modernist, Haroldo understands poetic sig-
nification in terms of Pound, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), or e.e.
158 ❘ Chapter 4
cummings (1894–1962), and thus transcends the realm of the referen-

tial to engage most intimately with the linguistic materiality of words
(their sound, morphology, and graphic design). I propose to take this
engagement with the materiality a step further and consider not only
the multiple “verbivocovisual” (verbal-vocal-visual) aspects of the sig-
nifier Haroldo embraces in his work but, specifically, the technological
ones too. Transcreation, in the following pages, stands as the transfer of
language technologies; that is, the tangible techniques, skills, methods,
and processes used in the recreation of a source text into a target text
that illuminate world literature in its material and medial dimension.
In Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture
(2014), Andrea Bachner studies different forms of media inscription
of Chinese signs (that she names “sinographs”) to inquire into the
signifying principles of this unique language in relation to the many
geographical contexts where it unfolds. Her wide-ranging study is fo-
cused in Southeast Asia and North America, however Bachner cred-
its the Brazilian concrete poets for their highly theoretical use of the
ideograph/sinograph notwithstanding their ignorance of the language.
Yet she is less enthusiastic about other Western poets (such as Pound,
Tablada, or Victor Segalen) who, in the hype of modernist sinophilia,
also explored sinographic material, but with what she considers less
interesting results: “Western writers, while reclaiming the ideographic
method for their own creative process, hardly ever set out to craft po-
etry with sinographic material. The poetry resulting from the appeal
of Chinese writing by poets creating in European languages and their
(mostly) alphabetic scripts might well be ideographic—depending on
what the term was intended to express at any given moment—but they
are rarely written in Chinese. Indeed, Chinese writing, viewed through
the lens of a phonetic script tradition often signifies merely as a figu-
rative specter.”27 While Bachner’s semiotic analysis posits these poets’
sinographs as “figurative specters”—forever metaphorical entities that
merely supplement the alphabetic text—I argue that these sinographs
instead actualize the matter of writing when seen through the lens of
visual culture. It is no surprise that what I consider to be the most in-
sightful discussion of the ideogram in Latin America was conducted
by poets who were also visual artists. The modernist poet José Juan
Tablada was also an illustrator and art critic; Haroldo de Campos’s
modern eye for design shaped his poetry; Severo Sarduy was trained in
fine arts and painted throughout his prolific writing career. The three
shared a fascination with Asia that led them to incorporate themes and
forms from different fields of the arts and also to engage with the vi-
suality and materiality of sinophone scripts.28 Tablada introduced the
poetics of haiku, wrote about ukiyo-e prints, and included a variant of
the kanji ( shou in Chinese; kotobuki in Japanese) in his collection
Li-Po y otros poemas (1920). In addition to employing the “ideogram”
as the general metaphor of concrete poetry, Haroldo de Campos’s trans-
creations of Chinese lyric, collected in Escrito sobre jade: Poesia clásica
chinesa reimaginada por Haroldo de Campos (1996; hereafter Escrito
sobre jade), include actual transcriptions of literary Chinese verse. Sar-
duy, whose neobaroque fiction abounds with characters from Havana’s
Chinatown or peripatetic Tibetan monks, made a series of paintings
in the 1970s that bear traces of these scripts (such as Première leçon
d’acupuncture, Demi-visage à la chinoise, and Untitled: Abstract in
Red with Black Calligraphy). The philosophical questions on language
that these artists addressed are also informed by a plastic inquiry about
forms and media. If the Chinese language was used as the paradigmatic
counterexample to phonetical writing from early modernity to post-
structuralism, these artists exploring the boundaries of the word and
the image wondered what and how the signs represented, but, in this
very interrogation, they also had to represent them. The poetic potential
of this question is boundless: how do you craft symbols without having
any of the required linguistic or practical capacity? Except for Haroldo
de Campos, who studied kanji under the supervision of a Brazilian pro-
fessor of Japanese, none of the other artists had any proficiency whatso-
ever to decipher or reproduce such glyphs. Thus, when examining their
“writing” of sinographs, it becomes particularly pertinent to inquire as
to the scriptural traditions that came into play. How does calligraphy
come into action? What about format, instrumentation, support, and
supplies? As I argue in the following pages, a “paleographic” approach
to these works (or rather “neographic,” to honor Barthes’s complaint
about the lack of a formal study of the aesthetics of modern writing)
weaves possible threads between antipodal and seemingly untouched
cultural traditions as well as with vernacular scriptural forms (nonver-
bal writing systems, folk art, and religious rituals).29
This approach also unveils a decades-long conversation on language
and visual poetics with other Latin American artists enamored with the
East. Sarduy dedicates “Ying Yang,” his essay on Salvador Elizondo in
Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1969; Written on a Body), to Octavio Paz,
who in turn dedicates to Elizondo El signo y el garabato (1973; The
sign and the scribble). In this collection, Paz takes up Tablada’s visual
160 ❘ Chapter 4
innovations from the early twentieth century, and Elizondo does as

much in a raving review of Haroldo de Campos’s Ideograma, poesía,
lenguaje (1978 Ideogram, poetry, language). Sarduy also praises Har-
oldo’s ideogrammatic method in his own seminal essay on concrete art
“Towards Concreteness” (1979), and Haroldo returns him (and Judith
Gautier) the homage in the title of his Chinese translations in Escrito
sobre jade (Written in jade). In 1986 Haroldo publishes his Portuguese
transcreation of Paz’s Blanco together with their correspondence about
translation, modernism, and Asia.
All these artists spent considerable time in Asia or were sufficiently
immersed in these cultures to experience their poetry in ways that went
beyond the merely textual. Both in Himalaya or the outskirts of Paris,
they visited Buddhist temples where hanging scrolls were read, wor-
shiped, and preserved; in Tokyo and New York they stocked their book
collections with kibyoˉshi pulp fictions as well as Japonist editions that
read from right to left; their close ties with migrant communities in their
hometowns exposed them to the methodologies of Asian literacy and its
writing supplies. In sum, these visual poets transcreate the Chinese script
not just in the words of the text but in the very textures of their books.
Hierog ly ph s a nd C uto ut s
The digitalization of José Juan Tablada’s graphic archive by the Instituto

de Investigaciones Filológicas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México (UNAM) sheds new light on the crucial role of the visual arts
in the Mexican poet’s work. In the introductory essay to the archive,
titled “La escritura iluminada por la imagen” (2003; Writing lit by the
image), its curator Rodolfo Mata traces multiple visual articulations in
Tablada’s intellectual biography: a childhood initiation into the picto-
rial observation of nature; formal training in watercolor at the military
academy; collaborations with other painters from Latin America; illus-
tration of his own editions; art criticism; and public advocacy of the
arts in Mexico.30 Tablada’s fascination with the Orient, sparked by his
actual sojourn in Japan in 1900 (discussed in chap. 1), further informs
this graphic inquiry. In his Japanese crónicas compiled in En el país del
sol (1919), he details the plastic art facet of his hobbies:
En las amables siestas de farniente cuando humea el té amo-

roso y afuera sopla el tifón me entrego a mil faenas exquisi-
tas para mi espíritu de bibeloteur y de enamorado del arte.

Ya es la aplicación del ácido oxálico sobre la mancha amari-
llenta que apareció en el margen de un libro amado que por
arcaico merecía ser incunable; ya es la preparación del pega-
mento para restaurar una deplorablemente rota faienza de
Kutani, ya es la renovación de la naftalina que preserva de
los destructores lepidópteros el arcón lleno de viejas telas; ya
es la fabricación de un diafragma para montar un grabado o
bien el simple registro en el catálogo de un bibelot adquirido
en un instante de vena.
In the cozy and lazy siestas when the tender tea steams and
the typhoon blows outside, I give in to the thousand exqui-
site chores that nurture my spirit of bibeloteur and lover of
the arts. Whether this is applying oxalic acid on a yellow-
ish stain on the margins of a beloved book so old that it
seemed to be an incunable; or preparing the glue to mend a
dilapidated Kutani faience; whether replacing the mothballs
that preserve the old fabrics in the chest from the menac-
ing lepidopterous, or fabricating a diaphragm to mount an
etching; or simply registering in the catalog the latest bibelot
acquired in a propitious instant.31
His poetic collections Un día: Poemas sintéticos (1919), El jarro de

flores: Disociaciones líricas (1922), and Li-Po y otros poemas (1920)
are rare instances in which modernista orientalism embarks on a search
for new forms.32 I say “rare” because although Tablada’s representation
of Asia consistently retains the modernista exoticist gaze of his Fran-
cophile peers, his avant-garde experimentations with form (synthesis,
fragmentation, and visuality) are intimately marked by an engagement
with the materiality of Asian textualities. Much has been written about
his introduction of haiku as a poetical form in the Hispanic Ameri-
can tradition and, to a lesser extent, about his ideographic method.
But almost nothing has been said about his actual manipulation of the
Chinese script and how it can serve as an entryway to a discussion of
antiquity, folklore, and world literature. In the following I argue that
Tablada’s modernism consists in illuminating the prehistory of writing
to deconstruct the metaphysics of the alphabet. He introduces visual po-
etry in the Hispanic lyric tradition by exploring the semiotic potential of
ancient pictographic scripts, both from Asia and Mesoamerica, and thus
162 ❘ Chapter 4
complicates the calligramatic experimentations of the avant-gardes, as

well as the geopolitics of primitivism. Like his fellow modernistas, he is
mesmerized by chinoiserie objects, which in his work take on a distinc-
tive textual function. Finally, by shedding light on the traffic of artifacts
and raw materials across the Pacific, Tablada redefines the uses of goods
such as silk, paper, or porcelain in terms of writing, thus breaking tra-
ditional connotations of high and low culture usually associated with
calligraphy, chinoiserie, and folklore in general.
Tablada’s Li-Po y otros poemas (1920) introduces visual poetry in
Latin America. Together with the Chilean Vicente Huidobro’s Ecuatorial
(1918; Equatorial) and Poemas árticos (1918; Arctic poems), these are
the first pieces in American Spanish to break with the linearity of tradi-
tional verse. Following Mallarmé’s irregular dispersion of words in Un
coup de dés (1897), Tablada in these poems suggests that words are not
the single signifying elements of poetry but that the blank space can do
as much. Thus, throughout the pages of the longer piece “Li-Po” and the
other independent ideographic poems, the size and font of words fluctu-
ate; they are clustered in geometrical shapes and stretched out in curves;
they stand alongside drawings or draw figures themselves; what is more,
they even form a Chinese character. The initial reaction to these poems
in Mexico was quite tepid and, in fact, questioned whether ideographic
poetry could even constitute a fundamental art at all. In refernce to the
Mexican poet Ramón López Velarde’s criticism, Tablada replied to him
in a letter that became a manifesto of sorts for his ideographic method:
Lo que me dice de la ideografía me interesa y me preocupa.

Le parece a usted convencional . . . ¿más convencional que
seguir expresándose en odas pindáricas, y en sonetos, como
Petrarca? . . . La ideografía tiene, a mi modo de ver, la fuerza
de una expresión “simultáneamente lírica y gráfica,” a re-
serva de conservar el secular carácter ideofónico. Además,
la parte gráfica sustituye ventajosamente la discursiva o la
explicativa de la antigua poesía, dejando los temas literarios
en calidad de “poesía pura,” como lo quería Mallarmé. Mi
preocupación actual es la síntesis, en primer lugar porque
sólo sintetizando creo poder expresar la vida moderna en su
dinamismo y en su multiplicidad; en segundo, porque para
subir más, en llegando a ciertas regiones, hay que arrojar las-
tre . . . Toda la antigua mise en scène, mi vieja guardarropía,
ardió en la hoguera de Thais.
What you say about ideography both interests and worries

me. You say it is conventional . . . yet [is it] more conven-
tional that continuing to express ourselves with Pindaric
odes and sonnets, like Petrarch? . . . Ideography has, in my
opinion, the strength of an expression that is “simultane-
ously lyric and graphic,” shedding, of course, its detriment
secular ideophonic character. Besides, the graphic advan-
tageously replaces the discursive and explicative nature of
ancient poetry, leaving literary themes in their expression as
“pure poetry,” as Mallarmé wanted. My concern is that of
synthesis; firstly because the dynamism and multiplicity of
modern life can only be expressed synthetically; secondly,
because in order to climb higher, to reach certain regions,
we must drop ballast . . . The ancient mise en scène, my old
wardrobe, has burnt in Thais’s bonfire.33
Tablada’s arguments are in tune with Futurism’s drive to capture the dy-
namism of modern life, as well as with the avant-gardes’ general call for
the immediacy of the graphic in lieu of explicative discourse. The me-
lodic “Pindaric odes,” “Petrarchan sonnets,” and other poetical forms
dear to modernismo are to be eliminated, exclaims Tablada, using a typ-
ical modernista Greco-Roman metaphor (the evocation of Thais’s bon-
fire). In this sense the ideographic works as a metaphor of the relation
between visual and phonetic representation. When Tablada switches Pe-
trarch for Li Bai (701–62), he is in fact switching the Italian Renaissance
as his lyrical model for that of premodern Chinese: just like dolce stil
nuovo had become emblematic of Western lyric, the jintishi (modern
form poetry) of the Tang dynasty became the lyrical archetype of East
Asia. Pauline Yu has made aware the dangers of transferring generic or
critical conventions across cultures, so frequent in Eurocentric attempts
of comparative literature to engage with Asian literatures, and she made
her case precisely by arguing that although the Chinese short poem (shi)
and Western lyric appear analogous in nature, the unique roots of each
have given rise to rather different sets of critical concerns.34 Yet Tabla-
da’s comparatist slip is not a fall, since the Mexican is not arguing here
about the philological equivalence between the two lyrical models, but,
like Santoro’s pairing of Peronism and the Tang, Tablada is making a
point about their stature within their respective traditions: both Li Bai
and Petrarch are metonyms of the golden age of Eastern and Western
civilizations, respectively.
164 ❘ Chapter 4
Now, how much of Li Bai is there actually in Tablada’s “Li-Po”?

Very little, I would say. “Li-Po” has Li Bai as a theme: the narrative of
the poem is based on legends about this figure, such as his drunkenness,
his obsession with the moon, and his accidental death—all elements
of a decadent lifestyle very attractive to fin de siècle poets. Because his
persona was more popular than his poetry, Kathlyn Liscomb refers to Li
Bai as a “poet-icon”: “one of a small number of renowned litterateurs
who was transformed from a historical personage into a multivalent
iconic figure through the cumulative effect of cultural practices involv-
ing later people.”35
Specialized bibliography on Tablada has looked into the sources that
inform the poet’s knowledge about Li Bai. Adriana García de Aldridge
and Esther Hernández Palacios demonstrated that several fragments of
Tablada’s poem are in fact glosses from other Tang poems about Li Bai
in Gautier’s Le livre de jade and Herbert Allen Giles’s History of Chinese
Literature (Giles’s book being Borges’s all-time guide to China; see chap.
2).36 To this list, Michele Pascucci adds Sages et poètes d’Asie (1916) by
Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879–1959) and enumerates several coincidences
with this French text, the most remarkable one being the transcription
of Mallarmé’s fragment of “Las de l’amer repos” (1914) in the epigraph.
Pascucci finds that the use of Sages et poètes d’Asie is ironic, since she
claims that although Tablada refers to “Chinese sources” to distance him-
self from Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et da
la guerre, 1913–1916 (1918) as the central influence of his ideographic
poetry, he ends up referring to yet another French secondary text.37 Even
though these specialists debate about whether Tablada was a precursor
of Apollinaire or vice-versa, the two experiments were contemporary
with the larger linguistic discussions of the verbal and visual correspon-
dence in writing systems. Tablada’s innovation, I argue, consists in pro-
jecting the visual power of the Chinese script. In this light, calligrams
are extended ideographs. Following the Orientalist myth that portrays
the Chinese script as entirely pictographic, the calligrams hold the same
iconic relation between text and image but on a different scale: if picto-
grams are words with pictorial resemblance to the concept represented;
calligrams are groups of words whose layout creates visual resemblance
to the concept represented. In the calligram, alphabetic writing becomes
a stroke, raw material, pure form at the service of the visual. It is no co-
incidence that, with the exception of “Talón rouge” and “El puñal,” all
the other calligrams of Li-Po y otros poemas are grouped in the section
of poems about the Chinese poet and illustrate the text with the shape of
a palanquin, a flower, a bamboo forest, a bird, a frog, and many moons.
Tablada’s exploration of alternative writing systems is nowhere bet-

ter rendered than in the actual inclusion of a Chinese character that
occupies all of page 7 and contains a stanza of the poem inside (fig. 6).
The sign is a variant of the character shou and stands for “longevity.”
Is this a wink to the timeless fame of Li Bai, nicknamed “The Banished
Immortal”? Philological studies of Tablada’s work insist on tracing the
literary provenance of this sign. Yet, as Tablada had no philological am-
bitions but a sharp eye for the arts, he does not read the Sinitic glyph but
rather sees it. That the luxury edition of Hiroshigué: El pintor de la nieve
y de la lluvia, de la noche y de la luna (1914, Hiroshige, painter of snow
and rain, of night and moon) contains an erratum in—of all words—the
name of the artist (the kanjis are turned upside down) evidences from
the start that Sinitic glyphs included in his books are not meant to be
read, but rather, to visually complement the alphabetic text alongside
the ukiyo-e prints. Tablada’s graphic archive includes a photograph of
Fig. 6. José Juan Tablada, Li-Po y otros poemas

(1920), 7. Courtesy of José Juan Tablada: Vida,
letra e imagen. Rodolfo Mata (coord.) Institu-
to de Investigaciones Filológicas Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.
166 ❘ Chapter 4
him in his studio dating from 1918 that reveals behind him, among
other Japanese bibelots, a wall hanging with at its center the character
shou (fig. 7). Since longevity is commonly recognized in Chinese culture
as one of the “Five Blessings” (together with wealth, health, love of
virtue, and peaceful death), the character shou is commonly printed on
textiles, furniture, and ceramics as an auspicious symbol. Furthermore,
the longer phrase containing this logogram wanshou wujiang
(“may you have ten thousand years of longevity without end”) was
used in the eighteenth century as an imperial birthday wish commonly
inscribed on royal porcelain and later imitated by the booming china
trade38 (the popularity of this glyph is such that up to the day it deco-
rates restaurants and dinnerware around the world, see fig. 8). Thus, as
Tablada was a globe-trotter and art collector with a taste for the Orient,
Fig. 7. José Juan Tablada in 1918 in his studio in Coyo-

acán, displaying a hanging scroll with the Sinitic glyph
shou. Courtesy of “José Juan Tablada: Vida, letra e
imagen.” Rodolfo Mata (coord.) Instituto de Investiga-
ciones Filológicas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, Mexico City.
Fig. 8. Chinoiserie melamine bowl with the inscription “longevity” (shou). Zoe’s
Restaurant, Cambridge, MA, 2022. Photograph by the author.
he most likely borrowed the sign from a decorative item rather than a
scholarly text. If, as Araceli Tinajero argues, most modernistas represent
chinoiserie objects in literary words, in this poem Tablada transfers a
word that is already an object: both in the wall hanging from his studio
and in his poem “Li-Po,” shou is a textual artifact. From this perspec-
tive, the character shou is a placeholder for Chinese writing in general.
Chinese writing appears in Tablada’s Li-Po y otros poemas as an
advanced pictographic system. In a mise en abyme, the stanza inside
the character on page 7 depicts a scene in which nonalphabetic signs
(hieroglyphs and ideograms) are written within another nonalphabetic
sign (the Chinese logogram shou):
Guiado por su mano pálida

Es gusano de seda el pincel
Que formaba en el papel
Negra crisálida
De misterioso jeroglífico
De donde surgía
Entres aromas de flor
Un pensamiento magnífico
168 ❘ Chapter 4
Con alas de oro volador;

Sutil y misteriosa llama
En la lámpara del ideograma!
The brush is a silkworm

Guided by a pallid hand
To form on parchment
A mythic hieroglyph
A black chrysalis from which
Emerges like a blossoming flower
A magnificent thought
Taking flight with gilded wings
A silent slender flame
In the lamp of the ideogram.39
The scene narrates the evolution of the pictogram: through the met-
aphor of the silkworm’s life cycle, hieroglyphs mature from a black
chrysalis into a fragrant and radiant ideogram, conveying the modern-
ization of the graphic sign from a premodern esoteric pictorial to a
rational conceptual pictorial. It should be noted that in Tablada’s lin-
guistic lingo “hieroglyphs” refer to any alleged pictographic system, be
it the Chinese, Mayan, or Egyptian. Tablada had equal fascination for
Asian as well as Mesoamerican antiquity: he owned an archeological
collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts; had illustrated the cover of Al sol
y bajo la luna (1918) with Aztec glyphs designed by the artist Jorge
Enciso (1879–1969); and had announced the publication of a mono-
graph titled “De aztecas y japoneses” in the same series as Hiroshigué:
El pintor de la nieve y de la lluvia, de la noche y de la luna.40 Thus,
when Tablada exclaims in the poem “Exégesis,” “Es de México y Asia
mi alma un jeroglífico” (My soul is a hieroglyph from Mexico and Asia),
he is not conveying his exclusive “spiritual identification with the Ori-
ent through the symbol of a technique,” as Salvador Elizondo observes
in his praise of the poet’s cosmopolitanism. Instead he is expanding this
identification to Mesoamerica too:
Cuando Tablada afirma (en un poema que lleva el significati-

vo y crítico título de “Exégesis”) su adscripción espiritual al
Oriente mediante el símbolo de una técnica, nos está diciendo
dos cosas: en primer lugar, que su poesía, hasta 1918 sigue
siendo fiel a los postulados del modernismo que preveía, des-
de sus orígenes, el exotismo literario como uno de sus veneros

más importantes, pero que si ese exotismo se volviera hacia
el Oriente, encontraría la barrera de un principio general de
la visión (y por lo tanto de la escritura), es decir, del pensa-
miento, radicalmente diferente del que habría operado en la
poesía tradicional, no se diga en castellano, en Occidente.
When Tablada asserts (in a poem meaningfully and criti-

cally titled “Exégesis”) his spiritual identification with the
Orient through the symbol of a technique, he is telling us
two things: firstly, that his poetry up until 1918 is still loyal
to the modernista creed that, from its origins, revered liter-
ary exoticism. Yet, if that exoticism turned to the Orient, it
would find as a barrier a general principle of vision (and thus
writing), that is, of a thinking, that are radically different to
that which would have operated in Spanish, to say nothing
of traditional Western poetry.41
In challenging traditional Western poetry, Tablada widens modernismo’s

mapping of antiquity in a precise way: he includes not only Oriental
but also Mesoamerican “barriers to the general principle of vision (and
thus writing),” to quote Elizondo. But Tablada still clings to outdated
hypotheses about Mesoamerican signs that had, since the early seven-
teenth century, read them as hieroglyphs and, in so doing, collapsed the
New World into the imaginary geography of the Orient. In addition to
these hypotheses, Jesuit scholars such as Athanasius Kircher (1602–80)
or José de Acosta (1540–1600) had found in the Amerindian codices
alternative models of a universal language. Even if over the course of the
nineteenth century, scholarship on Maya civilization gradually proved
that the expression “Mexican hieroglyphs” referred to a number of dis-
tinct script traditions, the legacies of early modern categories endured.
Byron Hamman argues that the advancement of positive knowledge in
philology also emancipated the transcendental qualities of these scripts
and instead located them on a historical continuum: Mayan, Egyptian,
and Chinese, respectively, represented touchstones in the evolution of
cumbersome pictorial systems leading up to the rational alphabet.42 Ar-
ranged in a hierarchy of complexity, the Chinese was the most sophisti-
cated of the primitive pictographic scripts precisely because of its longer
history.
170 ❘ Chapter 4
Tablada’s hint to the “longevity” of Chinese writing in this stanza

is further stressed in the revision of the physical transformations of its
script throughout its many thousand years of existence. If calligraphers
divide the history of the Chinese script into seven conventional styles
(oracle, bone, bronze, seal, clerical, cursive, and regular) that point to
changes in the form, character, and structure of the logograms, Tablada
explores the archaeology behind these styles. The attention to the min-
eral and chemical surfaces that serve as the evolving media of text (par-
ticularly silk and paper) becomes all more evident in the comparison of
Li-Po y otros poemas with two other pieces from Tablada’s work. First,
the crónica “Del corazón de China al riñón del cabaret” (1921; From
the heart of China to the cabaret’s kidney), published in the Mexican
newspaper Excélsior, registers Tablada’s impressions of the Silk World
Fair at the Grand Central Palace in New York, where he resided for sev-
eral years. The text opens with a mineral metaphor: “¿Qué puede en el
tiempo y en el espacio, trazar un puente que una a la China legendaria
con la ultra moderna Nueva York, el país de la porcelana con la isla del
hierro?” (What could bridge, in time and space, the gap between leg-
endary China—the land of porcelain—and the ultramodern iron island
that is New York?).43 In addition to praising the uses of silk as a finished
good, Tablada fixes his gaze on the technologies involved in production.
To describe the manufacture of the natural dyes that color silk, he em-
ploys the silkworm metaphor again:
En la parte industrial el concurrente ve con sus propios ojos,

cómo se utilizan los productos de las selvas tropicales y de la
hulla, en brillantísimos colores. Y se observa que, como en
un milagro, surgen del carbón mineral, de la negra crisálida,
las irisadas anilinas como una parvada de mariposas, radian-
tes y resplandecientes hasta parecer flamas de pirotecnia.
At the industrial section, the visitor witnesses with his own

eyes the elaboration of the products of the rainforest as well
as the colorful coal into such radiant colors. And he observes
that, just like a miracle, iridescent anilines swarm from the
mineral coal, the black chrysalis, like radiant and shining
butterflies that might as well be fireworks.44
In this narrative about silk, the silkworm metaphor is more than an

evident literary play. It illuminates its connotations in the earlier poem
“Li-Po”: silk is after all one of the earlier supports of Chinese literature
(the paleographic hypothesis is even more evident in Scott Britton’s En-
glish translation of papel as “parchment”). After millennia of inscribing
text in bronze, bone, and stone, the Chinese began using silk around
the second century bce to record writing. Silk was durable, soft, and
more portable than the wood or bamboo slips used immediately be-
fore.45 As a matter of fact, one of the oldest known manuscripts of the
most ancient Chinese text, the Yijing (circa ninth century bce; Book of
Changes), is a silk manuscript.46 Tablada’s interest in the production of
silk is, to me, partly compatible with Laura Torres-Rodríguez’s reading
of “La gloria del bambú” (The glory of bamboo) a sister crónica of sorts
to “Del corazón de China al riñón del cabaret,” signed from Yokohama
in 1901. Seeking to underscore how Tablada’s Japanese crónicas are
linked to Mexico’s economic modernization, Torres-Rodríguez carefully
stresses examples that prove that, for Tablada, bamboo is what largely
builds the infrastructure that facilitates communications and trade, such
as bridges and ships: “El bambú deja de ser un tropo poético exoti-
zante para convertirse en un símbolo de desarrollo nacional fundado
en una forma de fabricación . . . el poeta ofrece a sus lectores mexica-
nos un ejemplo de capitalización de la producción cultural autóctona”
(Bamboo ceases to stand as an exoticist trope and instead becomes a
symbol of national development based on a form of production . . . the
poet provides his Mexican readers with an example of how to capi-
talize autochthonous cultural production).47 Considering that Tablada
also stresses silk’s multiple manufacturing processes, both these texts
seem to be odes to commodities rather than to exotic goods. Yet, what
Torres-Rodríguez sees as a model of national industry or transpacific
trade, in my view serves as a reflection on ancient scriptural technolo-
gies that outdate those of Tablada’s Mexican ancestors. Twenty years
after his trip to Japan, and writing from New York, Tablada traces a
global history of writing.
To this point, Tablada’s take on silk as an ancient scriptural medium
is still within the realm of representation: the stanza evokes silk as an
ancient support of literature. In this light, the materiality of Chinese
writing in “Li-Po” is infused with the connotations of silk as a writ-
ing technology: a prohibitive material exclusively used by the lettered
elites to record sayings and for miscellaneous documentation of events
and procedures. Given the porous texture of its fabric, silk was a more
flexible support to absorb the ink from the brush than the hard surface
of bamboo, thus enabling the emergence of calligraphy as an art form
172 ❘ Chapter 4
during the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce). Over the course of the next
centuries, calligraphy would become one of the four main academic
and artistic accomplishments required of the ancient Chinese scholar-
officials (together with painting, playing the ancient string instrument
guqin, and mastering the strategy game of Go). Tablada’s attention to
materiality recalls Victor Segalen’s prose poems in Stèles (1912) that
evoke the ancient stone monuments on the roadsides of rural China
from where he drew inspiration for his poems. Haun Saussy observes
that Segalen’s Stèles was a collection so concerned about the materiality
of the poetry it evoked that the book itself also functioned as an elab-
orate artifact that engaged with the multisensorial experience of the
poetry of stone inscriptions.48 In its first luxury edition, Segalen sought
to transcribe the resonances of Chinese historical language through ex-
emplary materiality, something that later mass-produced editions did
not quite achieve: “Few readers will have held in their hands a copy of
the first or second editions of Segalen’s collection of prose poems Stèles
(1912–14) with their deliberately chosen page size (tailored to evoke the
Nestorian stele of Xian), their careful disposition of Chinese and Roman
type, their exquisite Korean paper, their Chinese-style thread bindings.
Most of us will have consulted a low-cost reprint such as the Gallimard/
Folio paperback or the thin-paper Œuvres complètes volumes from Laf-
font. The work’s popularity entails an impoverishment of its sensory di-
mensions for all but a few readers lucky enough to own or have entry to
a rare-books collection. But although many dimensions of touch, smell,
color, and typography fall out of most readers’ experience, some qual-
ities of textual materiality remain as properties of information, recep-
tion, and technical reproducibility.”49 Interestingly, Saussy’s observation
on the impoverishment of the sensory dimensions of Segalen’s original
handcrafted edition in its multiple chain of reproduction in turn illumi-
nates the equally revealing textual materiality of mass-produced books,
usually overlooked because of their standard book form.
A similar consideration of the mechanical reproduction of an an-
cient Chinese literary artifact into a modern book format adds yet an-
other layer to the dense palimpsest through which the Chinese character
shou is transcreated in Tablada’s Li-Po y otros poemas. Once again,
the UNAM’s extraordinary digital archive of Tablada’s graphic work
provides a clue, this time in the facsimile edition of the book originally
printed in Caracas in January 1920. Page seven is the only one that
has a black background, so that the alphabetic text inside the Chinese
sign is printed over the white page (inside the white space traced by the
strokes of the logogram). A very fine stripe connecting the vertical cen-
tral stroke to the white frame of the page suggests that the Chinese char-
acter was probably stenciled. Initially traced, then cut with scissors and
finally transferred onto the page with black ink, giving life to a white
logogram as well as leaving the mark of the slit through which the blade
entered the paper and carved out excess surface. From this perspective,
Tablada did not write the character, but cut it, thus dissociating Chinese
writing from the high art of calligraphy and silk evoked in the stanza, to
associate it with the popular tradition of paper cutting. Jianzhi (literally
“cut-paper”) was one of the most important types of Chinese folk art
since paper became an affordable good in the second century. Originally
meant to worship ancestors and gods, it later developed into a leisure
craft that produced patterns expressing good auspices and is still found
nowadays in common people’s doors and windows.50
As for Tablada, his attention to folklore is in tune with the Mexi-
can revolutionary government’s emphasis on Indigenous heritage (an
imperative that became globally famous in Diego Rivera’s murals), as
well as with the avant-garde’s taste for primitivism.51 Both Tablada’s
later poems in La feria (1928; The fair) and his foreword to the mas-
sive institutional project on art education—Best Maugard’s Método de
dibujo (1923)—praise autochthonous art forms.52 “Autochthonous,”
represents, for Best Maugard, pre-Columbian, colonial, and contempo-
rary art forms, which, as discussed in chapter 1 of this book, are partic-
ularly hybrid because of the Spanish and Asian influences of the early
modern transpacific trade route of the Manila Galleon. Paper cutting
is precisely one of the Chinese artistic elements that flourished in the
Mexican city of Puebla as an imported popular art form. Puebla was a
stop along the Spanish colonial route through which, roughly between
1565 and 1815, goods sailed from the Philippines to Acapulco across
the Pacific Ocean and then transported them by land to Veracruz, on the
Gulf of Mexico, to deliver them to Spain. Among porcelain, textiles, and
decorative motifs, there was a colored paper made of silk that was given
the name of “papel de China” (China paper) and used to make lamps
and cut paper ornaments in the style of jianzhi. Both the raw material
and the technique developed into papel picado, or “punched paper,” a
now distinctive Puebloan—and by extension, Mexican—handcraft used
in banners to honor the dead or to decorate festivities. It is no coinci-
dence that the cover of Tablada’s La feria reproduces a papel picado
banner (fig. 9) stenciled with the exact same technique as the character
shou in “Li-Po” and painted in a magenta similar to the usually red
174 ❘ Chapter 4
Fig. 9. Miguel Covarrubias, book cover project

for José Juan Tablada’s La feria, 1928. Courtesy
of José Juan Tablada: Vida, letra e imagen. Ro-
dolfo Mata (coord.) Instituto de Investigaciones
Filológicas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, Mexico City.
Chinese handcraft. The design of the cover was conveyed by Tablada,

although it was executed by Miguel Covarrubias (1904–57), a Mexi-
can artist who would coincidently have a close-knit artistic relationship
with Communist China a few decades later. Tablada’s later homages to
Puebla, where he spent part of his childhood, are fraught with affective
memories of the “Nao de la China,” also the topic of an unpublished
novel burnt when his Coyoacán home was ransacked during the Mex-
ican Revolution.
Regarding Tablada’s assessment of the Manila Galleon, I—again—
partly agree with Laura Torres-Rodríguez’s claim that Tablada’s empha-
sis on artifacts and goods traded through the Pacific recasts traditional
colonial cartographies:
En este sentido, se rearticula la orientación transpacífica del

Virreinato, al reclamar la producción material sincrética de
la colonia como el legado mismo de la saga criolla transpa-

cífica, un signo de distinción estética y cultural. La singula-
ridad estética del arte popular será reconocida en parte por
haber sido influenciada directamente por las técnicas artesa-
nales chinas y japonesas. Esto representa una reactivación
de las cartografías criollas coloniales, donde México se au-
toimagina como el lugar de encuentro entre Asia y Europa
y, por lo tanto, como el centro de difusión global de una
modernidad revolucionaria.
[Tablada’s] claiming of the syncretic material production

of the colony as a legacy of the transpacific criollo saga—a
symbol of aesthetic and cultural distinction—rearticulates
the transpacific orientation of the Viceroyalty [of Mexico].
The aesthetic singularity of popular art will be acknowl-
edged partly because it bears the influence of Chinese and
Japanese artisanal techniques. This reactivates colonial crio-
llo cartographies, where Mexico thinks of itself as the meet-
ing point of Asia and Europe, and therefore, as the center of
global diffusion of revolutionary modernity.53
In my view, this gambit is more ambitious in scale: by crafting poetry

with transpacific papercuts, Tablada does indeed resituate Mexico as
the Middle Kingdom of the Spanish empire and thus as the center of
revolutionary modernity. But in so doing, he also points to a paradox
of logocentrism: paper, the main technology of Western writing, is ulti-
mately a Chinese invention. Chinese paper, the thin, nonwoven material
made from milled plants and textile fibers, which made its way to the
Islamic world in the eighth century and was subsequently refined in
European paper mills, where its manufacturing boomed with the devel-
opment of the printing press in the sixteenth century. The first part of
this hypothesis is well known. Latin American scholars of decoloniality
have long contended that during the Spanish Conquest, writing was a
tool of control, exercised through ethnocentric categories that flattened
local scriptural (and semiotic) traditions. In The Darker Side of the
Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (1995), Walter
Mignolo observes how when a missionary, an educated soldier, or a
man of letters was exposed to the artifacts that the Mexicas named
amoxtli and the Maya named vuh, they described them as objects
folded like an accordion and translated these terms as “books”: “writ-
176 ❘ Chapter 4
ing was naturally conceived in terms of papers and books; and books
in terms of the medieval manuscript and the printing press.”54 But the
spine-bound book, printed on paper and reproduced massively via
movable type that generally signifies Western modernity (and its global
hegemony) owes its existence to two Chinese inventions. By using pa-
per to carve Chinese signs manually, Tablada rewinds the history of
paper and defers its course toward the Pacific, where paper no longer
signifies the medium of (Latin) text but the instrument of (Asian) words
and (mestizo) motifs. Tablada’s avant-garde primitivism thus consists
in illuminating the prehistory of paper to deconstruct the materiality
of Western writing.
Fon ts a n d S c ro l l s
In a 1986 review of the concrete movement for the UNESCO magazine

The Courier, Severo Sarduy celebrated the creative process of the Latin
American poets that had reshaped the international canons of visual
poetry.
according to Haroldo de Campos, the Pound-like patriarch

of the movement and its chief theorist, concretismo is not
merely “a hedonistic graphic arrangement or layout,” nor
a calligramme in which words are transformed into images
of the things they designate (the word “rose” actually be-
coming a rose). In concrete poetry words are dismantled and
modified so that we can see what they are made of, like a
complex toy taken to pieces by a wayward child. In short,
the poet becomes a “designer” of meaning.55
Sarduy advances how the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos

(1931–) and Décio Pignatari (1927–2012) transcended the modernist
innovations of Mallarmé and Apollinaire, two critical figures of their
paideuma. In a deconstructive spirit, he details their quasi-surgical (al-
beit ludic) interventions over words themselves: they dissect and alter
them for minute observation. The observation on “designers of mean-
ing” disavows concrete poems as definite works of fine art and instead
points to the process of transforming the most basic units of linguistic
signification into something else: “the term concretismo is taken from
the plastic arts, and designates nonfigurative, geometric and rational
compositions in which the key feature is the objective technique with

which they were produced, and a clearly defined iconlike image drained
of any residual emotion or subjective content, rather than any message
or perception of the ‘other’ reality, which such works might have man-
aged to convey.”56 Interestingly Sarduy, who shared with these poets
from the Noigandres group a fascination with the stylistic exuberance
of the baroque, hails them as technicians of meaning, wordsmiths oper-
ating within the parameters of the applied arts.
Concrete poets did not question the semiotic power of the linguistic
sign. As Pedro Erber argues, what they did question was its mandate for
referentiality: “concretism proposes a form of writing that no longer
refers to objects, but exists as an object in itself, among other objects
in the world, and holds with them an isomorphic relationship rather
than a representative one.”57 Theorized in tune with the emerging rhet-
oric of mass media in the rapidly modernizing city of São Paulo, the
concrete poem privileged the architecture of poetry: rigorous geometry
and graphic minimalism were at its core. Understanding the word as
a physical object implied, among other things, that poetry’s attributes,
and therefore its semantic power, were defined by a set of graphic vari-
ables (typeface, font, and case), spatial relations (paragraph, spacing,
and indentation) and sites of inscription (books and magazines, but also
billboards, museums, or maps). Now, how can Sarduy’s observation on
design illuminate the textures of the ideograph, not as the overall meta-
phor of poesia concreta but rather as the materialization of the foreign
script in Brazilian poetry? In view of a readership ignorant of Asian
languages, to what extent are the Chinese logograms in Haroldo’s work
also fictional calligraphies, that is, abstract signs devoid of linguistic res-
onances, which signify precisely through optical and haptical parame-
ters? In sum, how do elements of graphic and editorial design illuminate
the traffic of writing technologies, genres, and media from Asia to Latin
America in Haroldo’s poetry?
Since the ideogram is the central keyword of poesia concreta, estab-
lishing a general hypothesis about it in a few pages would be as impossi-
ble as “squaring the circle,” to borrow Haroldo’s own metaphor on the
task of translating Chinese poetry into Western languages.58 Inspired by
Pound as the method of poetic composition that could replace tradi-
tional linear verse, the ideogram was the recurrent metaphor adapted in
different stages of concretismo to signal crucial aspects of the new lyric
such as simultaneity, spatiality, and sound. Its first articulation in the
1950s reads as follows:
178 ❘ Chapter 4
Ideogram: appeal to nonverbal communication. The concrete

poem communicates its own structure: structure-content.
The concrete poem is an object in and of itself, not the in-
terpreter of exterior objects and/or more or less subjective
feelings. Its material: word (sound, visual form, semantic
charge). Its problem: a problem of functions-relations of this
material. Factors of proximity and similitude, Gestalt psy-
chology. Rhythm: relational force. The concrete poem, using
phonetics (digits) and analogical syntax, creates a specific lin-
guistic area—verbivocovisual—which shares the advantages
of nonverbal communication without giving up the word’s
virtuality. The phenomenon of metacommunication occurs
with the concrete poem: coincidence and simultaneity of ver-
bal and nonverbal communication; but—it must be noted—it
deals with the communication of forms, of structure-content,
not with the usual message communication.59
A remarkable polyglot, Haroldo also explored the ideogram within

the frameworks of linguistics and not only defended Ernest Fenollosa’s
landmark essay on the ideogram from the attacks of sinology but also
published it in Portuguese in the reader Ideograma: Lógica, poesia, lin-
guagem (1977; Ideogram: Logic, poetry, language). The actual incorpo-
ration of Chinese logograms in his creative work began with the formal
study of the language. Although this occurred as early as the late 1950s
with the translation of the Japanese poet Kitasono Katsue’s (1902–1978)
“Monotonous Space,” and other Cantos-like poems such as “via chuang-
tse” or “litaoipoema,” Haroldo’s bilingual transcreations of Asian lyric
mostly take place within the postconcretist phase: Hagoromo de Zeami
(1993), Crisantempo (1998), and Escrito sobre jade (1996).60 This is not
to suggest that by this time Haroldo had mastered the language, which
he neither did nor aspired to. Instead this signals that at this point he
conceived Chinese lyric well beyond the textual. The handling of the
Chinese script as the raw material of his poetry is informed by a lifetime
practice of concretism, a rich Chinese bibliography, and a mature reflec-
tion on the relation between “peripheral” cultures and universal tradi-
tion, summarized most effectively in the 1981 article “Anthropophagous
Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture.”61
Bilingual publishing is a common practice in cultural fields with a
relative proximity (and thus proficient readership) to the source lan-
guage. It is also a marker of distinction in critical editions. For Har-

oldo, however, the exhibition of the poems in the original language is
a programmatic aspect of translation. Unlike Octavio Paz, who would
erase the original text in his own versions of the Tang—“no he incluido
los textos originales: a partir de poemas en otras lenguas quise hacer
poemas en la mía” (I have omitted the original texts: basing myself on
poems in other languages, I set out to make poems in my own)62—
for Haroldo transcreation supposes the intervention on the original
sign too: “not only the signified but also the sign itself is translated,
that is, the sign’s tangible self, its very materiality (sonorous properties,
graphical-visual properties).”63 The poems of Escrito sobre jade indeed
stress the verbivocovisual correspondence between the new poem and
the original. Let us begin by studying Weinberger’s favorite: Wang Wei’s
“Deer Park.” “O refúgio dos cervos” reproduces the squared layout of
the Chinese quartet in two symmetrical columns, creating a new meter
based on visual length rather than syllable count. Absence of punctua-
tion, no capitalization, and parataxis turn the Portuguese signs into the
seemingly floating units of the isolating language that must be reorga-
nized analytically by the active reader. “O dique das magnólias,” also by
Wang Wei, further accentuates the economy of words and breaks and
uses intercalating lines to break with symmetry. “Li Fu-Jen” captures
the monosyllabic resonances of Chinese morphemes and onomatopoe-
ias in the sparse rendering of words:
O REFÚGIO DOS CERVOS

montanha vazia não se vê ninguém
ouvir só se ouve um alguém de ecos
raios do poente filtram na espessura
um reflexo ainda luz no musgo verde
O DIQUE DAS MAGNÓLIAS

na trama das ramas
brilhos de hibiscos
cálices vermelhos
surgem na montanha
cascata e choupana
tal calma: ninguém!
flores tantas flores
viçam e decaem
180 ❘ Chapter 4
LI FU-JEN
sim? não?
não? sim?
ora! agora!
paro
olho para
(ruflam passos-plumas)
ela
pluma ante pluma
demora!
So far, all these poems exhibit familiar visual aspects from the orthodox
phase of poesia concreta. Now, what about the display of the Chinese
“originals” in Haroldo’s translations in Escrito sobre jade? Of all the
poems, only Wang Wei and Li Bai’s quatrains are read vertically, from
right to left as in literary Chinese, while the other poems are read hor-
izontally, from left to right. Also, each poet of the anthology–which
ranges from Confucius, to Tang dynasty poets, to Mao Zedong—bears
a different calligraphic style. The script styles do not match the era of
Chinese calligraphy when each poem was written but respond instead to
the typographical preferences of the various English editions consulted.
Haroldo acknowledges in the introduction that the Chinese originals
were taken from different sources, which may account for the inconsis-
tency in the graphic design. Yet what might initially appear as the messy
outcome of a fragmentary bibliography instead provides a profound
mediation on the transit of thousand-years-old Chinese handwritten
poems to Brazilian mechanically reproduced books. Both editions of
Escrito sobre jade were produced with minute attention to editorial de-
sign: the 1996 edition was handcrafted at Tipografía do Fundo de Ouro
Preto by Haroldo and the “tipoeta” (typist-poet) Guilherme Mansur
(1958–), and the posthumous 2009 edition came out in the boutique
press Ateliê Editorial and was designed by the award-winning studio
Casa Rex (both from São Paulo) (fig. 10). After all, a closer look at Har-
oldo’s editorial “inconsistencies” might offer a key to the media trans-
fers of world literature.
Typography was crucial for Brazilian concrete poets. While later on
they experimented with different typefaces, their signature font was
the Bauhaus-style Futura bold, which was clean, modern, and inter-
national.64 As Gonzalo Aguilar observes, typography added an extra-
linguistic feel of modernity to their poetry: “A tipografia, que pode
Fig. 10. Handscroll-like book cover of

Haroldo de Campos, Escrito sobre jade
(2009) produced by Casa Rex for Ateliê
Editorial, São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy of
Gustavo Piquiera.
transmitir por si mesma a experiência do moderno—quebra a estrutura

binaria do signo e introduz uma significação que não depende do signi-
ficante, tal como o entende a linguística e sim do desenho do significante
(tipos utilizados, tamanho, disposição). Partindo desse principio, a ti-
pografia seria como o significante do significante” (Typography, which
can by itself convey the experience of modernity, breaks with the binary
structure of the sign and introduces a signification no longer attached to
the signifier, in linguistic terms, but to the design of the signifier [types,
size, layout]. From this approach, typography would be like the signi-
fier of the signifier).65 Some of the Chinese originals from Escrito sobre
jade were transcribed and others were stamped; technologically speak-
ing, some were set in typefaces while others reproduced as visual blocs.
In terms of production, this entails an uneven distribution of labor as
well as an asynchrony in the materiality of the translation chain: while
182 ❘ Chapter 4
the reprinted images are less sensitive to human intervention, the tran-
scribed texts are affected by the manipulation of a translator, typist, or
proofer. No different than ancient handwritten manuscripts transferred
by scribes, digitally produced texts are also the byproduct of intellectual
choices as well as available technological infrastructure.66 Whereas it
is easy to develop a typeface in alphabetical languages (it requires the
design of twenty-something letters plus a dozen symbols), a full Chinese
character set requires the design of almost seven thousand glyphs, and,
consequently, these are more limited and less diverse. The only typeset
poems in this anthology are, curiously, the odes of the Book of Songs,
which thus present uncanny versions of the most ancient collection of
Chinese lyric in the modern Heiti font, a sans-serif variant that is the
default Chinese font in most word processors in the West. By transcrib-
ing (rather than stamping) the oldest pieces of Chinese poetry in Escrito
sobre jade, Haroldo establishes a dialogue with Chinese calligraphy,
which is not obviously mimetic (if this were so, the oldest Chinese po-
ems in the anthology would bear the oldest calligraphic styles) but dis-
ruptively modern. He turns the paradigmatic stylization of the Chinese
script into digital type, while also using a global and accessible Chinese
typeface—most likely the only one available at his friend’s artisanal
publisher in Minas Gerais—that conveys a sense of digital modernity. If
typography became especially relevant in the neo-avant-gardes because
of the visual rhetoric of mass media and the new typesetting technologies
that multiplied the possibilities of mechanical reproduction of linguistic
signs, these factors were precisely the causes of its doom as a dated phe-
nomenon, overlooked by the strong philosophical emphasis on language
(and the semiotic fixation with concretism) that came with poststructur-
alism in the 1970s. As Marjorie Perloff notes, current digital technologies
create an appropriate environment to revisit the “purported mimeticism
and aestheticed composition” of the earlier stages of poesia concreta.67
Haroldo’s postconcretist manipulations of the Chinese script recuperate
foundational notions of the concretist ideogrammatic method, but, above
all, they reflect on comparative scriptural technologies in the digital age.
Apart from its meditation of the typography in premodern litera-
tures, the second edition of Escrito sobre jade (2009) offers a profound
exploration of the reading practices that such lyrical forms bring into
play.68 Chinese classical poetry is a broad category that encompasses
different lyrical styles and formats from the seventh century bce up to
the beginning of the twentieth century, when writers began using the
vernacular style of speech in their literary work. Because of the continu-
ous dialogue between oral and literati traditions, as well as the changing
scriptural technologies throughout these three millennia, the formats of
the poems changed dramatically, as did their reading practices. I pro-
pose that, while preserving the codex format of the book, Escrito sobre
jade (2009) is a modern rendition of handscrolls, one of the predomi-
nant formats of Chinese calligraphy. Calligraphic painting handscrolls
were texts handwritten in long horizontal scrolls, then wrapped in wo-
ven silk, and finally tied with a ribbon to be stored in wooden boxes
for the next reader to unfold them again. The profusely ornamented
endsheets that occupy the first and last pages of Haroldo’s book, which
can be seen though the slit in the grey cover, evoke the fine fabrics and
textures that separate the reader and the words, reminding us that the
reading of Chinese classical poetry is not just an intellectual operation
resolved in the immediate eye contact with words, but rather a haptical
ritual of caressing textures before the cinematic unfolding of a composi-
tion of images and words. It is also a collective ritual, where the author
of the literary work is just one of the many names inscribed on the sur-
face of the page, together with the calligrapher, painter, and collectors
who owned the manuscript, as well as the distinguished readers who
marked it with their seals. Throughout its different paratexts, Escrito
sobre jade mentions each one of the actors involved in the composition
of the latest version of Haroldo’s anthology, starting with the Chinese
poets, the editor (Trajano Vieira, a classics professor at Universidade
de São Paulo), the editor of the first edition (Guilherme Mansur), as
well as Ateliê Editorial’s editor (Plinio Martins Filho), the proofreader
(Genese Andrade), the producer (Aline Sato), and the studio in charge
of the book design (Casa Rex). The colophon even details paper quality
and typeface, reminding us of the relevance of the extralinguistic con-
notations of type design: by using a variant of the Bodoni font family
(Filosofia, designed by Émigré Foundry, from Oakland), the Brazilian’s
homage to classical Chinese poetry is vested with the neoclassical feel of
the classic Roman type, transcreated via California. Like Tablada, who
evokes the Tang to revisit the legacy of the Italian Renaissance in his
avant-garde Li-Po y otros poemas, Escrito sobre jade also signals the
Italian Renaissance as the Western mirror of Chinese classical culture.
Like Octavio Paz’s monumental Blanco (1968), Escrito sobre jade med-
itates on the performative rituals of Asian lyric.69
The evocation of the rituality of Chinese handscrolls in the book’s
design is a testament to world literature. As does typography discussed
above, Escrito sobre jade exposes the inevitable material transforma-
184 ❘ Chapter 4
tion of texts conceived within different rhetorical parameters. As such,

it nuances the haunting illusion of “original” poems. If, as discussed in
chapter 2, Borges caricatures the methodologies of comparative philol-
ogy to substantiate that “originals” (the Chinese novels he will never
“fully” grasp because he does not live in seventeenth-century China)
are nothing but triggers for the actual literature that takes shape in
the different layers of translation and degrees of separation from them
(his reviews of unavailable English versions), Escrito sobre jade evokes
the methods of paleography to propose that poetry emerges in the ad-
aptation of manuscripts by scribes and copyists operating within spe-
cific scriptural technologies, rather than in essential, long-lost originals.
What is more, because the 2009 book is a posthumous edition based
loosely on speculations on Haroldo’s plans, Escrito sobre jade redeems
the concretist creed of poetry as an applied art, whose semantic strength
lies in the collaborative effort of editorial fields (graphic design, typog-
raphy, and bookbinding), very much like Chinese handscrolls were pro-
duced collectively by painters, poets, and calligraphers. By evidencing
the textual instability of Chinese literature in Spanish and Portuguese,
Haroldo and Borges do not lament the peripheral writer’s residual ac-
cess 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.
N eedles a n d B l a de s
Like Tablada and Haroldo de Campos, Severo Sarduy also finds in sin-
ophone scriptural practices a framework for his own theory of writing.
The Cuban exile in Paris is probably the most slippery of all in his con-
ceptualization of the ideogram because the ideogram is at the core of his
master theory of writing, which conceives of writing as the drawing of
images, and writing as bodily inscription. Sarduy’s oeuvre flourishes in
the unique constellation of a marginal protagonism in French structural
theory, relentless pilgrimage, and a decadent lifestyle as a queer émigré.
His unique aesthetic models also combine Spanish baroque and Amer-
ican abstract expressionism. A multimedia artist who easily switched
codes as a narrator, essayist, poet, playwright, painter, radio host, and
science journalist, Sarduy’s quest for the continuum between the word,
image, and body is, I argue, inseparable from the physical exploration
of Asian textualities.
In a book as concerned as this one is with geographical distance as a

crucial variable for the writing of foreign cultures, Sarduy’s relationship
to China is probably the most disorienting one. China is at the same
time palpable and elusive in Sarduy’s mapping of world literature. Apart
from the family legend that he had ancestors from Macao, Sarduy did
not have to travel to China to write about it: Havana’s Chinatown pro-
vided him with memories of a community established on his island since
the mid-nineteenth century. He did not honor these memories through
a realist depiction of the immigrant community, but rather through the
burlesque rendering of the Teatro Shanghai from the capital’s Barrio
Chino, best depicted in his famous novel De donde son los cantantes
(1967; Where the singers are from). If Cuban identity is anything, this
novel seemed to suggest, this is a mix of Spanish, African, and Asian
heritage travestied by the gaze of an artist who utterly distrusted mime-
sis and understood writing as distortion. Sarduy did not have to travel
to China to write about Maoism either. In 1974 he declined the invi-
tation of an official visit to the PRC with his partner François Wahl
(1925–2014) and the editorial board of the literary magazine Tel quel.
Enthused by what Eric Hayot calls “the chimera of a truly cultural rev-
olution,” that is, “China as both an exotic and ancient culture, discon-
nected from the political and economic geography of the modern world,
and a powerful, exciting actual place able to participate and shape a
geopolitical vision,” Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet,
and Roland Barthes culminated a theoretical inquiry into the ancient
civilization they had been publishing about with a three-week guided
tour through the new nation.70 While Tel quel’s utopic embrace of Mao-
ism rippled into intellectual circles in Latin America as a renewed ver-
sion of internationalism backed by French theory (see the discussion
on Piglia in chap. 3), Sarduy remained cautious of both his French and
Latin American peers’ Maoist craze, because Communist China was a
reminder of the revolution that deprived him of the possibility of ever
returning home to Cuba. Rather than taking in Mao’s rhetoric of liber-
ation, Sarduy saw Mao as an oppressor. In his frenzied novel Maitreya
(1978) he fashions a Cuban Chinese cook who becomes a reincarnation
of Buddha, against the parodical backdrop of two political events of the
1950s that up until then had not been compared: Tibet at the moment
of the Chinese occupation, and Cuba at the moment of revolution. In
the same playful tone, Cobra (1972) features a gang of exiled Tibetan la-
mas who dress like hippies and seek to revive Tantric Buddhism around
the world. Tibet became Sarduy’s Mecca thanks to his fascination with
186 ❘ Chapter 4
Buddhism that began in the early 1970s through Octavio Paz’s conta-
gious enthusiasm for India and which grew with pilgrimages through
East and Southeast Asia during that decade. The Himalayan countries
of Nepal and Bhutan, and the Indian region of Sikkim would become
the platforms where he would “climb up to monasteries, partake of
ceremonies, chat with monks and observe, next to other exiled people,
the borders of Tibet.”71 If India’s color and warmth reconnected him to
his Caribbean roots, Tibetan Buddhism came to represent the religion
of exile, and thus, technically speaking, Sarduy did not travel to China
to write about this either. Like Cuba, China became a haunting cultural
universe in which Sarduy could not set foot but that he touched from
the surface.
The surface, as I have been demonstrating in this chapter, is by no
means a secondary—inferior—framework to make sense of China, but
rather a positive platform to assert the layers of signification in the ma-
teriality of a literary language. In response to the recurrent question of
how Sarduy managed to render the complexity of Oriental religions and
cultures with his signature neobaroque flamboyance, he would insist
precisely on the notion of the surface as the single possible interface for
a legitimate writing of Asia:
No se trata de una India trascendental, metafísica o pro-

funda, sino al contrario, una exaltación de la superficie y
yo diría hasta de la pacotilla india. Yo creo, y me hubiera
gustado que Octavio Paz estuviera de acuerdo—pienso que
lo está—que la única descodificación que podemos hacer en
tanto que occidentales, que la única lectura no neurótica de
la India que nos es posible a partir de nuestro logocentrismo
es esa que privilegia su superficie. El resto es traducción cris-
tianizante, sincretismo, verdadera superficialidad.
This is not about a transcendental, metaphysical or pro-

found India, it is exactly the opposite: it is the exaltation of
the surface, and, I dare say, it is a shallow India. I believe,
and I would have liked for Octavio Paz to agree with me—
I’m sure that he does—that as Westerners, the only way we
can decode India, the only nonneurotic reading available to
us and our logocentrism is that which privileges its surface.
Anything else is Christianizing translation, syncretism, true
superficiality.72
Precisely because for Sarduy logocentrism sets the limits for decoding
India, I think that his incorporation of Buddhism can be read in a simi-
lar light. Rather than in a profound exegesis of its philosophical tenets,
Buddhism is no better rendered in Sarduy’s work than in the surface
of its writing: in the opaque texture of the Tibetan language and in the
performance of its scriptural rituals. As I will explain shortly, these two
interfaces operate more strongly in the dialogue of Sarduy’s plastic and
narrative work.
The Buddhist rituals Sarduy practiced in the Himalayas or in the
Pagode de Vincennes in the suburbs of Paris coincided with the fiery
breakthrough of logocentrism (Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie
had been published in 1967; Roland Barthes’s L’empire des signes in
1970). As has been discussed in this chapter, non-Western scripts pro-
vided Western philosophy with a new toolkit to revise the metaphysi-
cal preeminence of alphabetic writing and to artistically celebrate the
written word—the signifier stripped of its denotative content. Intrigued
by the opacity of the Tibetan inscriptions that he was now seeing and
hearing so often, Sarduy’s acrylic paintings from the 1970s come up
with fictional scripts in the style of Henri Michaux’s Chinese-inspired
ideograms. Painting writing becomes for Sarduy a meditative practice,
by which the minute reproduction of identical signs follows the logic of
the Buddhist mantra, a ritual by which a phrase is repeated ad infini-
tum as an auspicious gesture. Moving beyond the recurrent etymolog-
ical metaphor of writing as a textile (since “text” and “textile” share
the root “texo”—“to weave,” it is commonplace to say that words are
“woven” into a text), Sarduy’s El Cristo de la rue Jacob instead defines
painting as the weaving of ancient textiles:
Se trata de repetir un mismo gesto, minúsculo, milimétrico,

hecho con el pincel más fino que hay, que se llama 0–0 y que
casi no tiene más que un pelo. Ese gesto, siempre el mismo,
siempre del mismo color, o más o menos, se va acumulando
en la tela. Se ha calculado que hay varios miles en un formato
medio. Y el “punto,” así le llamo a cada trazo, va armando
solo lo que puede asimilarse a una tela, a un tejido antiguo, a
una escritura arcaica. Algunos ven una escritura cuneiforme,
otros una escritura hebraica; otros, notaciones musicales.
This involves repeating a single gesture, minute, meticulous,

and made with the finest brush there is, the 00000, which
188 ❘ Chapter 4
has only about one hair. Always the same, always the same
color, more or less, that gesture gradually accumulates on
the canvas. It’s been estimated that there are thousands in an
average work. This “stitch,” which is what I call each stroke,
slowly constructs on its own something that resembles cloth,
an ancient weaving, an archaic writing. Some people see cu-
neiform, other see Hebrew letters, other musical notation,
etc.73
Whereas abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Mark Rothko

(1903–70) and Franz Kline (1910–62), had nurtured Sarduy’s taste for
the spontaneous, gestural, and dramatic color compositions of action
painting, Buddhism domesticated his painting style into a quiet and dis-
ciplined act of meditation, with results so precise as those of an intricate
Asian textile or a mechanically reproduced print (the latter explaining
Sarduy’s fascination with the Brazilian concretist design techniques).
The meditative practice of painting-writing is a ritual of dissolution,
both of the artist’s subjectivity and the linguistic sign’s content. I will
return to this shortly.
Apart from the text itself, Tibetan writing takes shape in Sarduy’s
calligraphic painting in the transformation of the conventional squared
white canvas into a rectangular brownish (coffee-tinted) surfaces that
evoke the Buddhist horizontal prayer books used in monasteries. In
the essay “Para recibir la aurora: La fabricación de los manuscritos
sagrados en el Tibet” (In the wake of dawn: The production of sacred
manuscripts in Tibet), Sarduy describes the production of the prayer
booklets whose unique format, just like the scrolls for Paz and Har-
oldo, demands a different manipulation from that of Western codex
books: “El libro no se hojea paralelamente al cuerpo del lector y de
derecha a izquierda, como en Occidente, sino que, con ambas manos se
tornan las endebles láminas hacia el cuerpo, hacia el pecho, como si la
escritura se entregara hacia una de esas flores simbólicas que marcan la
línea media del hombre—los seis çakras–: la que coincide con el cora-
zón” (The reader does not flip through the pages of the book from right
to left and in parallel to the body like in the West. Rather, he turns the
pages with both hands toward the body, toward the chest, as if writing
gave itself to one of those symbolic flowers that delineate the meridian
of the body—the six chakras—the one that coincides with the heart).74
From the perspective of Buddhism, Sarduy tells us, reading is a physi-
cal ritual in which printed words penetrate the body through energetic
points at the level of the chest, in the area of the heart. According to
Buddhist (and Tantric) anatomy, chakras are energetic centers consid-
ered to be the interface between the physical and nonphysical sides of
a subtler anatomy. Yet, what is initially presented as a metaphorical
dematerialization of writing is in fact the opposite: in Sarduy literature
implies the impression of a permanent mark. As he formulates in what
is arguably his most important essay, “Escrito sobre un cuerpo” (1969,
“Written on a Body”), literature is the art of tattooing: “La escritura
sería el arte de esos grafos, de lo pictural asumido por el discurso, pero
también el arte de la proliferación. La plasticidad del signo escrito y
su carácter barroco están presentes en toda literatura que no olvide
su naturaleza de inscripción, eso que podía llamarse escripturalidad”
(Writing could be the art of those graphies of discourses appropriating
the pictorial, but also the proliferation. The bonds between the plastic
arts and the written sign as well as its baroque character are present in
all literature that retains its inscriptive nature, what we could call its
scripturality).75
The drawing Première leçon d’acupuncture (1971; First Acupunc-
ture Lesson) graphically explores writing as the tattooing of pictograms
from the anatomical perspective of traditional Asian medicine.76 This
meticulously colored ink drawing combines two human figures and
different signs, some semantic, others not, in an exploration that was
then occupying the varied branches of structuralism, notably Roland
Barthes’s seminars, which Sarduy attended along with many who were
to become the leaders of French thought over the next twenty years.
The human figure in the drawing is a copy of an illustration of the
Routes of the Fourteen Meridians and Their Functions (Shisijing fahui),
a Chinese treatise of the mid-fourteenth century that became a referent
in the practice of acupuncture in the West through Jesuit translation.
These images depict half-naked male figures exhibiting the meridian
that runs through the body from neck to toes and organizes the two
dozen chakras of traditional Chinese medicine.
Curiously, while Sarduy’s drawing maintains the proportions of the
image from the Routes of the Fourteen Meridians, the names of the
chakras are displayed differently: only those in the area of the heart, at
the level of the chest—the ones that absorb the written word, we know
from the previous essay—are inscribed over the skin of the figure; the
other names float outside the silhouette, connected by an arrow to their
position in the meridian. These Han Sinitic glyphs—the only ones in
Sarduy’s work—untranslated and imitated with minute precision, are
190 ❘ Chapter 4
“tattooed” in this area of the body as a cross-cultural statement that

reading is a physical performance that marks the body for good.
Now, how do these figurative drawings, rare in Sarduy’s mostly ab-
stract plastic oeuvre, evoke Asian scripts specifically? To what extent do
acupuncture and the tattoo function as forms of writing that, through
the penetration of metal needles through the surface of the flesh, also
leave a wound? Escrito sobre un cuerpo, in fact, anticipates pain as a
condition for writing: “Pero esta inscripción no es posible sin herida, sin
pérdida. Para que la masa informativa se convierta en texto, para que
la palabra comunique, el escritor tiene que tatuarla, que insertar en ella
sus pictogramas” (“But this inscription is not possible without wound-
ing, without a loss. In order for informational mass to become text, for
words to communicate, the writer must tattoo that mass, insert his pic-
tograms in it”).77 In a foreword to an exhibition of the French painter-
calligrapher Jean Cortot (1925–2018), Sarduy makes an even more
explicit link between the flesh and the aesthetic materiality of Oriental
writing: “While the conceptual history of writing in the West, is vast,
its graphic history remains extremely poor. The concern for elegance in
the stroke, for the projection of the line, for curves and flourishes, we
assigned to the civilizations of ideograms and arabesques, leaving our
script with a purely informative role, a role devoid of ornament, script
reduced to its austere legibility. The figurative value of ideograms has, it
seems, gradually been lost, but letters in the Orient are still associated
with blood and the red seal of representation.”78 What might appear at
first glance as an Orientalist view of “ornamental” Asian scripts associ-
ated with violent cultures (“blood” is here a synecdoche of despotism)
becomes a more complex statement in light of religion: red is after all
the distinctive color of Mahayana Buddhism, visible in its monks’ garbs
and the facades of their monasteries. It is also the color of sacred texts:
in a synesthetic move, Sarduy associates red with the sound of the horns
that announce prayers at dawn in the Himalaya: “El rojo establece, con
el de la sangre, una complicidad secreta. Va circulando, una vez que sus
ondas han atravesado la piel, por todo el cuerpo, a un ritmo lento. Su
sonido es grave, algo sordo, su voz es de bajo, como el de las grandes
trompetas tibetanas que se despliegan en la puerta de los monasterios, a
la aurora” (Red establishes a secret complicity with blood. It circulates
slowly through the entire body once its waves have penetrated the skin.
It has a deep—almost deaf—sound, and its voice is as grave as the giant
Tibetan trumpets that rise at dawn at the entrance of monasteries).79
Translated in terms of Haroldo de Campos’s concretism, color becomes
a signifying agent of the linguistic ritual in a verbivocovisual scene of

preparation, in which blood flows through the body to absorb the signs
that will be imprinted—tattooed—onto the skin at the moment of en-
gagement with sacred texts. Red is the ultimate color, the heart of Sar-
duy’s palette, explored through a lifetime veneration of Mark Rothko,
whose suicide by razor represented for Sarduy the single true master-
piece. In “Cromoterapia” (Chromotherapy) he concludes: “De cuantas
explicaciones se han dado del suicidio de Mark Rothko hay una sola
que nunca he encontrado en sus numerosas, y con frecuencia deplora-
bles, biografías: su investigación del rojo llegó a tal profundidad, a tal
diálogo, que tuvo que derramar el modelo—y el origen—de todo posi-
ble rojo: la sangre humana” (Of all the explanations on Mark Rothko’s
suicide, there is only one that I have never found in the numerous—
and usually deplorable—biographies of him: that his incursion into red
reached such depth, such dialogue, that he had to spill the model—and
origin—of all possible red: human blood).80 In Sarduy’s interpretation,
death, marked by the fatal penetration of the blade on the surface of the
skin, marks the highest point of inspiration for his calligraphic painting,
a style translated superficially from the scriptures and rituals of Tibetan
Buddhism, but also from the most formal of the abstract expressionists.
Translation is an act of media transfer: a haptic process of iden-
tifying the superficial aspects of a literary artifact and recreating—
transcreating—them in a new cultural context. Translation of Chinese
classical poetry provides multiple forms of arousal of the tactile through
linguistic, spatial, and sensory manipulations of the Chinese script, op-
erations that were of particular interest to avant-garde Latin American
visual poets who were obsessed with Asia but largely illiterate of its
languages. Challenging Octavio Paz’s lamentation on the limited re-
percussions of Chinese poetics in Latin America, I posit that José Juan
Tablada, Haroldo de Campos, and Severo Sarduy, in turn, evidence the
rich tradition of ideogrammatic translation both through their visual
and plastic work and their intense conversation with other central Latin
American artists—Paz himself—exploring the limits of language at a
critical point in time when the supremacy of the written word was being
called into question by Western philosophy. This sensorial approach to
literary translation emphasizes tangible signifying elements of literary
languages such as instrumentation, supplies, site of inscription, and for-
mat that cast light on millenary material exchanges between Asia and
Latin America; to account for this, it is necessary to study the physi-
cal dispositions that enable such connection. Surfaces, Giuliana Bruno
192 ❘ Chapter 4
stresses, are “the site of reciprocal contact between us and objects or en-
vironments.” I have argued for the relevance of performance and rituals
in the media transfer of these poets, such as Haroldo’s evocation of the
cinematic unfolding of antique scrolls, or Sarduy’s calligraphic painting
as a meditation practice. These embodied transfers of world literature
prompt us to reflect again on the central role of the body in translation.
I started this book by studying translation as physical displacement, and
how the global traffic of Chinese bodies and the representation of their
silhouettes can be understood as a crucial marker of travel literature,
ethnographic modernism, and the modernista Orientalism at large. In
the final chapter of this book I return to the body’s epistemological ca-
pacity to affect and be affected. By analyzing the embodied memories
of performing arts during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,
I take translation as the transfer of affect in the writing of history of
China.
Chapter 5
Moving Memories
The Affective Archive of the Cultural Revolution
The documentary No intenso agora (2017; In the Intense Now) by the

Brazilian filmmaker João Moreira Salles (1962–) exhibits rare footage of
the Chinese Cultural Revolution.1 Through extraordinary editing work,
the two-hour piece weaves together television reports of the May 1968
riots in France, amateur films of the Prague Spring, and home videos
of a trip that Moreira Salles’s mother made to China in 1966. Moreira
Salles’s voice-over (reflective, calm, forever melancholic) comments on
these great events from recent history in light of childhood memories
that materialize in questions rather than in answers. Between long se-
quences showing French student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945–)
haranguing masses of students and workers, and scenes of Soviet tanks
marching through the streets of Czechoslovakia, Moreira Salles gives
in to the colorful shots of his mother strolling along the Great Wall of
China, posing in front of temples vandalized by Red Guards, or sur-
rounded by whimsical children holding Mao’s Little Red Book: “Ela
foi feliz na China, e por isso gosto de pensar nela lá” (She was happy in
China, and that is why I like to think of her over there), he concludes
about his mother’s transformative journey to the heart of the Great Pro-
letarian Cultural Revolution. Alien to any revolutionary activity and
moved rather by a bourgeois taste for art history, his mother visited
China in 1966 with a group of French aficionados, and, completely
193
194 ❘ Chapter 5
overwhelmed by what she saw, she filmed long hours that record the
reality of “um pais oposto a tudo o que ela conhecia” (a country unlike
anything she had ever known). The contrast in the tone of the narrative
is remarkable, but the narrator resolves it in a statement on the nature
of the family archive: “As imagens são amadoras. Não foram feitas para
a Historia. São apenas sobras de um momento na vida . . . quando tudo
parecia possível” (The images are amateur. They were not made for
History. They are mere leftovers of a moment in life . . . when everything
seemed possible). This personal footage, says Moreira Salles, is not the
private evidence of a scientific account of History—with a capital H—
but rather shows the fragments, residues, “leftovers” of an era of utopia.
Released between the fiftieth anniversaries of the Cultural Revolution
(1966–76) and May 1968, No intenso agora offers a bold revision of
the now extinct revolutionary zeal of the New Left as well as the fleeting
happiness of that mother, who—the documentary omits—took her own
life in the 1980s. Collective memory, family history, and the quest for
identity are intertwined here in the recovery of images and gestures that
individual memory gradually blurred and filtered into popular culture
until they were completely emptied of meaning.
In this book I have sought to demonstrate that the writing of China
in Latin America crosses the boundaries of established fields of knowl-
edge, unfolding as an undisciplined critical praxis of translation that
produces fragmentary archives. If the previous chapters explored differ-
ent forms of translation of Chinese artifacts that bypass conventional
disciplinary methods such as those of ethnography, philology, interna-
tional relations, and linguistics, in this final chapter I propose to ex-
plore translation as the transfer of affect in the narrative of history. At
a juncture in which the academic study of history is in the midst of a
“subjective turn” that incorporates emotions as forms of knowledge
production, and art criticism is illuminating the workings and transmis-
sions of archival memory (the “archival impulse” in Hal Foster’s 2004
formulation), I ask how the personal archives of Latin American fam-
ilies who experienced the Cultural Revolution first-hand resurface de-
cades later in artistic form.2 By affective archive, I refer to written, oral,
and visual records strongly marked by feelings and emotions. How do
personal correspondence, family photographs and films, or blurry child-
hood memories weave intimate stories that diverge from the institution-
alized versions of one the most intense episodes of Chinese history and
also of the twentieth century? Rather than focusing on the documen-
tary value of these materials in reconstructing the Cultural Revolution
Moving Memories ❘ 195
as a historical event, I am interested in how these pieces of evidence

are recast from the retrospective gaze of subsequent generations and in
turn prompt new questions about heritage, political commitment, and,
above all, the relationship between art and politics in the present.
I also take affect as the body’s capacity to affect and be affected,
which Diana Taylor understands as the performance of corporal epis-
temologies: “Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity,
and sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in
the public sphere. To understand these as performance suggests that
performance also functions as an epistemology. Embodied practice,
along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of
knowing.”3 This understanding of affect as a corporeal way of know-
ing is particularly well suited to grasping the importance of perfor-
mance and movement during the Cultural Revolution, which resurfaces
in various forms in the archives of the period. After all, the Cultural
Revolution was all about the body: through its sweeping deployment
of symbols and artifacts evoking the figure of Mao Zedong, it filtered
through to each aspect of the daily lives of those who lived in China
during those years. Following an extreme interpretation of Mao’s vision
of the arts at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (1942), the 1966
official campaign to destroy the “Four Olds” (old customs, old culture,
old habits, old ideas) sought to achieve a drastic break with the past to
edify a new socialist culture. As a result, cultural production, replying
on a modern infrastructure of mass media, and coordinated by Mao’s
wife Jiang Qing (1914–91), became largely circumscribed to a limited
repertoire of productions (yangbanxi) that were a blended pastiche of
socialist realism, Hollywood musicals, and Peking opera. And thanks to
a massive manufacturing industry, the imagery of these operas and bal-
lets manifested in posters, postcards, toys, kitchenware, stationary, and
magazines, as well as all kinds of trinkets, souvenirs, and utensils that
were used, touched, heard, and experienced with the body at all times of
the day. Just as the ubiquitous paraphernalia of the Cultural Revolution
aroused senses and emotions as much as the intellect, the memorialist
strategies to recover it also imply a physical and emotional disposition.
In light of this, I seek to apprehend how these feelings, senses, and emo-
tions are archived. How is the affective displayed not only through the
archive’s content but also in the ways the archives are made, produced,
and shared?
This book traces distinct forms of circulation of Chinese culture
that are virtually unreadable and undecipherable with the conventional
196 ❘ Chapter 5
tools of literary criticism. As I have argued throughout the chapters,

translation is not just a textual operation; it is also an act of displace-
ment of the human, visual, and haptic qualities of a literary artifact
when it crosses cultural boundaries. The affective turn, highlighting the
role of the body as site of knowledge production and signification, mod-
erates the emphasis on the linguistic and instead draws the attention
to other forms of perception. As Irene Depetris Chauvin and Natalia
Taccetta argue in Afectos, historia y cultura visual: Una aproximación
indisciplinada (2019; Affect, history and visual culture: An indisciplined
approach), “el ‘giro afectivo’ no se vincula con un regreso al sujeto,
sino con la puesta en evidencia de la discontinuidad constitutiva de la
subjetividad contemporánea y la experiencia de la no-intencionalidad
de las emociones y afectos en intercambios cotidianos” (The “affective
turn” is not a return to the subject; rather, it is linked to the evidence
of the constitutive discontinuity of contemporary subjectivity and the
experience of the nonintentionality of emotions and affects in everyday
exchanges).4 The following pages draw attention to the translation of
affect in world literature by exploring how childhood and youth em-
bodied memories of performances of music, film, dance, and drama
circulate through geographical as well as temporal boundaries. I put
forward tentative answers through the concepts of repertoire, mandate,
spectacle, mediation, illumination, and silence.
R ed Dia pers
Chapter 3 reconstructed the itineraries of intellectuals and artists from

the broad spectrum of the Left who visited the PRC during the first
seventeen years after the establishment of Communist rule. These were
occasional travelers who became vibrant cultural agents thanks to their
political enthusiasm, the momentum of the translation industry, and,
above all, the twisted networks of cultural diplomacy. This chapter in-
stead focuses on the trajectories of those Latin American “foreign ex-
perts” who resided long-term in Beijing with their families during the
years of the Cultural Revolution, a time when China had virtually shut
its doors to outsiders.5 They were hired as professors of Spanish and Por-
tuguese, translators, proofreaders, and journalists, and enjoyed a special
status compared to that of regular diplomats and other foreigners. Their
children attended Chinese schools, interacted with Chinese caretakers,
and became fluent in Mandarin. In the jargon of the Left they are called
“red diapers,” “children of Communist Party (CP) members, children of

former CP members, and children whose parents never became members
of the CP but were involved in political, cultural, or educational activi-
ties led or supported by the Party.”6 The term emerged in the 1920s as a
critique of the comrades who rose through the ranks thanks to relatives’
connections, but it rapidly became a literary and cinematographic trope
with the addition of subsequent Communist generations. These Latin
American red diapers established a unique bond with their adoptive
country that shapes their identity to this day: many of them developed
global careers in the orbit of China and have followed from up-close the
dramatic transformation of China from the capital of socialist revolu-
tion to the epicenter of global capitalism. The novel Volver la vista atrás
(2020; Retrospective) by the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez
(1973–) provides a vivid image of this singular cohort of individuals
whose itinerant lives were marked by political and family passions. In a
poignant scene toward the end, the protagonist Sergio Cabrera mirrors
himself in a photograph of fellow red diapers from Uruguay, who also
happen to go by the surname Cabrera, and wonders:
Toda una generación—pensó Sergio allí, viendo la foto de

los Cabrera uruguayos—, toda una generación de latinoa-
mericanos cuya vida quedó empeñada en una causa enorme.
¿Dónde estarían ahora? Vivían en Suecia, sí, ¿pero dónde,
y con quién, y con qué memorias de su paso por las armas,
y con cuánta sensación de que alguien había tomado por
ellos decisiones importantes, de que alguien les había robado
años de su vida? Eran hijos de un poeta, Sarandy Cabrera,
un contemporáneo de Onetti y de Idea Vilariño que tradujo
a Ronsard y a Petrarca y prologó los 37 poemas de Mao Tse-
Tung. ¿Cómo habría sido su vida? ¿En qué se habrá parecido
a la vida de Fausto Cabrera, y cuánta influencia habrá tenido
en las decisiones de sus hijos? De vez en cuando Sergio de-
dicaba sus ratos de ocio a rastrear por los laberintos de la
red el destino de todos ellos, los viejos protagonistas de sus
vidas previas.
A whole generation—Sergio thought there, looking at the

photo of the Uruguayan Cabreras—a whole generation of
Latin Americans whose lives were pawned for an enormous
cause. Where were they now? They lived in Sweden, yes, but
198 ❘ Chapter 5
where, and with whom, and with what memories of their

time in arms, and with how much of a feeling that someone
had stolen years of their lives? They were the sons of a poet,
Sarandy Cabrera, a contemporary of Onetti and Idea Vila-
riño, who translated Ronsard and Petrarch and wrote a pro-
logue to Mao Tse-tung’s 37 poemas. How had his life been?
How had it resembled Fausto Cabrera’s life, and how much
influence had he had on his sons’ decisions? Sometimes Ser-
gio devoted his free time to combing through the labyrinths
of the internet for their destinies, all those protagonists of his
previous lives.7
A remarkable number of documentaries, memoirs, and biographical

fiction by red diapers from all over Latin America have been released
over the last ten years, offering possible answers to the destiny of this
“Chinese” generation. In Cartas de Jingzhai (): Reminiscen-
cias estudiantiles en China 1976–1981 (2014; Jingzhai letters: Student
reminiscences of China 1976–1981), the Venezuelan Víctor Ochoa-
Piccardo (1955–) looks back on his college years at Tsinghua Univer-
sity as well as on his childhood during the Cultural Revolution. Apart
from offering a vast social network of the international community of
Beijing, in the eloquent footnotes to the letters the author plays out his
own tweaking of the past, the tricks of memory, and a firm resistance
to nostalgia. So does Pablo Vicente Rovetta Dubinsky (1958–) in Los
años setenta en China: Recuerdos de un Oriental en Oriente (2020;
The 1970s in China: Memoirs of an Oriental in the Orient), a collec-
tion of essays that reflect on Chinese history as seen through the eyes
of a Uruguayan who witnessed the end of the Cultural Revolution and
China’s transformations during the last forty years. The documentary
Hotel de la amistad (2016; Friendship Hotel) by Pablo (1958–) and Yuri
Doudchitzky (1961–) narrates a homecoming journey to Beijing. The
Uruguayan brothers become detectives of sorts who track the locations
and characters of their years in China by following family albums and
interviews only to learn about an unexpected outcome that makes them
revisit their childhood nostalgia in a bleak new light. A ponte de bambú
(2019; Bamboo Bridge) by Marcelo Machado (1958–), also brings al-
bums, films, and all kinds of media to reconstruct forty years in the life
of the Brazilian Martins family, who have served as “friends of China”
from the times of the Cultural Revolution to the present, adapting to the
shifting roles prescribed for them at each stage of Chinese diplomacy.8
By studying works that document the affective archives of the Latin

American youth who experienced the Cultural Revolution, this chapter
contributes to ongoing discussions on art, history, and memory unfold-
ing both in China and Latin America. In Utopian Ruins. A Memorial
of the Mao Era (2020), Jie Li overcomes decades of state-sponsored
amnesia and official narratives based on inaccessible archives by putting
together a “memorial museum” of corporeal and material evidence of
the Mao years. In a monograph designed as an exhibition, Li curates
six chapters that scrutinize photographs, films, and memorial sites, as
well as her own family’s memories that look back to negotiate the an-
tagonistic paradigms that structure the current intellectual debate about
China’s recent past. Li’s notion of “‘utopian ruins’ highlights, on the
one hand, the hopes and aspirations that moved so many to partici-
pate in the Chinese Revolution, and, on the other hand, the mass suf-
fering and cultural wreckage that occurred in its wake.”9 Attentive to
the crucial momentum of memory’s generational transfer in present-day
China (from the lived to the mediated; from possession to inheritance),
Li makes a programmatic call to future curators to salvage past stories
and remnants from death and demolition, and to give enduring form to
ephemeral memories: “Now is the time to collect documents, artifacts,
and testimonies in anticipation of future museums.”10 This chapter adds
to such memorial museums of the Mao era by showcasing scattered
documents, experiences, and testimonies of those “friends of China”
from the Third World who left their homes to experience the Cultural
Revolution in situ. The memories of their children, who were educated
as locals yet always treated as foreigners, further complicate notions of
identity, community, and internationalism during the Chinese revolu-
tionary process.
The archival lookback on the revolutionary zeal of the 1960s and
1970s has also been at the core of Latin American artistic and critical
discourse in the last two decades. As I discussed in chapter 3 regarding
Ricardo Piglia’s ambiguous relation to his Maoist past, Bruno Bosteels’s
recovery of the repressed militancy of the period through archives that
were “censored, forgotten, buried, or destroyed since the mid-1970s” is
arguably the most comprehensive project to rescue the legacy of 1968
by actualizing Communism, in the words of Alain Badiou’s The Com-
munist Hypothesis (2015).11 In parallel to Bosteels’s emphasis on intel-
lectual history, Erin Graff-Zivin identifies an “anarchaeological” drive
in recent scholarship that also revises dominant narratives, particularly
of the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 in Mexico, yet does so “not in order
200 ❘ Chapter 5
to ‘bring to light’ the truth of the Mexican student-popular movement

but instead to traverse the fantasy of the movement, together with its
dissolution, without seeking to suture the gaps necessarily produced
in such readings.”12 Like Moreira Salles’s No intenso agora, these lat-
ter works recover the affective and sensorial memories of the episode
through alternative forms of evidence such as the subaltern voices of
political prisoners and women or the luminous effect of gunfire, flares,
and camera flashes that ultimately defined the massacre.13 Beatriz Sarlo
summarizes the prevalent subjective turn in academia and the public
sphere in the following terms: “la actual tendencia académica y del mer-
cado de bienes simbólicos se propone reconstruir la textura de la vida
y la verdad albergadas en la rememoración de la experiencia, la revalo-
ración de la primera persona como punto de vista, la reivindicación de
una dimensión subjetiva, que hoy se expande sobre los estudios del pa-
sado y los estudios culturales del presente” (the current academic trend,
as well as the market for symbolic goods, seek to reconstruct the texture
of life and truth anchored in the remembrance of experience, the re-
evaluation of the first person as a point of view, and the reclaiming of a
subjective dimension, which today expands to studies of the past and to
cultural studies of the present).14 Sarlo refers in particular to the South-
ern Cone, where official gestures of repentance and amnesty legislation
to condemn the human rights abuses of recent dictatorships have given
a fresh voice to the victims of state terrorism and their descendants, now
grouped in organizations such as the Argentine H.I.J.O.S (Hijos por la
Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio; Children For Iden-
tity and Justice, Against Forgetting and Silence) or the Chilean A.F.D.D
(Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos; Association of
Families of the Detained-Disappeared). These policies have facilitated a
wealth of artistic production: novels, memoirs, and documentaries de
hijos (“by children”) configure a robust and ever-growing subgenre of
its own.
At the center of these comparable memorialist ecologies from the
two cultural fields is the notion of “postmemory,” coined by Marianne
Hirsch to describe “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to
the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before
to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images,
and behaviors among which they grew up, which were transmitted to
them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their
own right.”15 While transgenerational memories are always present in
the sons and daughters of Maoist militants whose life was shaped by
their parents’ political choices, their affective archives do not just seem
to constitute but are memories in their own right, since they refer to
the second generation’s first-hand experience in the revolutionary pro-
cess and their embodied exposure to the foreign culture. The Cultural
Revolution complicates dichotomies usually associated with patterns
of postmemory such as perpetrator/victim, state terrorism/revolution-
ary violence, or past/present because the traumatic decade 1966–76 in
China was part of a revolutionary process with global reach and still
in power today. Latin American memories of the Cultural Revolution
are thus moving both because they spur an emotional response and be-
cause they are in motion: they relate to China and Latin America from
the inside and from the outside. Released in Spanish and Portuguese,
they will most likely go unnoticed by the vigilant regime of the only
president of China other than Mao Zedong to have his personal views
on socialism elevated to doctrine (since 2018 “Xi Jinping Thought” ap-
pears in the preamble to the constitution). In the context of a cultural
industry closely monitored by the state, Xi Jinping’s (1953–) speech at
the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art in 2014, encouraging China’s
creative industries to promote party ideology and patriotism with their
work, echoed Mao’s stance at the Yan’an Forum and further reinforced
the message that in the postsocialist state intervention of the arts is
far from being a thing of the past. These memories also add nuance to
Western liberal views of the global legacy of the Cultural Revolution at
a juncture when democracy is being challenged worldwide by the rise
of populism—an anxiety nowhere better rendered than in the title of a
New Yorker piece published on January 25, 2021, shortly after right-
wing extremists stormed the United States Capitol to overturn the 2020
presidential election: “What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for
Our Current Moment? The Great Question of China’s Maoist Experi-
ment Now Looms Over the United States: Why Did a Powerful Society
Suddenly Start Destroying Itself?”16 Ultimately, these disorienting mem-
ories from all over Latin America that produce the most diverse political
and artistic reactions to the utopian ruins of the global revolutionary
past highlight the methodological shortcomings of assuming putative
frameworks of analysis such as the Third World or the Global South
in the comparative study of cultures, because such categories flatten
artistic production by seeking to anchor it into particular identities and
local histories, while the experience of Latin American red diapers in
China is essentially bicultural and transnational. I agree with Florencia
Garramuño that contemporary Latin American art combining unspeci-
202 ❘ Chapter 5
fied media and aesthetics to call into question notions of belonging and
identity ultimately poses a much deeper phenomenological conundrum:
what exactly does it mean to inhabit the world?17
R epertoir es
The father of Yuri and Pablo Doudchitzky was a leader of Argentina’s

Communist Youth who went into exile in Montevideo during the two
first Peronist administrations (1946–55). He soon became disenchanted
with his pro-Soviet peers—whom he pejoratively called “bureaucrats”—
and from the new ranks of Maoism accepted the invitation to undertake
“la más grande aventura de su vida como revolucionario” (the greatest
adventure of his life as a revolutionary).18 Together with his wife and three
children, he settled in the capital of China from 1963 to 1967 thanks to
a contract with the Spanish department of the Beijing Foreign Languages
University. The family stayed at the Friendship Hotel, an international
compound that initially housed the Soviet specialists who assisted in the
transition to socialism but later hosted the “friends of China” coming
from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The documentary Hotel de la amis-
tad by Yuri and Pablo Doudchitzky follows their return to Beijing fifty
years later, where, with the help of photographs, interviews, and blurry
memories, they reconstruct the itineraries of their Beijing childhood, the
intellectual biography of their father, and their own inscription in a gene-
alogy of militancy that began with their Bolshevik grandparents in Russia.
All the investigations conducted in Hotel de la amistad are struc-
tured around the question of what really happened to their father’s late
best friend Mong Futi, with whom the family lost touch after he was
arrested by the Red Guards in 1967. There is a photo of Mong that the
Doudchitzkys share with their interviewees from a laptop, which only
produces sterile answers. Toward the middle of the film we learn from
a former student of his that the person in the photograph is not Mong
Futi (and we could add, is his name also not spelled Meng Futi, since the
spelling “Mong” used in the subtitles of the film is not included in either
the Wade-Giles or pinyin romanization systems?). It appears that Mong
Futi committed suicide because of his humiliation at being labeled a
revisionist. Like many university professors during the transition to so-
cialism, Mong came from a middle-class family and had participated
in the Kuomintang, two tragic flaws to the radicalized eyes of the Red
Guards, the mass student-led paramilitary movement from the early
phase of the Cultural Revolution that sought to destroy all symbols of

China’s pre-Communist past. What the documentary describes as the
historic fate of the Chinese intellectual also functions as a metaphor
of the Doudchitzky brothers’ disenchantment with their own Chinese
childhood. This disenchantment is played out in the subtle editing of
original recordings and archival material, where soundtrack, lyrics, and
footage of the Cultural Revolution weave an affective narrative that
shifts in tone as the plot progresses.
At the beginning of the film, the sound, visual, and verbal registers
are aligned. Family photos of lavish banquets, Tai chi practices, and
lively classrooms convey the freshness of the intrepid, newly arrived
family who had come from afar to join those under the aegis of Mao.
The revolutionary song “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,”
commonly sung in public during the 1960s by the Red Guards, plays in
the background, confirming with its lyrics the faith of these converts to
Maoism: “The revolutionary masses cannot do without the Communist
Party; Mao Zedong Thought is the sun that forever shines.”19 The story
develops and so does the archival narrative. While family albums evoke
idyllic reminiscences of the international arcadia of the Friendship Ho-
tel where kids roamed free and role-played war against the American
imperialists, the background music raises some questions. To the lyrics
of the song “We are the Heirs of Communism,” interpreted by the in-
fant voices of the Young Pioneers of China—a mass youth organization
created in 1949 and still active today—the viewers are made to wonder
about the actual heritage of this fellowship of children of the Third
World, whose lingua franca was Mandarin and whose putative guard-
ians were the nannies and teachers who looked after them while their
parents served the revolution (fig. 11).
Somewhat perplexed by the awareness of such earnest responsibility
entrusted to the staff of the hotel, Yuri’s voiceover comments:
Al año de estar trabajando en Pekín, mis padres aprovecha-

ron uno de los privilegios que les daba su contrato y realiza-
ron un viaje de dos meses a Sudamérica para visitar parien-
tes en Argentina, Chile y Uruguay y nos dejaron con siete,
cuatro y tres años en las antípodas del planeta a cargo de
unas niñeras con las que nunca habían podido hablar por
desconocimiento del idioma. Y todo el comentario que hace
mi padre al respecto es que al regreso quedaron encantados
de que habíamos aprendido una coreografía y una canción.
204 ❘ Chapter 5
Fig. 11. Children of foreign residents singing Maoist marches in Beijing. Hotel
de la amistad, 2016. Copyright © Pablo Doudchitzky.
After a year of working in Beijing, my parents took advan-

tage of one of the privileges that their contract gave them
and made a two-month trip to South America to visit rel-
atives in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, leaving us—who
were then seven, four, and three years old—in the antipodes
of the planet in the care of nannies with whom they had
never been able to talk due to the lack of a common lan-
guage. And the single comment my father made upon his
return is that they were delighted that we had learned a cho-
reography and a song.20
The moment of reckoning with the need to sacrifice family life for the
sake of political action is a trope in the memorialist genre of the sec-
ond generation, particularly in works about parents disappeared by the
state. These range from the highly controversial Argentine documen-
tary Los rubios (2003; The Blonds), where the orphan Albertina Car-
ri’s open questioning of the value of militancy stirred a heated debate
about the ethical limits of this genre (see the Kohan-Macón debate in
Punto de Vista, 2004), to more laudatory films like La guardería (2015;
Our House in Cuba) by Virginia Croatto or El edificio de los chilenos
(2010; The Chilean Building) by Macarena Aguilo, about the everlast-
ing bond of the children of the guerrilla organizations Montoneros (Ar-
gentina) and M.I.R (Chile) who were sheltered in Cuba as their parents
broke their exile to conduct a counteroffensive strike in 1970s and early

1980s.21 Hotel de la amistad neither passes judgment nor pardons this
sacrifice. Looking back on the mid-1960s, before the New Left radi-
calized into armed conflict, the film evokes a form of militant utopia
at a stage when it was mostly intellectual, romantic, and full of ad-
venture. The Doudchitzkys’ father did not die because of his political
choices (we learn in the documentary that he passed away in 2005),
which casts an utterly different light on the memories of his children’s
temporary orphanage in China. In fact, as we listen to Yuri speaking
the words quoted above, we almost hear a scoff, as if he were grinning
at the arcane thought of his father crisscrossing the planet so smoothly.
And what appears to be the evidence of such nonchalance—that is, his
father’s delight that his kids learned a choreography and a song in his
absence—is the key to the peculiar quality of the affective memory of
this generation that was educated in China. In the film the songs and
dances that were part of the children’s curriculum do not operate simply
as material archives (static, permanent, storable) but rather as reper-
toires, performative practices that produce knowledge from an embod-
ied memory.22 Patriotic songs such as the aforementioned “Sailing the
Seas Depends on the Helmsman” or “We are the Heirs of Communism”
are indeed historical records of Maoist cultural policy, and the produc-
ers of the film have likely paid copyright fees to a repository to obtain
permission to reproduce them in their own film. Yet, for these director-
protagonists, these cultural products are the soundtrack of their child-
hood: the music they heard in films, at official events, and blaring from
ubiquitous loudspeakers on the streets; the music they learned by heart
at school and interpreted with their bodies, and most likely still hum
spontaneously to this day, since, like all effects of early pedagogy, they
stay engraved in the affective archive of childhood.
Once the tragic fate of Mong Futi is revealed, the editing no longer en-
dorses nor questions the triumphal melodies of the Cultural Revolution
with images; instead, it condemns them by juxtaposing photographs of
humiliated teachers wearing dunce caps, mountains of burning books,
and ransacked monuments. These rare images that chronicle the most
frenzied period of the Cultural Revolution—and that have become the
most recognizable storyboards of the Cultural Revolution in Western
eyes—come from the photo album Red-Color News Soldier (2003) by
the dissident Chinese photojournalist Li Zhensheng (1940–2020). A re-
porter for the Heilongjiang Daily from the northern city of Harbin, Li
kept more than ten thousand negatives stashed in floorboards for nearly
206 ❘ Chapter 5
forty years, making them known to the public in 2003 in a bilingual

edition published in New York: “Very little photographic evidence of
the excesses of the Cultural Revolution remains, and certainly no books
from that time exist that showed the flipside of these policies—making
the discovery and publication of an illicit archive from that era all the
more remarkable,” states the British photojournalist and collector Mar-
tin Parr (1952–) in reference to the historiographical value of these
images that are to this day proscribed in mainland China.23 Are the
photographs of the Cultural Revolution in Hotel de la amistad the same
as those of Red-Color News Soldier, from where they are drawn? How
do these testimonies of political turmoil take on new tones when twice
unearthed: first in the Maoist dissident’s book and then in a memorial-
ist work by the descendants of a Maoist activist from Latin America?
A close look at the sequence of how Li Zhensheng’s photos are repro-
duced in Hotel de la amistad reveals that they were filmed directly from
the album, since some of them exhibit the convex distortion produced
by the binding of the spine of the book. In simulating the act of flip-
ping through the album’s pages, memory is performed as a subjective
ongoing action rather than as a static memento: we follow the moving
camera cropping the images and zooming in on faces as if through the
lens of a magnifying glass. In Red-Color News Soldier these silhou-
ettes represent anonymous victims of the Cultural Revolution, whereas
in Hotel de la amistad—projected through the Doudchitzkys’ inquisi-
tive eyes—they embody the phantasmagorical figure of Mong Futi, the
missing person from the directors’ childhood for whom they frantically
search in the film. In a cultural context like that of the Southern Cone,
with its relentless artistic exploration of the recovering of the bodies of
the disappeared by the state—whether through photographs, film, or
human-sized cutouts that occupy the public space (to mention the thriv-
ing legacy of the 1983 Argentine performance siluetazo)—it is worth
mentioning that the missing body recuperated artistically in Hotel de
la amistad is a victim of the same revolutionary regime that their father
served in China, not of an antagonist one.24 In this case the fictional res-
titution of an identity via the nameless figures of a recognizable photo
album does not settle the score with a traumatic past but rather creates
a new pain: the fall from grace of the Cultural Revolution in the heroic
narrative of their father’s intellectual biography. I will return to this
complex articulation of the postmemories of the revolutionary Left in
my discussion of works about descendants of Shining Path militants in
Peru.
Yuri puts into words his disenchantment and that of others. As a

farewell to the Beijing sojourn, we see him at a restaurant themed after
the Cultural Revolution in the cosmopolitan Chaoyang district, where
an amateur troupe dramatizes “The East Is Red,” the de facto anthem
narrating Mao’s rise to power that we see at the lively beginning of
the documentary in clips from the 1964 model film by the same title
directed by Wang Ping (1916–90). Confronted with this low-cost and
sparsely attended spectacle, the relieved voice-over concludes that the
death of Mong Futi marks “the end of a stage of idealism of his father’s
life. It would be tempting to read such political disenchantment as the
fading of the idealist theatrical power of the model play, now turned
into kitsch memorabilia catering to foreign tourists. Like chinoiserie,
souvenirs of the Cultural Revolution thrive in markets inside and out-
side China as popular collectibles, ironically though, also as exotic com-
modities that recall the traumatic road to socialism, best summarized
by Laurence Coderre in the paradox that “while informed discussion
of the Cultural Revolution may well be in short supply in the People’s
Republic of China, objects (purportedly) from the Cultural Revolution
abound.”25 There is indeed a sharp contrast between the clips of the
1965 version of “The East is Red” and the one filmed in Hotel de la
amistad, both displaying the entire prelude “Sunflower to the Sun,”
a distinctive segment of “The East Is Red” where dancers hold large
yellow flowers. While in the model film radiant figures draped in pas-
tel hues enact flawless movements to the score of a massive orchestra,
the actors in the themed restaurant drag their floral props across the
stage, lip-synching to loud playback music constantly interrupted by
cheers from the audience. Amateur performance, which could hastily be
read as a nostalgic downgrading of the original lavish model plays, was
rather the “key technology of mass (re)production and remediation of
revolutionary art” destined to the massive population of the immense
Chinese territory.26 In cinematographic format, model operas made it to
the most remote corners of the countryside thanks to mobile projection
units that gathered entire villages around impromptu screens; as plays
they circulated in translation into the countless dialects and operatic
traditions from each region of the country, usually performed by non-
professional artists.27 After all, revolutionary operas were conceived as
Beijing operas, the traditional dramatic form popularly enacted in parks
and markets, as much as on the stage. Through amateur routines, revo-
lutionary art penetrated into the bodies of the common people making
them active performers of the new culture of the masses: according to
208 ❘ Chapter 5
Xiaomei Chen, “the masses were encouraged to imitate the protagonists

of the model theatre by watching and even performing model theatrical
pieces themselves in order to become better revolutionaries.”28 These
common people were older and newer generations of the PRC, among
them foreign schoolkids like Yuri and Pablo Doudchitzky, who learned
their songs and choreographies by heart while their parents were away
making the revolution.
Ma n dates
Víctor José Ochoa Gómez (1931–2018) moved with his family to the
Chinese capital in 1968 to work as a journalist for the Xinhua news
agency. The Venezuelan family stayed for two years altogether, but the
son Víctor Ochoa-Piccardo (1955–) returned in 1976 to complete his
college degree in architecture with a scholarship from the Chinese gov-
ernment and then settled permanently in 1983 (unable to renew his
residence permit in 2012, he now lives in Malaysia). Cartas de Jingzhai
offers a vivid testimony of the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in
the letters that the young Víctor sent to his family over the years. In the
eloquent footnotes to the correspondence that was transcribed for pub-
lication in 2014, the author not only reconnects with the China of his
youth but also notes the abyss between his China and that of his father.
If there is a repertoire of embodied memory in Cartas de Jingzhai,
it is the gustatory one. In numerous footnotes, the author displays a
sybarite ethnography perfected over nearly five decades of residence in
China. We learn about mantous and wotous, and jiaozis (steamed wheat
and cornmeal buns, and dumplings, respectively); the incorrigible qual-
ity of Chinese cheese; culinary maxims such as “uno podía conectarse
con su infancia a través de ciertos alimentos” (one could connect with
one’s childhood through certain foods); or the author’s commitment
to the bland menu of the Chinese students’ canteen rather than to “las
comodidades para consentir a los extranjeros” (the comforts to spoil
foreigners).29 Retrospective comments that appeal to the palate show up
in the most unexpected notes, as in the following quote repeated twice
in the book: “su madre era famosa por haber sido la primera guerrillera
griega durante la Segunda Guerra, además cocinaba muy bien, particu-
larmente los postres” (her mother was famous for having been the first
Greek guerrilla fighter during the World War II; she also cooked very
well, particularly desserts).30
Since the author is an insider to Chinese culture, he contextualizes his

youthful impressions retrospectively. The initial surprise of becoming
unexpectedly admired because of the freckles on his shoulders is ex-
plained decades later in terms of a common racial bias of the Chinese:
“Es muy cómico pero los chinos resultan ser muy exquisitos en el tema
racial. Por una parte, no les gustan los negros pero admiran su físico,
tampoco sienten mayor simpatía por la mayoría de las otras razas asiá-
ticas ni por los árabes” (it is quite amusing that the Chinese turn out
to be very picky when it comes to race. On the one hand, they do not
like blacks but admire their physique, nor do they feel any particular
attraction to most other Asian races or Arabs).31 An anecdote of a dis-
agreement with a friend is explained decades later as “ciertamente los
chinos son poco curiosos en sentido social, no preguntan qué hizo uno
el fin de semana o la noche anterior . . . Quizás es una medida sabia
para proteger su intimidad” (indeed the Chinese are not very socially
curious, they do not ask what one did last weekend or last before. . . .
Perhaps this is a smart way of protecting their own privacy).32 Ochoa-
Piccardo himself adopts such evasive Chinese attitude to sensitive issues
(known in China as “saving face” [mianzi]) by recounting history in a
way that avoids uncomfortable statements. Unlike the Doudchitzkys,
who assume an openly critical view of the Red Guards, Ochoa-Piccardo
exposes different versions of controversial historical episodes for the
reader to judge. For example, in the preface he recalls the atmosphere
during the Cultural Revolution as “aquel pandemónium revolucionario
que se vivía o sufría en la sociedad—depende quién eche el cuento”
(that revolutionary pandemonium that was lived or suffered in society,
depending on who tells the story).33 He is impartial with official records
too: in reference to the news of the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, he
points out: “el cálculo oficial de víctimas oscila entre 250 y 650 mil
depende de la fuente y del año. También se debe sumar a esto 700 mil
heridos. Las estadísticas en China siempre han sido un misterio” (the
official estimate of victims ranges between 250 and 650 thousand de-
pending on the source and year. 700,000 wounded must also be added
to this. Statistics in China have always been a mystery).34
While Hotel de la amistad is a posthumous tribute to an event in the
father’s intellectual biography, Cartas de Jingzhai is an open conver-
sation between father and son about the mutating meanings of China
during the second half of the twentieth century. As a resident, Ochoa-
Piccardo witnesses the postsocialist transition brought about by Deng
Xiaoping’s reforms while his father had remained loyal to the China
210 ❘ Chapter 5
of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to which he contributed

firmly from Caracas as president of the Venezuelan-China Friendship
Association and from his Marxist bookstore El Viento del Este (The
east wind):
Mi regreso a estudiar en Beijing, si bien fue una decisión per-

sonal, estuvo francamente alentada por papá quien aspiraba
a que yo recibiera una mejor educación (socialista) a la que
estaba recibiendo en la Universidad Central de Venezuela
(¿burguesa?) y volviera al país empapado de nuevos valores
políticos y culturales. Buena parte de estas cartas reflejan el
choque paulatino pero implacable de la realidad cotidiana
que vivía descubriendo con los consejos y valores enseñados
por él en mis años adolescentes. Ahora, próximo a cumplir
60 años, creo que este debate aún no termina de ser zanjado
entre nosotros, aunque últimamente ha concedido que “al
capitalismo le quedan dos mil años por lo menos.”
Although it was a personal choice, my return to study in

Beijing was frankly encouraged by Dad, who wanted me to
receive a better (socialist) education than the (bourgeois?)
one I was receiving at the Central University of Venezuela,
and to return to our country having soaked up new political
and cultural values. A good deal of these letters reflect the
gradual but implacable conflict between the daily reality that
I lived and discovered, and the advice and values that he
taught me in my adolescent years. Now, about to turn 60, I
believe that this debate has not yet been settled between us,
although he has lately conceded that “capitalism has at least
two thousand more years left.”35
Although these “letters to his father” could set the stage for a Kafkian
paternal reprimand, they offer instead a testament of filial piety, the
Confucian imperative of respect for one’s parents, elders, and ances-
tors that haunts the Chinese youth today. Filial piety not only specifies
norms within the family but also provides the social and ethical foun-
dations for maintaining social order and thus a stable society. Thus, this
imperative curbs a genuine intergenerational discussion on the Cultural
Revolution. Yet another hint of Ochoa-Piccardo’s becoming Chinese,
his family correspondence conveys the struggle of a generation that,
in growing up, learned the China of their parents and the current one
belong to remote universes but, out of ethical virtue and civic duty,
they needed to somehow reconcile them. Thus, while the footnotes of
Cartas de Jingzhai express opinions, they also listen; and although they
acknowledge friction, they avoid polemic.
Spec tac les
The stifling influence of parental expectations is the main theme of

Volver la vista atrás, a biographical novel by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
(1973–) about the everlasting mark of the Cultural Revolution in the
life of Sergio Cabrera (1950–). Fleeing the dictatorship of Francisco
Franco in 1939, Fausto Cabrera (1924–2016) escaped from Spain
and, after years of itinerant strife in the Dominican Republic, Pan-
ama, and Venezuela, became a beloved poet, interpreter, and film and
television director in Colombia. This restless revolutionary joined the
Colombian Communist Party and, seduced by Mao, moved to the
Chinese capital in 1963 to work at the Foreign Languages University
together with his wife Luz Elena and their children Sergio and Mari-
anella. The teenagers spent four years in China, two of these without
their parents, who purposely left them on their own so as to complete
their ideological and proletarian transformation: “llegar a Colombia
antes de haber entrado en forma firme en esa transformación me pa-
rece simplemente haber perdido el tiempo en China, y no lograr el
objetivo” (“Going back to Colombia before having firmly entered into
that transformation seems to me to have simply wasted your time in
China, and not achieved the objective”).36 The two traveled back to
Colombia in 1969 to join the Ejército Popular de Liberación (Na-
tional Liberation Army) and gradually grew disenchanted with guer-
rilla, their home country, and world revolution, pushing Sergio into
an existential dilemma: “En China no hay nada para mí. En Colom-
bia tampoco. Ni siquiera he cumplido 24 años y ya me estoy pregun-
tando para qué seguir viviendo” (“There is nothing for me in China.
Nor in Colombia. I haven’t even turned twenty-four and I’m already
wondering what to keep living for”).37 An ambitious family saga that
highlights Latin America’s enduring role in the revolutionary cartogra-
phies of the twentieth century, the novel is essentially a meditation on
fatherhood and, more precisely, a cautionary tale on mixing personal
passions with pedagogical models.
212 ❘ Chapter 5
The novel opens in 2016 in Barcelona, where the acclaimed Colom-

bian filmmaker learns of the sudden death of his father. Partly honoring
his word to participate in a retrospective on his own work organized by
the Catalunya Film Archive and partly paralyzed by the memories from
the past that suddenly erupt in his face, Sergio decides not to attend the
funeral in Bogotá and instead stays for a few days in the Mediterranean
city with his son Raúl, just arrived from his native Málaga. With a cu-
rious teenaged son and engaged filmgoers as interlocutors, the novel
unfolds as a retrospective bildungsroman where the evolution of the
protagonist unfolds through the magnetic relation of his father with the
performing arts. I read Volver la vista atrás as a theatrical performance
of Sergio Cabrera’s formative years; a performance that is staged during
the Cultural Revolution, scripted by his father, and directed by a Latin
American novelist.
The Cultural Revolution as a total stage is a trope. As discussed ear-
lier, Chinese cultural policy from 1966 to 1976 privileged scenic arts
such as film and theater whose reach stretched beyond the setting of the
venue and filtered through the daily lives of common folk, making them
actual performers of the model society projected in them. Foreigners
also participated in this spectacular effort: the Doudchitzkys with their
dances and choreographies at school; Víctor Ochoa-Piccardo proudly
singing patriotic songs: “Todos los actos culturales, bien sea en vivo
o en cine, comenzaban con todo el público de pie cantando ‘El este es
rojo’ y ‘Navegar los mares depende del timonel.’ Nosotros gozábamos
cantando con aquel gentío haciendo gala de nuestras voces y de nuestro
chino” (All cultural events, whether live or in theaters, began with the
entire audience standing up singing “The East is Red” and “Sailing the
Seas Depends on the Helmsman.” We enjoyed singing along with those
people, showing off our voices and our Chinese).38 Sergio Cabrera, for
his part, contributed from backstage by dubbing revolutionary films
into Spanish at the Beijing Film Academy under the direction of his fa-
ther: “Sergio entendió de inmediato cómo funcionaba aquel sortilegio:
entendió que se trataba de una actuación completa, aunque su figura
nunca se vería en la pantalla, y había algo en el proceso que le gus-
taba a su timidez: actuar sin que nadie lo viera parecía por momentos
una situación ideal” (“Sergio immediately understood how that sorcery
worked: he understood that he needed to act completely, even though
he’d never be seen on screen, and there was something in the process
that his timidity enjoyed; acting without anyone seeing him seemed like
an ideal situation at times”).39 Voice-acting in Chinese films under the
direction of his father exposes the shy yet intense Sergio to yet another
form of phantasmagorical performance where the boundaries between
representation and reality become blurred. Trained in the Stanislavski
system by Fausto himself, on stage Sergio is not only a method actor
seeking his own inner motives to justify highly emotional dramatic ac-
tion, but rather finds himself in the only place on earth where he can
experience actual paternal love: “Sergio había comenzado a actuar con
seriedad; la actuación se había convertido en un espacio de felicidad
palpable, pues moverse bajo las órdenes de su padre era cobrar una en-
tidad, una materialidad, que no existía fuera de la escena, y era también
tener su atención indivisa” (“Sergio had begun to act seriously; acting
had turned into a space of palpable happiness, for to move under the
auspices of his father was to take on an entity, a materiality, that did
not exist off stage, and was also to have his undivided attention”).40
Sergio’s proletarian education in China is also meticulously scripted by
his father, who after returning to Colombia with his wife, stays with him
in the form of a long oracular letter that guides him in his most drastic
decisions, such as enlisting in a faction of the Red Guards, joining the
assembly lines of a clock factory, or receiving military training with the
People’s Liberation Army: “Buscó la carta larga de su padre, de la cual
nunca se separaba, y releyó algunos fragmentos. Se había convertido en
su manual de instrucciones para estos últimos meses, y a veces lo asal-
taba la noción de que en la carta, mágicamente, se contestaba a todas las
preguntas que Sergio pudiera hacerse y, lo que era más sorprendente, en
el mismo instante en que se las hacía” (“After he finished he looked for
the long letter from his father, which he always kept with him, and re-
read a few fragments. It had turned into his instruction manual for these
past months, and sometimes he was struck by the notion that in the
letter, magically, all the questions Sergio might ask were answered and,
what was more surprising, in the same instant that he asked them”).41
Perhaps used to disguising real identities in clandestine life, or due to a
strict proletarian mandate of refraining from individual—bourgeois—
affect, or simply because of a personal inability to express emotions, in
Volver la vista atrás demonstrations of paternal, as well as filial love,
occur exclusively in the context of performance.
The climax of the novel occurs inside a movie theater, where an adult
Sergio sees for the first time the moving image of his now late father at the
projection of his most acclaimed film La estrategia del caracol (1993; The
Strategy of the Snail) on the last night of the retrospective in Barcelona. To
a question from the audience about the biggest challenge of making what
214 ❘ Chapter 5
came to be such a successful movie in Colombia, Sergio rambles a few un-

satisfactory words but silently realizes that directing his father in the role
of Jacinto, a Spanish anarchist and theater director that resembled Fausto
in every way, had been the greatest challenge of his entire life:
Pues eso era sobre todo aquella historia de un viejo espa-

ñol anarquista que organiza una rebelión de vecinos: un
homenaje a Fausto Cabrera, una carta de amor filial en fo-
togramas. Con cada parlamento, con cada encuadre, Sergio
había querido decirle a su padre cuánto lo quería, cuánto
le agradecía tantas cosas, cuánto sentía que de alguna ma-
nera misteriosa le debía la vida entera, desde sus comienzos
como actor infantil de una televisión incipiente hasta su silla
de director de largometrajes. En el medio habían sucedido
otras cosas—dolorosas, incómodas, incomprensibles—pero
La estrategia del caracol sería el bálsamo para cerrar todas
las heridas, la pipa de fumar todas las paces, y tener esa con-
ciencia mientras escogía el lugar de la cámara o daba una
instrucción a los actores, o mientras echaba humo con una
máquina para ver mejor por dónde iba la luz de una escena,
fue el mayor reto de su vida.
It was a story about an old Spanish anarchist who organized

a neighborly rebellion—it was a homage to Fausto Cabrera,
a filial love letter in stills. With each bit of dialogue, the
framing of each shot, Sergio had wanted to tell his father
how much he loved him, how grateful he was for so many
things, how he felt that in some mysterious way he owed
him his whole life, from his beginnings as a child actor in
the early days of television to his director’s seat on feature
films. In between, other things had happened—painful, un-
comfortable, incomprehensible things—but The Strategy of
the Snail would be the balm to heal all the wounds, the peace
pipe, and keeping that in mind while he chose where to place
the camera or gave an instruction to the actors, or while he
let smoke out of a machine to see better which way the light
was shining in a scene, was the biggest challenge of his life.42
The quote evokes the moment in which their roles changed and the son
began directing the father. Now a mature film director, on a stage, in his
dead father’s homeland, Sergio is finally able to articulate an obituary,

not through the epitaphic words of a bereaved son but through the lan-
guage of performance: through a reflection on the technique, style, and
aesthetics of his own cinema. The final image of this fragment, which
depicts a playhouse trick to measure light by artificially casting a cloud
of smoke to capture the invisible beams that illuminate the stage, is the
recurrent metaphor of Volver la vista atrás. Like light, memories are
also invisible and thus need an exterior stimulus to materialize: “Sergio,
al mirarlo, pensó que los recuerdos eran invisibles como la luz, y así
como el humo hacía que la luz se viera, debía haber una forma de que
fueran visibles los recuerdos, un humo que pudiera usarse para que los
recuerdos salieran de su escondite, para poder acomodarlos y fijarlos
para siempre. Tal vez no era otra cosa lo que había sucedido estos días
en Barcelona. Tal vez, pensó Sergio, eso era él, eso había sido: un hom-
bre que echa humo sobre sus recuerdos” (“Sergio, as he looked at him,
thought that memories were as invisible as light, and just as the smoke
allowed him to see light, there must be a way to make memories visible,
a smoke you could use to make memories come out of hiding, and ad-
just them and fix them forever. Maybe what had happened in Barcelona
during those days was nothing less. Maybe, Sergio thought, that’s what
he’d been: a man blowing smoke over his memories”).43 Within the plot,
Sergio indeed casts smoke over his memories from youth, China, and
his father’s life, thus weaving a retrospective bildungsroman; but who
is it that casts smoke over individual and collective memory in Volver
la vista atrás, a novel from 2020 authored by the Colombian writer
Juan Gabriel Vásquez that was the product of years of conversation
and archival research with the actual individual Sergio Cabrera and his
family? In the epilogue to the novel, Juan Gabriel Vásquez redeploys the
smoke metaphor to describe his own omniscient narration as an act of
rendering visible the “invisible” and “manifest” the “secret”:
Mi labor de novelista, frente al magma formidable de sus ex-

periencias y las de su hermana, consistió en darles a esos epi-
sodios un orden que fuera más allá del recuento biográfico:
un orden capaz de sugerir o revelar significados que no son
visibles en el simple inventario de los hechos, porque perte-
necen a formas distintas del conocimiento. No es otra cosa
lo que hacen las novelas. A esto nos referimos, creo, cuando
hablamos de imaginación moral: a esa lectura de una vida
ajena que consiste en observar para conjeturar, o en penetrar
216 ❘ Chapter 5
lo que es manifiesto para descubrir lo oculto o lo secreto. La

interpretación es también parte del arte de la ficción; que el
personaje en cuestión sea real o inventado es, en la práctica,
una distinción inconducente y superflua.
My work as a novelist, faced with the formidable magma

of his experiences and those of his sister, consisted of giv-
ing those episodes an order that went beyond a biographi-
cal recounting: an order capable of suggesting or revealing
meanings not visible in a simple inventory of events, because
they belong to different forms of knowledge. Novels don’t
do anything else. This is what we refer to, I believe, when
we talk about moral imagination: to that reading of another
life that consists of observing in order to surmise, or of pene-
trating what is manifest to discover the hidden or the secret.
Interpretation is also part of the art of fiction; whether the
person in question is real or invented is, in practice, an un-
conducive or superfluous distinction.44
These lines sketch a theory of biographical fiction or, rather, an aesthetic

that blossoms along the thin line between history and literature. The
first part of the quote is straightforward: a prolific novelist obsessed
with private stories that unfold against the backdrop of great historical
episodes (whether the drug wars in Colombia, the separation of Pan-
ama, or World War II, to mention a few examples from Vásquez’s bibli-
ography) finds in the extraordinary life of Sergio Cabrera the material
for an ambitious emplotment of the twentieth century that meditates
on fascism and Communism, to pose the enduring question of what
happens when utopia turns into fanaticism. This combines the Latin
American Boom realist tradition and its sophisticated ability to depict
parallel histories, with the emphasis of contemporary world literature
on exile and migration as privileged channels of contact across borders.
By navigating the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Revolution, and the
Colombian conflict through a single life story, Volver la vista atrás can
be read in terms of what Héctor Hoyos calls “global Latin American
novels,” that is, novels that “reflect upon the experience of globalization
and situate themselves beyond the boundaries of national literatures.”45
Yet through its unique use of the affective archive, Volver la vista atrás
transcends more than the national boundaries of biographical fiction
and poses a question about its generic limits, since it draws from drama
as much as from literature. When Vásquez states in the epilogue that

“interpretation is also part of the art of fiction; whether the character in
question is real or invented is, in practice, an irrelevant and superfluous
distinction,” he refers to “interpretación” as the hermeneutic exercise
of explication and deciphering of the meaning of a life, in this case,
to Vásquez himself in the act of “blowing smoke on the memories” of
the Cabrera family so as to render them visible. Yet—and this is more
evident in Spanish than in English—“interpretación” also means “per-
formance” in the sense of “acting” or “scenic representation,” which
underscores the second clause suggesting that the distinction between
real or invented characters is superfluous. When I suggest that Volver
la vista atrás can be read as a theatrical performance of Sergio Cabre-
ra’s formative years, I am also implying that the writing process of the
novel draws from the conventions of biodrama (biographical theater),
particularly its use of the personal archive as a point of departure. Paola
Hernández observes how recent articulations of documentary theater
in Latin America choose protagonists that are both common people
and public figures who bring their personal documents and artifacts
onstage to thread narratives based on these: “los Biodramas exponen
la relación inestable que existe entre el archivo y los documentos ve-
rídicos de historias personales con la forma de percibir y corporalizar
estos archivos desde lo efímero del teatro. A la vez, al traer a escena una
variedad de biografías personales se crea una conexión con la presencia
corporal del actor en el escenario y con la audiencia en un tiempo y un
lugar específicos que logra, por un lado, reforzar el aura benjaminiana
y, por otro, formular posibles lazos entre lo privado de estas historias
y lo que la audiencia llegue a formular de ellas” (Biodramas expose the
unstable relationship between, on the one hand, the archive and the
real documents of personal stories and, on the other, the way that these
archives are perceived and embodied from the ephemeral nature of the
theater. At the same time, bringing a variety of personal biographies to
the stage creates a connection with the actor’s bodily presence on stage
and with the audience in a specific time and place that manages, on the
one hand, to reinforce the Benjaminian aura and, on the other, to for-
mulate possible links between what is private in these stories and what
the audience comes to formulate about them).46 Of course, in the novel
Sergio Cabrera has no physical presence, but his personal archive over-
takes the pages in the form of intimate WhatsApp messages with his
wife transcribed from his phone, confessions about his involvement in
the guerrillas during Colombia’s transitional justice process, or in pho-
218 ❘ Chapter 5
tographs of letters and journal entries that Cabrera saw for the first time
in the final version of the manuscript. Sergio Cabrera is both a protago-
nist and a reader of Volver la vista atrás. And what started out as a novel
on the masculine universe of family mandates, exile, and political mili-
tancy, eventually carved out a space for Sergio’s sister Marianella, who
gained protagonism as her archive surfaced during the research process.
Vásquez comments on how a conversation during the novel’s writing
shifted the course of the manuscript: “Lo primero que hizo Carl (Crook)
fue sacar de sus anaqueles una caja de latón, como de galletas, y de esa
caja todos esos objetos que eran mensajeros del pasado: el brazalete de
Marianella, los diarios de Marianella en chino y algunos otros recuerdos
en español. Fue el regalo de despedida de Marianella a su novio cuando
se fue de China. Eso le agregó otras cien páginas a la novela” (Immedi-
ately, Carl produced from the shelves a tin box, like a biscuit tin, and
from that box came out a series of objects that were messengers of the
past: Marianella’s armband, Marianella’s diaries in Chinese, and some
other souvenirs in Spanish. It had been Marianella’s parting gift to her
boyfriend when he left China. That added another hundred pages to the
novel).47 The mediation of the writer gathers the collective memories of
the family and renders them visible in fictional form.
Mediation s
Brazilian journalist Jayme Martins (1936–) settled in China on two oc-

casions: from 1962 to 1975, when he was employed in the Portuguese
sections of the Beijing Foreign Languages University and Radio Peking
(today China Radio International), and then between 1986 and 1989,
when he served as correspondent for different Brazilian media outlets.
The documentary A ponte de bambú (2019; Bamboo Bridge) recon-
structs the multiple “bridges” that have united Martins with Brazil and
China as his family continually adapted to the changing dynamics of
Chinese diplomacy.48 Throughout the documentary’s ninety minutes we
see Jayme, his wife Angelina, and their two adult daughters Andrea and
Raquel travel to China and revive past memories that arise with the
development of more than three thousand negatives from their personal
collection, processed at the initiative of the director Marcelo Machado,
a personal friend of the family. This film’s affective archive is mediated
through the gaze of this third person, who interviews them with a vora-
cious interest in Chinese history, while also trying to decipher through
them the key to his own bicultural family, formed in São Paulo with his
Chinese wife, an immigrant from Taiwan.
Of all the parents portrayed in this chapter’s corpus, Jayme is the
most fervent follower of Mao. Through black-and-white square frames,
we visualize him in the 1970s cutting his daughters’ hair so that they
would stand out less among the Asian girls, planting wheat in the gar-
den of the Friendship Hotel to distribute to agricultural communes,
or lowering his own salary to match that of his local comrades. The
adaptation of his daughters Andrea and Raquel to the ever-changing
Chinese context is also one of the boldest testaments to this rare bi-
cultural generation. We see footage of these two unusually bilingual
women code-switching between paulistano and putonghua, captivating
auditoriums packed with Chinese businessmen astonished at their lin-
guistic skills. Educated entirely in Chinese schools and universities, both
are professional translators and thereby perpetuate the paternal legacy
of diplomatic cooperation. Foreign experts became largely obsolete in
China with the normalization of relations in the late 1970s because
public diplomacy replaced propaganda. Journalists, intellectuals, and
broadcasters, who had reached the most diverse audiences of the Third
World with news from a proscribed nation, were quickly replaced with
regular ambassadors and local translators trained in the languages of
the new strategic countries of the capitalist bloc, which China targeted
when shifting to a market economy. In a scene where Andrea explains
to a fellow red diaper that she now works as the Brazilian representative
of a Chinese energy company and he somewhat cynically observes, “you
must be playing a crucial role with all the Chinese money going to Latin
America,” she confidently adds that just like their parents contributed
to the construction of China in its first thirty years, it is up to their gen-
eration to continue the efforts of cooperation.
If the previously discussed works focus on the impact of specific pe-
riods of Chinese history on a family experience, A ponte de bambú
thoroughly registers five decades of exchange from the Cultural Revolu-
tion to the present through eyewitness accounts and a dense archive of
primary sources, both from personal and public repositories. Aware of
its high documentary value, the film also details the technical genealogy
of that archive displayed in plates that divide the timeline with photo-
graphs of the devices that physically stored memories at each stage:
1. Rolleiflex 6×6cm film rolls—1965.

2. Philips world receiver shortwave radio—1970.
220 ❘ Chapter 5
3. Fluorescent 4×6 inches photo-albums—1988.

4. Newspaper clippings—1989.
5. Sony DVcam metal tapes—2005.
6. USB flash drives—2015.
This technical archive is the record of a decades-long collaboration be-

tween a Brazilian documentary filmmaker and a journalist, each of a
different generation and united by their common interest in China since
A ponte de bambú is only their most recent joint venture (Machado and
Martins collaborated on the 2003 television documentary Viagem ao
Anhui [Trip to Anhui] among other projects). Yet beyond journalism,
what unites these two men is the unique experience of having formed
Brazilian-Chinese families. While the director discloses his friendship
with Jayme in the first minutes of the documentary, that his wife is of
Chinese origin is revealed later, when we see him in a photo with his
in-laws and thus reinterpret the Asian features of his daughters that we
saw in the frames at the beginning. Toward the end of the film we see
Machado and his wife on screen with the four Martins in a domestic
scene of friendship filmed in the Brazilian town of Jundiaí. The film, the
final plate tells us, is dedicated to “Sung Ian Lin,” Machado’s wife.
In a way, all the questions about the political, economic, and cultural
bridges between China and Brazil in the film seek to explore the very
definition of belonging. That of the Martins family to a nation idealized
through the lens of political militancy; that of Machado’s Taiwanese
wife’s family to that same revolutionary nation that had banished them
and to the South American one that welcomed them as immigrants;
or that of Marcelo Machado’s own daughter, who, we learn from the
documentary’s Facebook page, currently lives in Shanghai. “I feel that
our parents and us have been a very special part of China when China
was isolated. For me it should be a matter of honor that all of us should
have a green card” claims a red diaper at a homecoming meeting at
the Friendship Hotel in 2015, to which a frustrated Raquel cynically
retorts: “Please don’t open that Pandora’s box.” The clear awareness of
feeling Chinese but not having the legal credentials of that identity is
at the heart of the Martins family, who respond in unison that if they
had the chance they would move to China again. This gap between
the feeling of belonging and the lack of citizenship rights compels us
to revisit the family’s freedom as regards migration: To what extent
would they have returned to Brazil had they recovered their passports
earlier? We learn that they were only allowed to go back to Brazil in
1975, shortly after the Brazilian embassy started operating in the PRC
and clandestine citizens abroad were once again able to apply for iden-
tification documents. Or would they not have preferred to avoid that
traumatic departure in 1989 after the authorities deported all foreign
residents from Beijing to limit the international repercussions of the
Tiananmen Square incident? “Não fomos evacuados, tivemos que sair.
A coisa aconteceu muito rápido. ‘Têm que ir embora, têm que ir em-
bora!’ ‘Pega duas, três roupas!’ e foi assim como viemos. Fechou o
apartamento com tudo lá” (We were not evacuated, we had to leave.
It all happened very quickly. “You’ve got to go, got to go!” “Just pack
two or three things!” And that’s how we left. We locked the door of our
apartment with everything inside).
If the narrator of Volver la vista atrás seeks maximum distance from
his subjects to orchestrate an epic emplotment of global socialism, the
third person in A ponte de bambú uses Chinese history as the backdrop
to mirror his own biography in that of the Martins family, both in their
affective relation to China and in their inquiry into citizenship rights
(or lack thereof). Machado’s body, face, and voice appear recurrently on
screen, prompting the question about the specificity of cinema in the au-
tobiographical turn of documentary art. Who is this documentary about
after all, we might ask? If, as Gonzalo Aguilar observes, one could write
the history of cinema as the gradual effacement of the first person in
the quest for generic objectivity, contemporary cinema reveals a grow-
ing tendency to introduce the image of first person that demands new
representational rules: “Considero que es necesario un nuevo arsenal
conceptual, porque diferencias binarias muy establecidas como ficción/
realidad, lo real / la puesta en escena, ‘cineastas que creen en la imagen’ /
‘cineastas que creen en la realidad,’ perdieron todo sentido. Se trata de
dirigir la mirada crítica a las imágenes impuras, ad astra per mostrum,
y tocar esas distinciones binarias en el momento en que se fusionan,
se hacen indiscernibles o se vuelven dramáticas” (I think that we need
a new conceptual toolkit, because well-established binary differences
such as fiction/reality, the real / the staged, ‘filmmakers who believe in
the image’ / ‘filmmakers who believe in reality,’ have lost all meaning.
The critical gaze must turn to impure images, ad astra per mostrum, and
those binary distinctions must be apprehended when they merge, when
they become indiscernible, or dramatic).49 A ponte de bambú as well
as Tempestad en los Andes, discussed next, dramatize the image of the
first person on screen, further complicating the documentary register of
history in fictional terms.
222 ❘ Chapter 5
Illu min atio ns
In 1967 Augusta La Torre (1946–88) landed in China with her husband

Abimael Guzmán (1934–). Invited by the Chinese government to ob-
serve the Cultural Revolution from up close, the couple returned to Peru
determined to conduct their own rebellion in the highlands. Impassioned
by China’s dramatic uprooting of the class system of its largely peasant
population, they transferred their own version of Chinese Communism
to the Quechua-speaking region of Ayacucho, in the Andes. Evoking the
legacy of the Communist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–
1930), who claimed that “Marxism-Leninism will open the shining
path to revolution,” they founded their own fraction of the party under
the name of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and, along the lines of
Mao’s Cultural Revolution, they pronounced Abimael “Chairman Gon-
zalo,” characterized his doctrine as “Gonzalo Thought,” and his role
in world revolution as the “fourth sword of Marxism.” From a strictly
clandestine base in Ayacucho they unleashed a liberation campaign
that mobilized provincial intellectuals, students, and peasants, but soon
radicalized into an internal armed conflict with government forces that
paralyzed the country between 1980 and 2000 and took away roughly
70,000 lives, for the most part Indigenous. While the 2003 Final Report
of the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Commission for Truth
and Reconciliation) sought to bring closure to the trauma accumulated
over several years by providing reparations to victims and establishing
a record of the human rights abuses perpetrated by terrorist groups and
government forces, the process, according to Matthew Rothwell, “is no-
table internationally for excluding the Shining Path from its registry of
victims, deliberations, and organized process, except as interview sub-
jects.”50 This stance becomes more patent today as the children of Shin-
ing Path release autobiographical works that are both celebrated for
nuancing the complexity of the armed Left and condemned as apologies
of terrorism. Memoirs such as Memorias de un soldado desconocido:
Autobiografía y antropología de la violencia (2012, Memories of an un-
kown soldier: Autobiography and anthropology of violence) by Lurgio
Gavilán Sánchez (1980–) or Los rendidos: Sobre el don de perdonar
(2015, The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining Path) by José
Carlos Agüero (1975–) prompted wide-ranging discussions on the role
of children in the Peruvian armed conflict51—their responsibility, their
guilt, their stigmatization—and punctured the myth that people did not
want to talk or read about a very troubling period in Peru’s history since
these works became major catalysts for debates on memory and recent
history.52
Few members of Shining Path settled long-term in Beijing to work as
foreign experts, but, as Rothwell demonstrates in Transpacific Revolu-
tionaries: The Chinese Revolution in Latin America (2013), the Chinese
lessons penetrated deeply.53 Because of the scale of the conflict, and the
fact that the Shining Path conducted the only self-proclaimed Maoist
people’s war in the Western hemisphere, the accounts of this second
generation further complicate some of the patterns evident in the mem-
oirs of red diapers educated in China and of descendants of victims
of state terrorism in Latin America. As the sources are abundant and
quite complex, and a comprehensive analysis far exceeds the few pages
of this chapter, I will focus on Mikael Wiström’s 2014 documentary
Tempestad en los Andes (Storm in the Andes) because it decenters the
boundaries of local and foreign and private and public in the filmic uses
of the affective archive.54
Tempestad en los Andes follows the homecoming journey of Josefin
Augusta Eckermann (1989–2019), Augusta La Torre’s niece, who grew
up in Sweden and wants to learn more about the mysterious death of
her aunt in 1988 and the actual reasons that forced her Peruvian rela-
tives into exile. No longer convinced of her family’s epic tale about the
mythic “Comrade Norah” who died fighting for the poor, she reaches
out to a Swedish filmmaker who has a long-standing involvement with
Peru and joins the documentary that he is filming about Indigenous
narratives of the conflict. The film traces the encounter of Josefin with
Flor Gonzáles, a young woman from the Andean town of Andahuaylas
who is also investigating the enigmatic death of her brother Claudio,
murdered without trial at the massacre of El Frontón prison in 1986.
Flor is initially reluctant to meet her, but Josefin begs for her sympathy,
not for Flor to forgive her family but to genuinely help her gain perspec-
tive on their actions. Throughout the film, the camera tracks their con-
flictive encounter as well as their joint search for any further evidence
on the role played by Sendero Luminoso in the disappearance of both
their relatives. Toward the end of the film, Flor successfully manages
to have her brother included in the official registry of victims (Registro
Único de Víctimas), and Josefin leaves Peru torn but in peace for having
gained deeper insight into her family’s role in the conflict as well as into
her own identity. After coming together to conduct their search and
trying to reconcile their differences, Flor and Josefin part on amicable
terms. In this sense the documentary follows the conventions of what
224 ❘ Chapter 5
Fernando Rosenberg calls “novels of truth and reconciliation,” that is,

creative works that recreate the conditions of enunciation, investigat-
ing the possibilities, limitations, and legacy of the transitional justice
framework that became a paradigm to apprehend and address the af-
termath of historical processes of human rights violations in the Global
South.55 Rosenberg notes the international appeal of this genre, which
fulfills the enduring magical realist fantasies of Latin America as a re-
gion peppered with colorful, violent, and permanent revolutions, while
at the same time mobilizing the imaginary that views human rights as
capable of finally overcoming insurmountable political disagreements.
For the European and Anglo-American markets, whose readership these
novels pursue, these novels may serve to confirm the end of the era of
revolutions and the possibility of a “culture of tolerance” emanating
from these very same sites of supposedly preserved revolutionary uto-
pia, as well as to create anxiety or a sense of loss for what has yet to
happen, particularly in places like Spain, where the atrocities from the
fascist regime have never been judicially examined or undergone any
official scrutiny.56 More than in global consumption, I am interested in
the global construction of the narrative of truth and reconciliation, with
the aim of understanding the extent to which the inclusion of a foreign
voice exposes the inner fractures of the nation-state in a process of tran-
sitional justice. A documentary made by a Swedish director who built
a career in Peru and focused on a young Swedish woman who happens
to be the most direct descendant of one of the top leaders of Sendero
Luminoso turns the spotlight on those who inhabit the geographical
borders of Peruvian society as foreign experts and political exiles, and
who claim to also have a say in the memorial reconstruction of the
internal conflict. After all, a Chinese-inspired war, with a dramatically
high Indigenous death toll, resolved by a report largely unauthored by
either of these parties, ultimately questions how “internal” the Peruvian
truth and reconciliation process was and points to how global archives
of the revolutionary Left and of the centuries-long oppression of Indige-
nous communities in Latin America can further illuminate the Peruvian
internal armed conflict of 1980–2000.57
In Tempestad en los Andes Wiström repeats a narrative device from
his earlier film Compadre (2004), which consists in traveling to Peru to
reconnect with friends from his first trip to the country in the 1970s.
In both films we see the Swedish director on screen, exchanging warm
hugs with his South American friends—who tease him by calling him
“gringo”—and sharing photographs of their initial encounter decades
ago. The “compadre” (buddy) in Tempestad en los Andes is Samuel

González, a village leader from the department of Apurimac whom
Wiström met while reporting on the land reforms of 1974 and who lost
his son Claudio during the armed conflict. Samuel and his daughter Flor
take Wiström to the highlands, where they help him identify the sitters
from the old photographs and translate into Quechua their accounts of
the years of bloodshed. Within the larger context of Flor and Josefin’s
parallel searches for the truth about the deaths of Claudio and Augusta,
the testimonies of these peasants illuminate the steps of Claudio, who
left the countryside to study in Lima during the heat of the conflict
and was killed for his alleged sympathies for Sendero Luminoso. In this
sense, Wiström’s photographs are both a key to Claudio’s past and a
platform for Andean voices to provide their long-overdue accounts of
a conflict that they were swept into and became the main victims. In
the metonymical move of inscribing Claudio in the larger community
of the Andes, Wiström also inscribes his own photographs in a geneal-
ogy of indigenismo. In a slow sequence with tense background music,
Josefin’s voice reads passages of Guamán Poma de Ayala’s El primer
nueva crónica y buen gobierno (1615; The First New Chronicle and
Good Government) about the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire. The
images of a hand flipping through the pages of the original manuscript
housed at the Royal Danish Library blend with black-and-white pho-
tographs by the Indigenist photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973),
which stress the class and ethnic abyss separating criollo landowners
and native peasants during the first half of the twentieth century. After a
still frame of a thunderstorm over snowy mountain peaks that hints to
the title of the film and Luis E. Valcárcel’s (1891–1987) 1927 prophetic
novel about a new Inca empire, Wiström displays static shots of his
own photographs depicting the short-lived success of the peasants land
takeover during the 1974 agrarian reform. By bringing his own photo-
graphs into this sequence depicting how the Indigenous are oppressed,
the Swedish director not only confirms his continuing participant obser-
vation of recent Peruvian history but also alludes to the enduring efforts
to asserting Indigenous rights and denouncing past wrongdoings from
colonial and republican states.
Is this yet another iteration of the European anthropologist enamored
with the pre-Hispanic civilizations of South America, capturing ethnic
difference through dramatic close-ups and autochthonous music? Or
rather, the expression of a Swedish artist committed to human rights
and familiar with the demographics of a country historically receptive
226 ❘ Chapter 5
of asylum seekers and resettled refugees? Sweden became known as a

humanitarian haven in the 1970s and 1980s for embracing people flee-
ing persecution from both Cold War blocs, a very large number of whom
came from Latin America.58 Peruvians from all walks of life ended up
in Sweden during this time, as illustrated vividly in the following depo-
sition from the Ley de arrepentimiento (Repentance Law) issued during
the presidency of Alberto Fujimori in 1992 to encourage members of
the armed group to make accusations: “al llegar a Suecia están todos
los grupos políticos, está Sendero y están también los que están contra
Abimael, o sea los de Proseguir ¿no? Hay algunos vinculados al MRTA
y hay muchos que están renegados de todo . . . En Suecia hay más exil-
iados que en cualquier otra parte y de todos los colores, entonces, si tú
vas no puedes dejar de tomarte un café con ellos, porque son peruanos
además” (When you arrive in Sweden you realize that all the political
groups are there. Sendero is there as are those who oppose Abimael,
that is, those of Proseguir, right? There are some linked to the MRTA
and there are many others who reject everything . . . In Sweden there are
more exiles and of more stripes than anywhere else, so if you go there
you cannot help but to go have a coffee with them, because they are also
Peruvians).59 Josefin belongs to one such exiled Peruvian-Scandinavian
community. In the first scene of the film, on the plane to Lima, she
introduces herself in fluent Spanish showing a photograph of her as a
baby at a demonstration in support of Sendero Luminoso in Stockholm
in 1992. Adult Josefin, however, reveals the generational clash within
her immigrant community by challenging her own postmemories of Pe-
ru’s traumatic past in a direct address to her father: “Papá, no querías
que yo haga este viaje. ¿Tienes miedo que no sea tan leal con Sendero
y Abimael como los demás en la familia? Quiero saber la verdad y sé
que no es un cuento” (Dad, you didn’t want me to make this trip. Are
you afraid that I won’t be as loyal to Sendero and Abimael as the others
in the family? I want to know the truth, and I know it is no fairy tale).
Like Wiström, personal photographs from her own past legitimate her
presence in Peru and suggest that she can potentially contribute to the
truth-seeking process too.
The most valuable photographic evidence Josefin brings from home
is a set of prints of Augusta and Abimael’s wedding. These are black-
and-white images taken at the La Torres’s home in Ayacucho in 1964
that reveal a cheery teenager and a much older professor in an inti-
mate family celebration. “These photographs are impressive, very, very
impressive,” observes in awe the renowned journalist Gustavo Gorriti
(1948–), who covered the conflict for the weekly Caretas and who tries
to convey to Josefin what it means for a Peruvian investigative reporter
to see new images of the two phantasmagorical figures who were both
omnipresent and invisible for so long. Walter Alejos Calderón (1947–),
the author of these photographs, celebrates having them back in the
studio in Ayacucho and dedicates a few lines to his encounter with Jo-
sefin in his memoirs: “Afortunadamente, 48 años después, en enero del
2012 tuve la oportunidad de reunirme con la señorita Josefin Augusta
Ekermann en mi oficina con motivo de una filmación de un documental
sobre las tomas de tierra en el Perú y ella personalmente me entregó 6
ejemplares de aquellas fotos del matrimonio que se habían perdido en
el tiempo. Fue realmente un hecho muy emocionante, como fotógrafo,
tener nuevamente en mis manos copias de aquellas fotos inéditas y que
habían sido conservadas por la familia La Torre en Suecia durante todos
estos años” (Fortunately, forty-eight years later, in January 2012, I had
the opportunity to meet with Miss Josefin Augusta Ekermann in my
office on the occasion of the filming of a documentary on land seizures
in Peru, and she personally gave me six copies of those photos of the
wedding that had been lost in time. It was really a very exciting event
for me, as a photographer, to have back in my hands copies of those un-
published photos that had been kept by the La Torre family in Sweden
for all these years).60 These photographs preserved in exile reappeared
in Peru through this film in 2014 and have been circulated widely ever
since, appearing prominently in the press and in most of the recent bib-
liography on Sendero Luminoso.61 To thank Josefin for her gift, Alejos
digs into the archives of the photo studio and produces various portraits
of Augusta taken in the 1960s and 1970s: “son fotos puntuales, para
trámites” (they are specific portraits, for bureaucratic purposes), ob-
serves the photographer as he shuffles various standard head-to-torso
shots of one who used to be a regular middle-class woman from Ayacu-
cho last captured on film by Alejos Calderón himself: “esta fue la última
foto que se tomó, con toda seguridad, 73 o 74, y luego ya ellos en 75
entraron en la clandestinidad y nunca más se les volvió a ver” (With all
certainty, this is the last picture of her, from 73 or 74; then in 75 they
went in hiding and were never seen again). These upper-torso portraits
of Augusta la Torre that read as mugshots of a fugitive leader become
mundane photo identifications in the hand of her niece. By illuminating
her firm expression, caring personality, and family background—after
all, she came from a Communist household that welcomed her marriage
to the Marxist philosophy professor—in the documentary the family
228 ❘ Chapter 5
photographs of Augusta seek to humanize the second-in-command of

Sendero Luminoso. The film’s move to strip off her identity as the leader
of an armed group is summarized most effectively in the visual effect
of blending a propaganda image of her wearing a green uniform into a
studio shot of her as a young woman from Ayacucho (fig. 12).
These family photographs that seek to humanize the terrorist relate
to three crucial challenges of the boundaries between the private and
the public in the affective archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in
Latin America, namely, in reference to the cult of the leader, revolution-
ary theatricality, and its contemporary memorabilia. If descendants of
Sendero Luminoso today strive to carve out a space for their voice in Pe-
ruvian society by situating their forebears’ actions in the larger context
of the revolutionary Left, Josefin bears the brunt of holding one of Sen-
dero Luminoso’s intellectual authors accountable. In his memoir Los
rendidos, the historian, poet, and son of Sendero Luminoso’s militants,
José Carlos Agüero makes a plea for the need to nuance the different
levels of engagement with the revolutionary cause: “Hubo senderistas,
muchos, que no actuaron como peleles, que no fueron solo objeto de
la manipulación. Hijos de su contexto sí, pero tampoco secreciones de
las estructuras . . . Este fue el caso de mis padres y de los senderistas
que conocí. Tenían sus razones para ser de izquierda, para ser radica-
les como muchos otros en aquel entonces. Pero tenían una motivación
extra, difícil de conocer, inaprensible, que era la de una minoría, para
Fig. 12. A propaganda poster of Camarada Norah blends into a youthful profile
shot of Augusta La Torre. Tempestad en los Andes, 2014. Copyright © Mikael
Wiström.
hacer la guerra, coger las armas, luchar por el poder usando la fuerza”
(There were Senderistas, lots of them, who weren’t puppets, who weren’t
merely pawns. They were children of their context, yes, but not just by-
products of the structures of which they were a part . . . Such was the
case of my parents and of the people I met from Shining Path. They had
their reasons for being leftists, for being radicals like many others were
back then. But they also had an extra motivation that was hard to see
or apprehend and that fueled only a minority of people: they wanted to
take up arms, to fight power with force).62 Yet Augusta was neither a
puppet nor a regular intellectual embracing a cause of her time; she was
the second-in-command of a highly personalist movement. A straight-
forward Flor speaks up to Josefin during their first meeting: “De una u
otra manera, no tú, pero sí tu familia tiene una responsabilidad política
en toda esta situación. Llevaron a miles de jóvenes a involucrarse en un
proceso de revolución que confundieron la realidad y muchos de ellos
murieron ahí, como mi hermano” (One way or another, not you, but
your paternal family has a political responsibility in this whole situa-
tion. They led thousands of young men and women into a revolutionary
process that misread reality and that took the lives of many of them,
including my brother). As a leader, to what extent was Augusta also
essentially a public figure in Peru, whose family photographs will never
be viewed as personal footage but always as a public record? Do these
photographs introduced by Tempestad en los Andes to the Peruvian au-
dience also seek to humanize Augusta in the multiple platforms where
they have been reproduced henceforth or do they further reinforce her
identity of “Camarada Norah”? Unlike the other works discussed in
this chapter that use affective archives as a counterpoint to official his-
torical narratives, the phantasmagorical physiognomies of the lideresa
(female leader) do not complement one another but rather fill a refer-
ential void that an entire society had been desperate to seal for years.
Paradoxically, the Peruvian cultural revolution that fostered the cult of
its chairman and his personalist doctrine in the style of Mao and Stalin
had fugitive and secret leaders.
Herein lies one of the most intriguing operations of translation of
China in Latin America: How to transfer the total stage of the Cultural
Revolution to a strictly clandestine format? If the Chinese Cultural Rev-
olution deployed a permanent spectacular extravaganza that filtered to
the bodies of the masses and saturated the public space with the image
of the leader, Sendero Luminoso performed such theatricality in private:
in prisons and hideouts. It was known that since the 1980s prisons had
230 ❘ Chapter 5
become Sendero Luminoso strongholds, where members of the group

exercised full control of their quarters and their communication with
the exterior. The penitentiary’s workshops, as well as its yards were
the privileged stages where Sendero Luminoso produced and deployed
its visual propaganda aimed at both the community of interns and the
journalistic cameras that captured and projected its Maoist-inspired art
to a terrified audience outside. Tempestad en los Andes includes such
footage in the opening scene. Taken from the 1992 BBC documentary
People of the Shining Path—which was promptly broadcast on multiple
Peruvian networks—the footage shows the marches and chants of the
Movimiento Femenino Popular (Feminine Popular Movement) at the
Canto Grande prison. Dressed in green uniforms and following a strict
military choreography, dozens of young women stomp their feet in uni-
son as they hold a portrait of Chairman Gonzalo and voice their loyalty
to his “thought.” This choreography, highly resonant of the model ballet
The Red Detachment of Women, is followed by a play piece with dra-
matic conventions that were absolutely illegible to the reporter of the
magazine Caretas in 1992, who in a story did not identify the latter as a
revolutionary huaju (spoken drama) but rather described it as a deriva-
tive hodgepodge of global guerrilla aesthetics: “parte de la fiesta fue una
demostración de cómo se derrota el ‘revisionismo, la podrida burguesía,
el gobierno genocida y el imperialismo.’ Todo ello en oscuro ropaje pol-
potiano de khmer-chichas, y con el habitual hieratismo seudochino”
(Part of the show consisted of a demonstration of how “revisionism, the
rotten bourgeoisie, the genocidal government, and imperialism are to
be defeated.” All this in the dark Pol-potian clothing of Khmer-chichas,
and with its typical pseudo-Chinese hieraticism).63 Gustavo Gorriti in-
terprets the dramatic catharsis of Senderista theater in equally horrific
terms, as he shares with Josefin his own experience as a stunned live
spectator of such performance: “I had listened to many people chanting
revolutionary songs throughout the years but when I went physically
inside the perimeter, and stood with my tape recorder, I was nevertheless
very impressed. It was a new category in many respects, with an al-
most religious fervor in the realization of their cause, imposing a war on
peasants, imposing a dogma, an absolute dogma, a literally totalitarian
dogma on people and provoking so much bloodshed on their own, on
the others, and all the people in the middle” (in English in the original).
Such trauma found its revenge in the equally spectacular performance
of Abimael Guzmán’s capture, also at a prison yard. On September 24,
1992, a few days after being caught by the Grupo Especial de Inteligen-
cia (GEIN; Special Intelligence Group), Guzmán was displayed to the

press locked up in a cage and wearing black-and-white striped pajamas,
resembling those of prisoners in classic Hollywood films, as President
Alberto Fujimori wholeheartedly admitted at the time. To the journal-
ists’ and police force’s furious chant of Peru’s national anthem, Guzmán
responded with a solo interpretation of The Internationale. I cannot
help but read this dramatic end to one of the most delayed and affective
inflections of the Chinese revolutionary process as the grand finale of
the cultural Cold War in Latin America.
Sendero Luminoso indeed invested in the visual deployment of sym-
bols of its cultural revolution with dances and chants, and with murals,
posters, paintings, and objects crafted behind bars and channeled to the
group’s hideouts and temporary residences across the country. When
the Peruvian intelligence services identified the hiding place of Abimael
Guzmán a few months before his capture in 1992, the cameras were
aghast at the motley of revolutionary icons, trinkets, and books that fur-
nished such spaces and revealed in different formats the much sought-
after image of Chairman Gonzalo. Where are these artifacts today, we
might wonder, two decades after the report of the Truth and Recon-
ciliation Commission officially called the end of the conflict in 2003?
Laurence Coderre studies how the current proliferation of counterfeit
Cultural Revolution memorabilia, including badges of Mao, comic
books, propaganda posters, and ceramics, is ultimately an indication
of the strength of the Maoist collectible market that wrestles with a
paradox: enduring socialist concerns in an era of market commodity
consumption.64 In its translated version in Latin America, what specific
issues could the senderista memorabilia retrospectively bring up? This
question is tricky, since there is no such thing as senderista memorabilia
in Peru, whether vintage or counterfeit. Perhaps because of the prox-
imity of the conflict in comparison to the more remote 1966–76, and
most likely to the transitional justice process that exposed the wounds
of a traumatic past as part of a form of healing, Peruvians might just
not be ready to adopt an ironic distance vis-à-vis the internal armed
conflict by embracing kitsch consumer products. Anouk Guiné notes
that fear of political persecution has prompted Peruvian Communist
Party members to destroy much of the art the party produced, and that
most of what is left can only be viewed online, mainly in webpages
of scattered groups such as Movimiento Popular Perú-Alemania.65 The
few attempts to showcase senderista material culture at mass-audience
venues in Peru have been framed by curatorial decisions that directly or
232 ❘ Chapter 5
indirectly discredit their message; examples of this being Pablo Hare’s

Incautados (Seized) at the Museo de Arte de Lima (Lima Art Museum)
in 2017 or Esquirlas del odio: Violencia de 1980 al VRAEM (Shards of
Hate: Violence from 1980 to the VRAEM) at the Lugar de la Memoria,
Tolerancia e Inclusión Social (Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social
Inclusion) in 2016, both of which used confiscated artifacts that remain
today under the strict surveillance of police forces and can be consulted
by appointment at the museum of the Dirección Nacional contra el
Terrorismo (DIRCOTE; National Directorate against Terrorism), where
they are displayed as war trophies. In her visit to this museum in the
film, Josefin caresses the glass case containing the “personal items be-
longing to the delinquent and terrorist Augusta La Torre Carrasco, alias
Camarada Norah” in a futile attempt to get a hold of them: “Mi abuela
quiere tener algo de las pertenencias de Augusta” / “Ah sus pertenencias,
eso va a ser muy difícil, ¿Quién te va a dar? No te van a dar eso, es muy
difícil, muy difícil” (My grandmother wants to keep some of Augusta’s
belongings / Oh, her belongings, that is going to be very difficult; who is
going to give that to you? They are not going to give you that, it is just
very, very difficult), prompting us to consider once again the exception-
ally fine line separating the private property of Augusta La Torre and
the relics of official history in Peru in the affective archive of the cultural
revolution publicly displayed in Tempestad en los Andes.
Silen c es
Let me conclude by looking back at the rare footage of the Cultural

Revolution in João Moreira Salles’s No intenso agora mentioned at the
beginning of this chapter. These are colorful Super 8 sequences of travel
in public spaces in Beijing and Shanghai commented by a melancholic
third person resonant of Chris Marker’s ruminative narrators. Moreira
Salles is neither a red diaper nor the son of a disappeared person; he
is the child of a renowned Brazilian banker who happened to live in
Paris as an expat in the 1960s and a mother who visited China as a
tourist in 1966. Unlike the other works discussed in this chapter, No in-
tenso agora does not invoke the personal testimony of the revolutionary
Left from the protagonist’s childhood but rather unfolds as the medi-
tation of a mature filmmaker on the seismic intensity of the New Left,
viewed through the prism of his own mother’s prime and death. The
cinematographic connection between the images of the student demon-
strations of May 1968 and of his mother’s trip to China in 1966 is

entirely affective: they both signal the climax of a cycle that is political
and personal. Through a wealth of archival material, No intenso agora
poses an eminently technical question: How can cinema convey mourn-
ing? Moreira Salles’s first-person voice-over is distinctive for its use of
silences; in this case, in the deliberate omission of the global impact of
the Cultural Revolution and his own mother’s suicide.
In No intenso agora the footage of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution serves as the stage where his mother experienced her most
unexpected happiness, but that she completely misread in political
terms. Moreira Salles watches this footage for the first time forty years
after it was filmed and cannot help but overwrite it: he translates the
slogans from the ubiquitous red signs “that she saw but did not read”
and contrasts her superficial observations about Chinese society with
highly political passages from Alberto Moravia’s (1907–90) contempo-
raneous travelogue La rivoluzione culturale in Cina: Ovvero il Convi-
tato di pietra (1967; The Red Book and the Great Wall: An Impression
of Mao’s China).66 In No intenso agora China is out of place. Traveling
by herself, emancipated from routine and domesticity, his mother felt
happily out of place; a paid trip organized by a French art magazine
for “dilettantes atrás das belezas de um pais” (dilettantes in search of
the beauties of the country) during the most iconoclastic stage of the
Chinese revolutionary process was, indeed, totally out of place; the nar-
rative of Chinese history in No intenso agora is also out of place. For
a film that tries to capture the contagious utopia of revolution (and
the subsequent disenchantment with it), the silence on the impact of
the Chinese Revolution on the French youth is remarkable because the
Cultural Revolution epitomizes the sudden rise and fall that so obsesses
Moreira Salles: while it was a key reference point for a large number
of French sinophiles mesmerized by the image of empowered student
brigades supported by their own leader, when French students took the
streets in 1968 most of the Red Guards had already been banished to
the countryside. French Maoism would thrive years later when the Tel
Quel group embraced their own interpretation of Maoism and visited
the country in a highly publicized trip in 1974. Yet, in the thorough
filmic reconstruction of the rise and fall of the students’ revolutionary
utopia of 68, the absence of Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967),
a prescient and parodic examination of the New Left activism during
those years by the director that would become an icon of experimental
collectivist cinema in France, is noteworthy; “Godard, o mais babaca
234 ❘ Chapter 5
dos maoistas suiços” (Godard, the most idiotic Swiss Maoist), reads
a graffiti in the only reference to the director in the entire film. By de-
taching Chinese history from the May events, Moreira Salles strips the
Cultural Revolution of any documentary value and instead retains its
pure affect, that which dazzled his mother in 1966.
A very moving silence surrounds his mother’s suicide, which is never
stated in words but dramatically edited with images and tones. The sec-
ond part of the film titled “The Return to the Factory” explores the res-
toration of order in the summer of 1968 and the traumatic retreat of the
students. Fixated with the generalized feeling of failure, Moreira Salles
dedicates the last quarter of the film to analyzing footage of the funerals
of the fallen militants during the confrontations and wonders how tele-
vision, independent cinema, and the big screen captured those rituals:
What was the audience of the funerary processions really crying for?, he
asks repeatedly. What did the cameras want to convey with their close-
ups? Moreira Salles’s questions become more specific: how come these
people died so young? And thus we realize that those mentioned earlier
died by suicide: in protest of the Soviet invasion, the Czech Jan Palach
(1948–69) set himself on fire; fleeing the police, Gilles Tautin (1950–68)
drowned in the Seine; and Killian Fritsch (1943–70), author of the fa-
mous slogan “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the cobblestones, the
beach!”), threw himself on the tracks. For the first time in the film, the
narrator expresses his opinion and admits his preference for Romain
Goupil’s Mourir à trente ans (1982; Half a Life), a film about Trotskyist
militant Michel Recanati’s (1948–78) untimely death: “ao menos para
mim, esse é o filme mais bonito sobre o período” (in my view, this is the
most beautiful film of the period); and for the only time in the entire
picture, we see original footage in a still frame of the Gaité station in
Paris where Fritsch took his own life: “Tal vez Fritsch morasse por perto
da estação; ou tal vez tenha cruzado a cidade para se matar ali, no ul-
timo gesto de ironia magra, ja que ‘gaité’ em francés, significa alegria”
(Maybe Fristch lived near the station, or maybe he crossed the entire
city to kill himself there in a final gesture of bitter irony, since “gaité”
in French means joy). This highly personal cinematographic note on
fatal happiness is followed by a sequence of home movies of his mother,
being lively at the beach and family celebrations in the 1960s, an affect
that quickly wanes: “a partir dos anos setenta as imagens começan a
rarear, e de oitenta em diante não há quase nada” (starting in the 1970s
the images become scarcer, and from the 1980s onward there is almost
nothing). The photographic void that signals his mother’s abrupt end
is filled with the Chinese footage that a moved Moreira Salles com-
ments on, referring to her no longer as “minha mãe” (my mother) but
with the more infantile form of address “mamãe” (mommy): “A inefável
emoção que sucede ao choque do encontro inesperado. . . . Ela foi feliz
na China, e por isso gosto de pensar nela lá” (The indescribable emo-
tion that follows the shock with the unexpected encounter. . . . She was
happy in China, and that is why I like to think of here there) (fig. 13).
I find a final key into the silences in the Moreira Salles’s family ar-
chive, no longer in their home movies but rather in the documentary
Jia Zhangke: Un homem de Fenyang (2014) (Jia Zhangke: A Guy from
Fenyang) by João’s brother, Walter Salles’s (1956–). Written in collab-
oration with the French critic Jean Michel Frodon (1953–), this is a
cinephile’s tribute to one of the most important Chinese directors of
the present. The film follows Jia Zhangke (1970–) as he travels to his
hometown in the Shanxi Province in Northern China to visit family
and friends, capturing his meditations on his work at the site of the
locations of his earlier films. A leading figure of the “Sixth Generation”
of Chinese cinema, in his films Jia shies away from totalizing visions of
Chinese society and instead turns the spotlight on those alienated by the
Fig. 13. João Moreira Salles’s mother poses happy during the Cultural Revolu-
tion. No intenso agora, 2017. Copyright © Videofilmes.
236 ❘ Chapter 5
drastic changes China has experienced since its transition to the market
economy in the late 1970s. Toward the end of the two-hour interview,
where he discusses everything from aesthetics to the film industry and
recent history, Jia suddenly mentions his father; it appears that he never
quite appreciated Jia’s career or celebrated his fame because he was
forever terrified. The scars he bore during the Cultural Revolution—
having been reeducated in the countryside and burning his entire library
out of caution—never fully healed and thus he fretted for his son’s life
until the day he died. Suddenly, the stoic artist breaks down, sheds a
tear, and falters: “He had very few happy moments” (fig. 14). We do not
hear or see Walter Salles in the scene, but we know that he is behind the
camera, listening in silence to Jia’s words through the delayed words of
an interpreter. And after watching No intenso agora, we also know that
he has a secret, which he does not reveal in the film and probably never
confessed to his Chinese colleague. The secret is that his mother, on the
contrary, was never as happy as during the Cultural Revolution.
Read together, the films by the Moreira Salles siblings reveal a fra-
ternal complicity in the cinematographic treatment of filial love, a com-
mon grammar distinctive for its painful silences and highly resonant of
Sergio and Fausto Cabrera’s intimate theatrical connection as the privi-
leged form of parental affection. After all, the moving image—the most
personal of the scenic arts—blurs the boundaries of intimacy and im-
mediacy, and absorbs other genres, archives, and affects in its capacious
Fig. 14. Chinese film director Jia Zhangke falters when talking about his father’s
pain during the Cultural Revolution. Walter Salles, Jia Zhangke: Um homem de
Fenyang, 2014. Copyright © Videofilmes.
format. The joint reading of No intenso agora and Jia Zhangke also
reveals the taste for affectively charged images of China, coincidentally
the theme of the first collaboration of the Moreira Salles brothers, which
initiated João into professional filmmaking: “He (Walter) convinced me
to go with the crew and to be his ersatz director for two or three weeks,
and I decided to do it. . . . I remember I was at Tiananmen Square on the
first day. We arrived there on a Monday, and Tuesday was our first day
of shooting. I remember that the cinematographer asked me the scar-
iest question that I had ever heard, and which I had to answer: where
should he put the camera? I simply had not realised deciding this was
the director’s job. I thought that my job as director was to have beauti-
ful thoughts and that the cinematographer would realise them. So I had
to learn just by doing it. Back in Brazil I put the thing together, writing
the narration. Formally, it was very conventional, but, at the time, in
Brazil it was new, and China, O Império do centro (1987) became a
success. . . . Since then, I’ve never stopped doing film.”67 Disoriented, at
the symbolic “gate of the nation” of China, the amateur director from
Brazil produced what would become not only a very original film about
Chinese culture but also the foundation of one of the most intriguing
trajectories of a Latin American intellectual in the world of filmmaking.
Afterword
“Imposture”
I always thought that I would finish this book with a chapter on repre-
sentations of China in contemporary Latin American fiction. Through-
out the years it took me to write it, I bought, read, and kept track of the
numerous “Chinese novels” that sprung from Latin American publish-
ers, in synch with the global rise of China since the start of the twenty-
first century. The folder “Book Project / Chapter Five” on my computer’s
hard drive accumulated labels reflecting how each new release brought
about changes in their positions within my argument. “New Travels”
housed novels such as O livro dos mandarins (2006, The mandarins
book) by Ricardo Lisias, Reprodução (2014, Reproduction) by Ber-
nardo Carvalho, Pekin (2017, Beijing) by Miguel Ángel Petrecca, or La
máquina de escribir carácteres chinos (2017, The Chinese typewriter)
by Eduardo Berti, which was twice given to me as a present. The ti-
tles under “Chinatowns” grew in tandem with the waves of migrants
from Fujian that settled in different cities of the region during the last
two decades: Ariel Magnus’s Un chino en bicicleta (2007, A Chinese
man on a bike), Eduardo Lalo’s Simone (2012, Simone), Luciana Czud-
nowski’s Chuan (2016, Chuan), Federico Jeanmaire’s Tacos altos (2017,
High heels), or Manolo Nuñez Negrón’s Barra China (2012, Chinese
bar), also given to me as a present twice. Then there were Mario Bel-
latín, César Aira, and a few other individual authors who revisit China
throughout their work in the most unexpected ways. In a nutshell: there
is a wealth of recent Latin American “Chinese novels” out there.
239
240 ❘ Afterword
I kept telling myself that I would compose this chapter last to cover
as much new material as possible, but I gradually came to realize that I
was procrastinating. Had I, perhaps too influenced by Borges, lost inter-
est in the genre that had brought me to love literature in the first place?
Or had my critical interests drifted away from the mimetic quality of
the novel and turned towards its circulation? Whatever the reason,
these Chinese novels no longer stirred the unique intellectual thrill of
coming up with something new, which I experienced when researching
and writing the other sections of the manuscript. What kept me com-
mitted to my original chapter plan (or to the anxiety of including new
and thematically relevant material, regardless of its aesthetic or affec-
tive value) is a set of hypotheses concerning a few of these novels that I
put forward in an early article and wanted to revisit in greater depth. I
thought that if I expanded the corpus and added new lines of analysis,
that thrill would eventually return. But I was wrong. More powerful
ideas and archives had emerged from other sections, and chapter 5 be-
came something completely different. In the end, none of the Chinese
novels made it into this book. Or one did.
The article I had planned to resume is titled “Rewriting Travel Lit-
erature: A Cosmopolitan Critique of Exoticism in Contemporary Latin
American Fiction.” This was my first peer-reviewed publication as a
graduate student, and although I would approach it very differently to-
day, I still think its ideas are quite solid. I argued there that recent Latin
American novels set in Asia were driven by a dislocating impulse against
the particularistic legacy of the Boom. I demonstrated that novels such
as La gruta del Toscano (2006; Toscano’s grotto) by Ignacio Padilla,
Mongólia (2003, Mongolia) by Bernardo Carvalho, and Los impostores
(2002; The impostors) by Santiago Gamboa remove, refute, and ridicule
all references to Asia or the Asian cultures that they portrayed as set-
tings. By questioning different articulations of Orientalism, I claimed,
these writers were questioning the self-exoticizing aesthetics of magical
realism that had universalized Latin American literature by stressing its
quaint particular difference. What is more, I posited that these young
novelists revisit the archive of European Orientalism by rewriting colo-
nial travelogues and adventure novels in their own fiction. For the post-
Boom (“McOndo”/”Crack”) generation, rewriting European literature
was their cosmopolitan mode of engagement with the world.
Because I became so focused on Chinese literature, language, and
history over the years, Los impostores kept popping up in my syllabi
and scholarship, while La gruta del Toscano (set in the Himalayas) and
“Imposture” ❘ 241
Mongólia (about the nomadic tribes of the steppe) lay dormant in my

files waiting for a jump start in chapter 5. Gamboa’s novel is a fast-
paced and funny text that complicates frameworks of East-West com-
parison. A Colombian journalist living in Paris, a German philologist in
search of adventure, and a Peruvian literary critic based in Texas find
themselves enmeshed in a farcical plot in the search of a lost manuscript
from the Boxer Rebellion in present-day Beijing. The three are failed
writers, who weave the narrative through discordant voices and formats
and display a hilarious repertoire of Orientalist clichés. A globe-trotter
himself catapulted by the Spanish publishing market, Gamboa winks
at the commonplaces of world literature. I was lucky to chat with him
about this a few years back when he came to Trinity College as Lecturer
in International Studies. Invited by my colleague Vijay Prashad, who
had met Gamboa when he was an attaché to the Colombian embassy in
India, Gamboa spent a couple of days with us discussing cultural diplo-
macy, world literature, and Orientalism. In my seminar we devoted an
entire session to Los impostores, live with the author.
The more I reread Los impostores, the more it nurtured my research.
First, the novel included a rare reference to Chinese coolies. While
Chinese migrants abound in contemporary fiction, the inclusion of a
character from the nineteenth-century tusán universe from Peru is quite
atypical, and what’s more, the character of Nelson Chouchán Otálora
adopts a remarkably cynical tone, shamelessly exploiting his Chinese
heritage for the sake of literary consecration: “Me voy a Pekín, cholita,
a buscar mis orígenes. ¡Llegó la hora de volver a las fuentes! Luego
me voy a escribir una novela tan buena que se van a cagar los perros,
y después, cuando ya sea famoso, vengo aquí, los mando a todos a la
mierda y nos vamos tu y yo a vivir a París” (I’m off to Beijing cholita,
to look for my roots. It’s time to return to the origins! Afterwards, the
novel I will write it be so goddamn good, and when I become famous,
I’ll come back here, send everybody to hell and you and me can finally
move to Paris).1 Los impostores also lays out the philological division
of labor that I discuss throughout the book. In the novel the expert on
China is a German sinologist, while the two Latin Americans after the
same manuscript are a journalist and a literary critic, both completely
oblivious to China and both living outside Latin America. Even the ed-
itorial design of Los impostores got me thinking. To my surprise, the
Chinese character that illustrates the cover of the first edition of Gam-
boa’s novel is the exact same logogram that José Juan Tablada uses in
his ideographic collection Li-Po y otros poemas, which I flesh out in
242 ❘ Afterword
chapter 4 (fig. 15) There is still more: I came to learn that Gamboa’s
host during his stay in China while writing this book (and the sister
travelogue Octubre en Pekín [October in Beijing] from 2001) was the
Colombian filmmaker Sergio Cabrera, the red diaper educated in Mao-
ist China and protagonist of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel Volver la
vista atrás discussed in chapter 5. In hindsight, it appears that each of
the translations of China studied in this book (migration of coolies,
Fig. 15. Cover of the 2002 edition of Santiago Gam-

boa’s Los impostores, which uses the same Sinitic logo-
gram as José Juan Tablada’s ideographic poem “Li-Po.”
Copyright © Seix Barral.
“Imposture” ❘ 243
transplantation of sinology, transfer of ideograms, and adaptation of

Maoism) are fictionalized in Los impostores; or conversely, that this
book is an uncanny scholarly reverse of Gamboa’s novel.
For a study that revisits Latin American literary modernity chrono-
logically, the temptation of teleology loomed in the background. What
better way to evidence my thoughts on an archive formation than with
a recent novel that connected each of its distinct parts through a realist
fiction? But my claims go precisely in the opposite direction: one of
the key findings I offer is that the archive of China in Latin America
is deliberately submerged, scattered, or simply slippery. Unlike Orien-
talism, where “a groups of texts acquire mass, density, and referential
power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (stra-
tegic formation) thanks to a the stable—hegemonic—point of enunci-
ation (“strategic location”), “disorientation” is a centrifugal process,
where references and archives are unstable and dispersed.2 When I fi-
nally decided to redefine chapter 5 and leave aside the Chinese novels,
I still struggled to find ways to squeeze Los impostores into the extant
text: maybe an observation about the critique of sinophone writing in
reference to the coolie passage archive in chapter 1; a footnote about
the caricature of the German philologist Gisbert Klauss (mostly likely
borrowed from Borges’s sinologist Stephen Albert) or a close reading
of the book’s cover alongside Tablada’s ideographic poem (was this
a reference to the Latin American ideogrammatic tradition or, rather,
another random iteration of a glyph that works as a placeholder for
Chinese text, easily available to a corporate publisher like Seix-Barral?).
Yet none of these observations added any density to my arguments;
they only illustrated them. Finally, Los impostores did not make a single
appearance in the text.
Now that the book is finished, I wonder: Have I really left out Los
impostores by not citing it? Or is it that the novel, like the etymology
of its title suggests, is placed elsewhere (from Latin, impostare/impo-
nere: “place upon, impose upon, deceive”)? Perhaps this novel was a
point of departure, an introduction to a set of historical and literary
encounters that, after years of research, generated a scholarly account.
But I think that what really stayed with me from Los impostores is
its tone: Gamboa’s witty, nonchalant, but fierce attack on the Latin-
Americanist obsession with differential identity as the dominant form
of global engagement. Gamboa’s tone conveys the assurance that the
Latin American (or any peripheral) intellectual can indeed engage with
the world without complying to hegemonic cartographies or adopting
244 ❘ Afterword
a particularistic—subaltern—place of enunciation; and if they do, this

can expose such inertia as ridiculous. The article from my graduate stu-
dent days opened with a quote by Gamboa that read “Soy colombiano,
pero no siento la obligación de que mi escritura esté arraigada en Co-
lombia” (I’m Colombian, yet I don’t feel it my duty to root my writing
in Colombia).3 Los impostores, Gamboa’s fiction, as well as my own
book seek to uproot indigenous mandates of Latin Americanism with
impostor gestures of disorientation.
I advocate in this book for a methodological shift from place to pos-
ture (from Latin, positura: “position, situation; disposition of the several
parts of anything with respect to one another or a particular purpose”)
to revisit disciplinary frameworks in the study of cross-cultural ex-
change. Unlike fixed geographies, the bodily dispositions studied in this
book are unstable: they suggest a form of navigating the world through
trafficked routes, twisted networks, on the edge, from the surface, and
in motion. They are contingent positions that make use of given infra-
structures but do not conform to their geopolitical logic, because, after
all, they deal with literary creation. This postural move is not new to the
field: in the 1990s Sylvia Molloy famously called for a positive “politics
of posing” to question the attacks on modernismo’s frivolous and repre-
hensible poses. Like her, I also understand posing as a liberating move:
“not as a set of bodily or textual affectations at odds with national
and continental discourses and concerns from which Latin America
ultimately recovers, but as an oppositional practice within those very
discourses and concerns, a decisive cultural statement whose political
import and destabilizing energy I try to recuperate and assess.”4 In this
book on the writings of China in Latin America, the destabilizing en-
ergy I try to recuperate and assess is what I call disorientation.
Appendix
Table 2. Spanish translations of Chinese literary works published in Buenos

Aires, 1942–81
Year Author Title Publisher Translator
1942 Sheng Cheng Mi madre Siglo Veinte Ernesto Ibarra
1944 Various Cuentistas de la Siglo Veinte María Casado
authors nueva China
1944 Various Poesía china Continental Alfredo Weiss
authors and H. F. Miri
1946 Lin Yutang Sabiduría hindú Biblioteca Georgette de
Nueva Herberg
1946 Lin Yutang Una llamarada en Sudamericana Leon Mirras
la roca
1947 Various Antología de Espasa-Calpe Marcela de Juan
authors cuentistas chinos
1947 Li Qianfu Dos joyas del Espasa-Calpe Alfredo Cahn
teatro asiático
1948 Various Cuentos chinos Espasa-Calpe Marcela de Juan
authors de tradición
antigua
1950 Li Bai Poemas de Li Cuadernos del Osvaldo
Tai Po Unicornio Svanascini
1951 Various La flauta de jade Guillermo Angel
authors Kraft Battistessa
245
246 ❘ Appendix

1952 Lin Yutang La sabiduría de Siglo Veinte Elena Dukelsky
Confucio Yoffre
1952 Lin Yutang La sabiduría de Sudamericana Floreal Mazía
Laotse
1952 Various La flauta de jade Guillermo Angel
authors Kraft Battistessa
1952 Various Antiguos poemas Sociedad de Horacio Becco
authors chinos anónimos Amigos del and Osvaldo
Arte Oriental Svanascini
1952 Various La poesía china Sociedad de Osvaldo
authors Amigos del Svanascini
Arte Oriental
1954 Lu Xun La verdadera Asociación Estela Canto
historia de AQ Argentina de
Cultura China
1954 Beijing Entre marido y Asociación
People’s Art mujer Argentina de
Theatre Cultura China
1955 Xiao San Poemas Revista
and Ai Qing Cultura China
1954 Mao Dun “Nuevas Cuadernos de
realidades” Cultura
1954 Lin Yutang Sabiduría china Biblioteca Alfredo
Nueva Whitelow
1954 Various Cuentos Espasa-Calpe Marcela de Juan
authors humorísticos
orientales
1955 Eileen Chang La canción del Goyanarte Alfredo Weiss
arroz
1954 Mao Zedong “Dos poemas de Capricornio Fermín Chávez
Mao Tse Tung”
1955 Li Zhihua Reacción en la Ariadna Raúl González
aldea china Tuñón
1956 Sheng Cheng Mi madre y yo Cauce Ernesto Ibarra
1956 Lu Xun Diario de un loco Lautaro Julio Galer
1957 Lin Yutang Amor e ironía Biblioteca Alfredo Weiss
Nueva and Héctor Miri
Appendix ❘ 247

1957 Lin Yutang Obras escogidas Sudamericana Miguel de
Hernani
and Román
Giménez
1958 Han Suyin El amor es algo Santiago Luis Echeverri
maravilloso Rueda
1958 Pekin opera La venganza del Quetzal Estela Obarrio
pescador Bell
1958 Various Poetas chinos Quetzal Alvaro Yunque
authors vertidos del
francés
1959 Shao La literatura Cuadernos de
Quanlin china actual Cultura
1959 Mao Zedong Poemas chinos Cuadernos de Juan L. Ortiz
et al. Cultura and A. Varela
1959 Guo Moruo La escena de la Cuadernos de
conspiración Cultura
1959 Mao Zedong Obras escogidas Platina
(2 tomos)
1959 Various El teatro Siglo Veinte Bernardo
authors tradicional chino Kordon
1960 Various Poesía china Fabril Editora María Teresa de
authors León and Rafael
Alberti
1960 Han Suyin La montaña es Guillermo Luis Echavarri
joven Kraft
1960 Lin Yutang Un momento en Sudamericana Rosa de Toryho
Pekín
1961 Various Cuentos chinos Centurión Marcela de Juan
authors de tradición
antigua
1961 Various Poetas chinos de Mundonuevo Raúl A. Ruy
authors la dinastía Tang
1962 Mao Zedong 20 poemas Compañía Luis Enrique
Argentina de Délano
Editores
1963 Various Teatro de ópera Sudamericana J. Huang-Hung
authors chino: Los niños
del jardín
248 ❘ Appendix

1963 Various Las damas de la Goyanarte Virgina Carreño
authors China
1963 Lin Yutang La familia del Sudamericana León Mirlas
barrio chino
1964 Lin Yutang Enebro Loa Sudamericana Roman A.
Jimenez
1965 Huang Teatro chino y Revista Juan José
Zuolin teatro occidental Capricornio Sebreli
1965 Li Fuyan, Tres cuentos Revista Bernardo
Shen Jiji, fantásticos Capricornio Kordon
Li Gongzuo
1965 Various Cuentos de da Capricornio Bernardo
authors dinastia Tang Kordon
1965 Lin Yutang La fuga de los Sudamericana León Mirlas
inocentes
1965 Mao Zedong La guerra de Huemul
guerrillas
1966 Mao Zedong Sobre arte y Ediciones del
literatura Tiempo
authors vertidos del
francés
1967 Lin Yutang Mi patria y mi Sudamericana Román A.
pueblo Jimenez
1968 Lin Yutang Teoría china del Sudamericana Roberto Bixio
arte
1969 Mao Zedong Cuatro tesis La Rosa
filosóficas Blindada
1969 Mao Zedong Obras escogidas La Rosa
(4 tomos) Blindada-
Nativa
1969 Mao Zedong Citas del La Rosa
presidente Mao Blindada
1969 Han Suyin El amor es algo Santiago Luis Echeverri
maravilloso Rueda
1969 Various Cuentos chinos Juarez Editor Bernardo
authors con fantasmas S.A. Kordon
1970 Lin Yutang Una hoja en la Sudamericana Atanasio
tormenta Sánchez
Appendix ❘ 249

1970 Lu Xun La verdadera Centro Editor Luis Enrique
historia de AQ de América Delano
Latina
1970 Various Los poetas de la Centro Editor Roberto
authors dinastía Tang de América Donoso
Latina
1971 Lu Xun Diario de un loco Centro Editor Julio Galer
de América
Latina
1972 Mao Zedong Charlas en el foro Marxismo de
de Yenan hoy
1972 Mao Zedong Selección de La Rosa
escritos militares Blindada
1972 Various Poesía china Fabril Editora M. T. León and
authors R. Alberti
authors
1974 Chen Boda Lucha de clases Schapire
en el campo
chino
1974 Mao Zedong Notas para la Los libros
lectura
1974 Mao Zedong Los 37 poemas Schapire
1974 Mao Zedong Sobre la literatura Nativa
y el arte
1974 Mao Zedong Obras escogidas De la Paloma
(6 tomos)
1974 Mao Zedong Los 37 poemas Schapire Jorge Enrique
Adoum
1975 Mao Zedong Texto inédito de Los libros
Mao
1975 Mao Zedong Escritos inéditos Mundo Nuevo
1975 I Ching: El libro Sudamericana/
de las mutaciones Edhasa
1976 Various Así escriben los Orion Bernardo
authors chinos Kordon
1977 Various Poetas chinos de Hachette Raúl A. Ruy
authors la dinastía Tang
250 ❘ Appendix

1977 Various Poesía china: Andrómeda Fritz Aguado
authors Antología Pertz
esencial
1979 Mao Zedong Obras escogidas, Independencia
tomo V
1979 Laozi El camino y su Kier
poder
1979 Various La literatura Centro Editor Jorge Lafforgue
authors china clásica de América and Miguel
Latina Olivera
1980 Various La literatura Centro Editor
authors china moderna de América
Latina
1981 Various El cuento chino. Centro Editor Bernardo
authors Li Fu-Yen, Chen de América Kordon
Ki-Tsi y otros Latina
Notes
In trodu c tion
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo, Antología
de la literatura fantástica (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1940), 1. All transla-
tions are mine unless otherwise noted.
2. Zhang Longxi, “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,”
Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 110.
3. Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World
Literature in Latin America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2014), 3; Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction,
the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 13; and Fernando Degiovanni, Ver-
nacular Latin Americanisms: War, the Market, and the Making of a Discipline
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 2, respectively.
4. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, “Sinographies: An Introduc-
tion,” in Sinographies: Writing China, ed. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven
G. Yao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), vii.
5. Hayot, Saussy, and Yao, “Sinographies,” vii.
6. David Damrosch, Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global
Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2020), 1.
7. The debates on world literature that unfolded in the early 2000s were
largely an intellectual reaction to the state of the humanities, which in the hey-
day of globalization at the turn of the twentieth century had ceased to reflect
the political culture, research agenda, or epistemological frameworks on which
comparative literature had thrived half a century before. The rise of area stud-
ies programs during the Cold War had opened a space for academic training
251
252 ❘ Notes to Introduction
in regions of strategic interest, and, with a social sciences approach, special-

ists funded by the State Department began to focus on contemporary cultures
and their impact on international relations. Also, empowered by the civil rights
movements of the 1960s, the new student body that now comprised women,
immigrant groups, and other minorities pushed for the creation of specialized
fields of study based on particular identities. Multiple ethnic studies depart-
ments emerged to propose an interdisciplinary inquiry into the specifically US
experience of Asian, African, Chicano, or Jewish identities, to name a few. On
the methodological side, postcolonial theory and poststructuralism had sweep-
ing effects on the politics and methods of reading, particularly in English and
French departments. As the “canon wars” of the 1980s anticipated, by the turn
of the millennium it was no longer possible to disentangle geopolitics from the
humanities curriculum. In comparative literature departments this conundrum
translated into the struggle of how to reconcile the multiculturalist thrust to
diversify the canon with a more traditionalist view that still regarded philology
and the classics as the tenets of liberal arts education.
Of the three paradigms of world literature that developed around Franco
Moretti, “Conjunctures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 55–
67; David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2003); and Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters,
trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004),
published originally in 1998 as La république mondiale des lettres, Damrosch’s
was the boldest. While Moretti and Casanova indeed broadened the scope of
the world beyond the few, major Western European literatures of traditional
comparativism, both models still regarded the literature from, say, Brazil,
China, or Nigeria as putative peripheries of a world system with an axis defined
by either a hegemonic genre like the European novel or the city of Paris as the
“Greenwich meridian” of newness and modernity. Damrosch, instead, opened
an unusually horizontal platform to compare literatures from all geographies,
genres, and epochs through translation. In a very capacious formulation, Dam-
rosch’s world literature encompassed “all literary works that circulate beyond
their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (What
Is World Literature? 4).
But as world literature flourished both in the United States and abroad, so
did criticism. “What about local knowledges with the new planetary scale of
world literature?” wondered Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Death of a Dis-
cipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), calling the attention to
the quality, rigor, and language training particular to area studies overlooked
by this transregional paradigm suspected of Americanizing of the world. As
to methodology, Spivak called on scholars not to overcome but rather to rec-
oncile the humanist philological tradition with a social science framework to
decolonize the profusely diverse Global South, formerly read through an Ori-
entalist lens: “in disciplinary method we remain astute. Attention to idiom,
demonstration through textual analysis, acquisition of expertise in plotting the
play of logic in rhetoric and vice versa. In so far as our object of investigation
is concerned, however, we acknowledge as comparativists any attempt that the
text makes to go outside of its space-time enclosure, the history and geography
Notes to Introduction ❘ 253
by which the text is determined. Thus disciplinary convention expands toward

what would otherwise escape it, and the field expands greatly, in many ways”
(Spivak,”Rethinking Comparativism,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 [2009]:
615). The most articulate critique, though, came from translation theory. Emily
Apter’s programmatic Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslat-
ability (London: Verso, 2013) questioned the optimistic assumption of trans-
latability at the core of Damrosch’s model and in turn posited the relevance
of nontranslation, mistranslation, incomparability, and untranslatability as an
approach to literary comparativism.
8. David Damrosch, “What Isn’t World Literature? Problems of Language,
Context, and Politics,” plenary lecture of the Institute for World Literature, Cam-
bridge, MA, 2016, https://iwl.fas.harvard.edu/keynote-plenary-lectures-videos.
9. Apter, Against World Literature, 2.
10. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4.
11. The Germans Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, and the Czech René
Wellek (1903–95) epitomize the figures who infused US literary criticism with
the tools of stylistics and hermeneutics and muffled the monolingualism of En-
glish departments with their ear for Romance repertoires. But they were part of
a larger intellectual exile that had repercussions on the methods and politics of
reading foreign literatures in the many other cultural fields that hosted these ex-
iles around the world. Edward Said and Amir Mufti insistently wrote about Au-
erbach’s (and to a lesser extent, Spitzer’s) years in Istanbul, where their erudition
in Romance philology played out in the complex relationship between Jewish
identity, secularization, and the Westernization efforts of the Turkish academic
world they inhabited for several years before finally settling in the United States.
See Edward W. Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,” in Mi-
mesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, by Erich Auerbach,
trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), xiii;
and Amir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and
the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1998): 95–125.
12. Miranda Lida, Amado Alonso en la Argentina: Una historia global del
Instituto de Filología (1927–1946) (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de
Quilmes Editorial, 2019).
13. Degiovanni, Vernacular Latin Americanisms, 2.
14. To mention an example, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique
générale (1916) was published in Spanish as early as 1945 by the Argentine
press Losada and aimed at the general public, while it only became available
to English-language readers in 1959, by the hand of Wade Baskins at the Philo-
sophical Library of New York.
15. Lida, Amado Alonso, 269.
16. Wellek taught at the University of Iowa for seven years until 1946 and
then settled at Yale University, where he established and chaired the department
of comparative literature. Auerbach started his career in the US at Pennsylvania
State University in 1947 and was appointed professor of Romance philology at
Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957. Spitzer spent
his entire sojourn in the United States at Johns Hopkins University (from 1936
until 1960).
254 ❘ Notes to Introduction
17. Nora Catelli, “Asymmetry: Specters of Comparativism in the Circulation

of Theory,” Journal of World Literature 2, no. 1 (2017): 20.
18. Catelli, “Specters of Comparativism,” 15.
19. Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón, eds., The Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815:
A Reader of Primary Sources (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
20. Carles Prado-Fonts, Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics
of Translation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022), 9.
21. Martín Bergel, El Oriente desplazado: Los intelectuales y los orígenes
del tercermundismo en la Argentina (Bernal, Argentina: Universidad Nacional
de Quilmes, 2015), 116.
22. María del Pilar Álvarez and Pablo Forni, “Orientalismo conciliar: El pa-
dre Quiles y la creación de la Escuela de Estudios Orientales de la Universidad
del Salvador,” Estudios de Asia y África 53, no. 2 (2018): 442.
23. The study of Asian cultures in general is gradually gaining space in Latin
American research centers and universities. See Leila Gándara, “Transforma-
ciones culturales y nuevos campos de conocimiento: Los estudios sobre lengua
y cultura china,” in Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Letras, ed. Américo
Cristófalo (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras 2014), 1333–42.
24. See Paula Hattori and Pablo Gavirati, “Estudios Inter-Culturales Nikkei /
Niquey: Nuevas perspectivas entre Japón y América Latina,” Revista Transas,
https://www.revistatransas.com/dossier-estudios-interculturales-niquey/.
25. For a comprehensive study of the literary culture of Peruvians of Chinese
heritage, see Ignacio López Calvo, Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing
Tusán in Peru (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014).
26. Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review
of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327. I first read about Larkin’s infrastructures in
Guido Herzovich, “La desigualdad como tarea: Crítica literaria y masificación
editorial en Argentina (1950–60)” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016). Her-
zovich uses the notion of “critical infrastructures” to describe the constellation
of publishers and cultural magazines in 1950s Argentina that enabled the for-
mation of a renewed form of criticism. I used this concept to understand the
forms of writing about China in that period and then I redefined it in the global
terms of this book. I thank Guido for our initial conversations.
27. Sánchez Prado, Strategic Occidentalism, 15.
28. Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape Peo-
ple, History, and Civilization (New York: Random House, 2018).
29. Maialen Marín-Lacarta, “Mediated and Marginalised: Translations of
Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain (1949–2010),” Meta
63, no. 2 (2018): 309.
30. Marín-Lacarta, “Mediated and Marginalised,” 306.
31. Andrea Bachner, “World-Literary Hospitality: China, Latin America,
Translation,” in The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Litera-
ture, ed. Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press 2022), 104.
32. Octavio Paz, “Further Comments,” in Eliot Weinberger, Nineteen Ways
of Looking at Wang Wei (Kingston, RI: Asphodel Press, 1987), 47.
Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 255
33. Araceli Tinajero, Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano

(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004).
34. For sinophone, see Shu-mei Shih, “The Concept of the Sinophone,”
PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011); and for Hispanophone, see Paula Park, “Transpacific
Intercoloniality: Rethinking the Globality of Philippine Literature in Spanish,”
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20 (2019): 83–97.
35. Brazil is of particular interest in this regard. While the Lusophone coun-
try holds the largest Nikkei community outside Japan, relatively few Chinese
immigrants made it to the latecomer abolitionist empire. Yet debates over the
introduction of Asian workers have played a central role in Brazilian politics
since the early nineteenth century, and thanks to the impetus of the aforemen-
tioned scholarship on the coolie trade, more scholars working with an ethnic
studies intellectual agenda in mind are accounting for it. In Mandarin Brazil:
Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2018), Ana Paulina Lee postulates a global map of race through what she con-
ceptualizes as “circumoceanic memory”: “the transpacific passages that connect
the histories of once distant places through the shared experience of racialized
exploitative labor and the networked cultural processes that produce racial sub-
altern subjects” (10).
36. Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, eds., Transpacific Studies: Fram-
ing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 3.
37. Junyoung Verónica Kim, “Asia–Latin America as Method: The Global
South Project and the Dislocation of the West,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias
3, no. 2 (2017): 102.
38. Diana Sorensen, “Alternative Geographic Mappings for the Twenty-First
Century,” introduction to Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 17.
39. Laura Torres-Rodríguez, Orientaciones transpacíficas: La modernidad
mexicana y el espectro de Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2019), 17.
40. Eric Hayot, Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 18.
41. Erin Graff-Zivin, Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2020), 17.
C ha pter 1
1. Rubén Darío, “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China,” in Azul (Madrid:
Mundo Latino, 1917), 160–61; and “The Death of the Empress of China,” in
Selected Writings, ed. Ilan Stavans, trans. Andrew Hurley, Greg Simon, and Ste-
phen White (New York: Penguin, 2005), 304. Hereafter citations list the origi-
nal publication first, followed by the translated publication.
2. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 136.
3. Iván A. Schulman, El proyecto inconcluso: La vigencia del modernismo,
Lingüística y teoría literaria (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 2002).
256 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1
4. Darío, “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China,” 162; “Death of the Em-

press of China,” 305.
5. Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Ex-
port Age (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013), 44.
6. Arnold J. Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to
Latin America, 1847–1874 (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2008), 61.
7. Denise Helly, introduction to The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden
History of the Chinese in Cuba; The Original English-Language Text of 1876
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 20.
8. Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth
Century: Free Labor of Neoslavery,” Contributions in Black Studies 12, no. 5
(1994): 39.
9. Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 8.
10. Rudolph Ng, “The Chinese Commission to Cuba (1874): Reexamining
International Relations in the Nineteenth Century from a Transcultural Per-
spective,” Transcultural Studies 2 (2014): 41.
11. Jason Oliver Chang, “Toward a Hemispheric Asian American History,”
in The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, ed. David K. Yoo and
Eiichiro Azuma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 32.
12. Ignacio López-Calvo, Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Cul-
ture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 134.
13. Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 125.
14. Martí’s “Letters of New York” set the tone of the Hispanic American
genre of the crónica modernista as a stylized fusion of journalism, literature,
and philology. Aníbal González observes that “as a journalistic genre, the
crónica was obliged to convey news of current events and to be subject to the
commercial law of supply and demand; as a literary genre, it had to be original
and entertaining, but it also had to be well written, with a solid philological
awareness of the history of language.” Aníbal González, A Companion to Span-
ish American Modernismo (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 49.
15. José Martí, “El puente de Brooklyn,” in Obras completas, vol. 9 of En
los Estados Unidos: Escenas norteamericanas 1881–1883 (Havana: Editorial
de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), 9:423–24, and “The Brooklyn Bridge,” in Selected
Writings, trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002), 141.
16. Martí, “El puente de Brooklyn,” 9:424; “Brooklyn Bridge,” 141.
17. Graciela Montaldo, “Guía Rubén Darío,” in Rubén Darío, Viajes de un
cosmopolita extremo, selection and preface by Graciela Montaldo (Buenos Ai-
res: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), 13.
18. Martí, Obras completas, 9:281.
19. Tobías Schwarz, “Políticas de inmigración en América Latina: El extran-
jero indeseable en las normas nacionales, de la Independencia hasta los años de
1930,” Procesos: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia 36 (2012): 57. For a com-
prehensive review of immigration legislation by Latin American countries, see
the following titles in the bibliography: Alejandro Fernández “La ley argentina
de inmigración de 1876 y su contexto histórico,” Almanack 17 (2017): 51–
85; Ernesto Maguiña Salinas “Un acercamiento al estudio de las inmigraciones

extranjeras en el Perú durante el siglo XIX y las primeras décadas del siglo
XX,” Tierra Nuestra 8, no. 1 (2010): 65–96; Vera Valdés Lakowsky, “México
y China: Cercanía en la distancia,” Estudios de Asia y Africa 15, no. 4 (1980):
816–31; and Iván Olaya, “La selección del inmigrante “apto”: Leyes migrato-
rias de inclusión y exclusión en Colombia 1920–1937,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos
Nuevos (2018): 1–16.
20. Susana Rotker, The American Chronicles of José Martí: Journalism and
Modernity in Spanish America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New En-
gland, 2000), 174.
21. Martí, Obras completas, 9:281–82.
26. Koichi Hagimoto, Between Empires: Martí, Rizal, and the Intercolonial
Alliance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 95.
28. Martí, Obras completas, 9:298–99.
29. José Juan Tablada, “Bacanal china,” in En el país del sol (New York:
Appleton, 1919), 23.
30. Tablada, “Bacanal china,” 22.
31. José Juan Tablada, “La mujer de Tjuan-Tsé,” in En el país del sol, 111.
32. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, De Marsella a Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la
India, la China y el Japón (Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1906), 189.
33. José Juan Tablada, “El Japón en Occidente,” in En el país del sol, 95.
34. Tablada, “El Japón en Occidente,” 94.
35. The 2019 exhibition Pasajero 21: El Japón de Tablada at the Museo del
Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (July 24 to October 13) presented for the
first time part of Tablada’s collection of Japanese prints, his archive and library,
as well as his work in favor of the dissemination of Japanese art in Mexico.
36. Christopher Bush, “Unpacking the Present: The Floating World of French
Modernity,” in Pacific Rim Modernisms, ed. Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword,
and Steven Yao (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 54.
37. Rubén Darío, “Japoneses de París,” in Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo,
136.
38. Darío, “Japoneses de París,” 132.
39. Toake Endoh, Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration to Latin America
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 60.
40. Endoh, Exporting Japan, 63.
41. Torres-Rodríguez, Orientaciones transpacíficas, 59.
42. José Juan Tablada, “Divagaciones,” in En el país del sol, 96.
43. Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo: Tradición, resurgimiento y
evolución del arte mexicano (Mexico City: Departamento de Editorial de la
Secretaria de Educación, 1923), 10.
44. Denis Carr, Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (Bos-
ton: MFA Publications, 2015), 120.
45. Mariano Bonialian, “Asiáticos en Lima a principios del siglo XVII,” Bul-
letin de l’Institut français d’études andine 44, no. 2 (2015): 219.
46. Apart from Tablada and Gómez Carrillo, other modernistas who trav-
eled to Asia are the Mexican poet Efrén Rebolledo (1877–1929) and the Salva-
dorean writer and journalist Arturo Ambrogi (1874–1936). Araceli Tinajero’s
Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano provides the most compre-
hensive study of their travelogues.
47. Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires, 225.
50. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, “Shanghai: Los chinos que trabajan,” in De
Marsella a Tokio, 120.
51. Gómez Carrillo, “Shanghai: Los chinos que trabajan,” 120.
52. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, “En Singapur, el paraíso de los chinos,” in De
Marsella a Tokio, 93, 102.
53. Gómez Carrillo, “En Singapur, el paraíso de los chinos,” 93.
55. Jason Chang studies the eminently Spanish infrastructure that enabled
the figure of Chinese compradores (specialized commercial middlemen) at
transpacific trading ports. For Chang, these intermediaries “provide a histori-
cal framework to understand the succession of imperial states, overlapping ra-
cializations, and maintenance of a territorial assemblage bridging Asia and the
Americas.” See Jason Oliver Chang, “Four Centuries of Imperial Succession in
the Comprador Pacific,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 2 (2017): 193–227.
58. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural
Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997).
59. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, “Paisajes y emociones,” in De Marsella a Tokio,
20.
60. Gómez Carrillo, “Paisajes y emociones,” 21.
63. Harris Feinsod, “Canal Zone Modernism: Cendrars, Walrond, and Ste-
vens at the ‘Suction Sea,’” English Language Notes 57, no. 1 (2019): 117.
64. Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the
Coolie Era through World War Two (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2014), 30.
65. Lisa Yun, “Under the Hatches: American Coolie Ships and Nineteenth-
Century Narratives of the Pacific Passage,” Amerasia Journal 28, no. 2 (2002):
39.
66. Edgar Holden, “A Chapter on the Coolie Trade,” Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine 29, no. 169 (1864): 6.
67. The story of Holden’s article in Harper’s is fascinating. Almost every
scholarly work on the coolie trade, including my own, cites it and reprints its
dramatic engravings as the primal source of a first-hand narrative of the coolie
passage. Yet it is unclear why Holden was onboard the Norway and whether he
was there as crew or as passenger. More curious is the fact that it took him five
years to publish such a vehement attack on the atrocities he apparently witnessed
at sea. A biography of Edgar Holden (who apparently was a notable physician
during the American Civil War) eagerly argues against his presence in the ship,
demonstrating that during the two years of the voyage of the Norway, he was
enrolled at Princeton University (Sandra W. Moss, Edgar Holden, M.D. of New-
ark, 2014). The biography argues that, as a writer and an abolitionist, Holden
most likely transcribed the story from his brother Henri, who was involved in
mercantile affairs. Historians and biographers might dispute Holden’s seaborne
experience as a reliable record in their reconstruction of the coolie trade. But
in my interest to unveil “the coolie passage archive,” I embrace blurred forms
of authorship between actual seamen and desktop writers, something I find at
the heart of maritime literature in general. Joseph Conrad’s, Herman Melville’s,
or Edgar Allan Poe’s sea fictions are largely indebted to memories of navigation
overheard in the seafaring circles they frequented.
68. Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie
in Peru, 1849–1874 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1951), 75.
69. South Pacific Times, May 24, 1873. Quoted in Stewart, Chinese Bond-
age, 80.
70. The Chinese Educational Mission (1872–81) was a pioneering exper-
iment of study abroad. Designed by the reform-minded Yung Wing, the first
Chinese to graduate from a US university, it was an Qing government official
program that sent young Chinese students to the United States to train in West-
ern science and engineering. The boys arrived in several detachments, lived with
US families in Hartford, Connecticut, and other New England towns; and after
graduating high school, went on to college, especially at Yale. The mission came
to an end in 1881 because of the escalating hostility toward Chinese in the US
and the Qing government’s hesitant attitude about the future of the program.
71. Steffen Rimner, “Chinese Abolitionism: The Chinese Educational Mis-
sion in Connecticut, Cuba, and Peru,” Journal of Global History 11 (2016):
358.
72. Helly, Cuba Commission Report, 46.
73. I thank Rudolph Ng for this reference. Ng is currently working on a
monograph about the extant Peru report.
74. Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt,
1909), 193.
75. Siu Kam Wen, “En alta mar,” in El tramo final (Lima: Lluvia Editores,
1985), 90.
76. Wen, “En alta mar,” 91.
77. Lee, Mandarin Brazil.
78. Juan de Arona, La inmigración en el Perú: Monografía histórico-crítica
(Lima: Imprenta del Universo, de Carlos Prince, 1890), 60.
79. Aurelio García y García, “Informe que contiene importantes detalles
sobre la conducta con los emigrantes chinos y otros datos relativos a esta in-
migración,” “Documentos-Memoria del Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores al
Congreso de 1874,” in Documentos Parlamentarios (Lima: Archivo del Con-
greso de la República del Perú, 1874), 198.
80. Arona, La inmigración en el Perú, 64.

81. Henrique Carlos Ribeiro Lisboa, A China e os chins: Recordações de
viagem (Montevideo: Typographia a Vapor de A. Godel, 1888).
82. Henrique Carlos Ribeiro Lisboa, Os chins dos Tetartos (Rio de Janeiro:
Empreza Democratica Editora, 1894), 70.
83. There is a partial English translation of this book; see Glenn Thomas
Curry, “Nicolás Tanco Armero: A Mid-Century New Granadan’s View of
China,” MA thesis, Vanderbilt Univeristy, 1972.
84. Nicolás Tanco Armero, Viaje de la Nueva Granada a China y de China a
Francia (Paris: Imprenta de Simón Racon y Compañía, 1861), xxv.
85. Tanco Armero, Viaje de la Nueva Granada a China, 425 and 494.
86. Tanco Armero, Viaje de la Nueva Granada a China, 425.
90. Frédéric Martínez, “Los relatos de viaje a Oriente en el debate político
colombiano (1847–1875),” Historia y Sociedad 3 (1996): 104.
C ha pter 2
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xv.
2. Jorge Luis Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” in Obras com-
pletas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 708; and “The Analytical Language of John
Wilkins,” in Selected Non-Fictions, trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Pen-
guin, 1999), 231.
3. Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” 708; “The Analytical Lan-
guage of John Wilkins,” 231.
4. Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge (London: Verso,
1993), 23.
5. Foucault, Order of Things, xix.
6. Borges, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” 708; “The Analytical Lan-
guage of John Wilkins,” 231.
7. Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges, 7.
8. Borges, “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” in Obras completas, 473;
and “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Labyrinths; Selected Stories and Other
Writings, trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions,
1964), 21.
9. Sylvia Molloy, Signs of Borges (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1994), 35.
10. Molloy, Signs of Borges, 35.
11. Molloy, Signs of Borges, 35.
12. D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins
of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), 16. In his oblique
mimetic style Borges avoids any explicit connection between Wilkins’s scheme
of a universal language and his contemporaries’ fascination with Chinese lan-
guage as a model for a lingua franca in “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins.”
13. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 123.
14. It is worth mentioning that with the establishment of semicolonial treaty
ports along the coast after the Opium Wars cultural exchanges with China grad-
ually provided novel evidence for scholarship. As books and travelers’ reports
flowed into Europe in ever-increasing volumes, descriptions of the Chinese
empire in operation, its rebellions and repeated capitulations to the Western
powers, multiplied. Biased and imperfect as many of these were, they served
on many points to contradict or undermine the self-image, which the sinologue
imbibed through his classical texts. Arthur F. Wright, “The Study of Chinese
Civilization,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21, no. 2 (1960): 243.
15. Borges, “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” 476; “The Garden of
Forking Paths,” 24.
16. Daniel Balderston, Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Rep-
resentation of Reality in Borges (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993),
43.
18. Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2015), 62.
20. Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia, trans. Sylvia Beach (New York:
New Directions, 1986), 156.
21. Christopher Bush, “Modernism, Orientalism, and East Asia,” in A Hand-
book of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabate (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley,
2013), 193.
22. Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares “La prolongada búsqueda de
Tai An,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas en colaboración (Buenos Aires:
Emecé Editores, 1979), 106; and “Tai An’s Long Search,” in Six Problems for
Don Isidro Parodi, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Dutton,
1981), 138.
23. Borges and Bioy, “Tai An’s Long Search,” 10.
24. John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic
Detective Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 427.
Forking Paths,” 26. My emphasis.
26. Borges anticipates the connection between sinology and chinoiserie in
“El jardín de senderos que se bifucran” by situating Stephen Albert in the town
of Fenton, in Staffordshire, an English county that became a center of ceramic
production in the early seventeenth century. Like Parodi, Albert can also be
described as “a sinologist; a European surrounded by the tinkle of teacups.”
Borges and Bioy Casares, “Tai An’s Long Search,” 138.
27. Porter, Ideographia, 136.
28. Borges and Bioy, “La prolongada búsqueda de Tai An,” 106; “Tai An’s
Long Search,” 137
Long Search,” 139.
Long Search,” 134.
31. All the stories from this collection are dedicated to grand historical fig-
ures such as the prophet Muhammad or Alexander Pope.
32. Jorge Luis Borges, “Ernest Bramah,” in Textos cautivos: Ensayos y rese-
ñas en El Hogar, ed. Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Enrique Sacerio-Garí (Bar-
celona: Tusquets, 1986), 206; and “Ernest Bramah,” in Selected Non-Fictions,
165.
33. Gonzalo Aguilar, “Historia local de la infamia (sobre ‘Seis problemas
para don Isidro Parodi de H. Bustos Domecq’),” Variaciones Borges 27 (2009):
36.
35. Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” in Obras completas, 273;
and “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” in Selected Non-Fictions, 185.
37. Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” 272; and “The Argentine
Writer and Tradition,” 184.
38. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 34.
39. John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and Its Role in
the Development of a Culture, 1931–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 1.
40. The “Four Great Classical Novels” are the four novels commonly re-
garded by scholars to be the greatest and most influential of premodern Chinese
fiction. Dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties, they are well known to most
Chinese readers. These are Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the
West, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chamber.
41. Bergel, El Oriente desplazado, 341.
42. Carles Prado-Fonts observes that Marcela de Juan’s translations were
often equally indirect, mostly based on French translations. Prado-Fonts, Sec-
ondhand China, 230.
43. Alejandro Dujovne explores this idea in reference to the history of the
Jewish book in Argentina. Dujovne reconstructs libraries, personal archives,
and publications in Yiddish to conclude that the transnational links of the Jew-
ish community were so determinant in the formulation of ideas about the mean-
ing of “the Jewish” to the extent that the Yiddish book in Argentina followed
a completely parallel course to the history of foreign publications in the same
place. Alejandro Dujovne, Una historia del libro judío en la Argentina: La cul-
tura judía a través de sus editores, libreros, traductores, imprentas y bibliotecas
(Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2014).
44. Herbert Allen Giles, Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer
(London: B. Quaritch, 1889).
45. In 1956 Borges started working on a monograph on Buddhism, which
he would publish with Alicia Jurado in 1976 as Qué es el budismo. Other key
titles on Chinese philosophy and history at the National Library’s collection
are Fung Yu-lan The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy (1947); Richard Wilhelm,
Chinese Lebensweisheit (1950) and Lao-Tse und der Taoismus (1948); Wolf-
ram Eberhard, Chinas Geschichte (1948); and several titles by Laozi. See Laura
Rosato and Germán Álvarez, Borges, libros y lecturas: Catálogo de la colección

Jorge Luis Borges en la Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Biblioteca
Nacional, 2010), 23.
46. Jorge Luis Borges, “Palabrería para versos,” in El tamaño de mi esper-
anza (Buenos Aires: Proa, 1926), 23.
47. This book was later translated from the neocriollo into Spanish. See Xul
Solar, Relato de los mundos superiores, trans. Maria Cecilia G. Bendinger (Bue-
nos Aires: Fondo Nacional De Las Artes, 2011).
48. In April 2013 Daniel Balderston told me an anecdote that José Bianco
had told him many years ago. Before Bianco joined Sur as chief editor in 1938,
he had contributed to El Hogar for a few months in the section “Books and
Authors in Spanish Language.” He recalled that El Hogar received monthly dis-
patches of books that came directly from publishing houses. These were mostly
the leftovers of the stock, a motley collection of recent themes and genres clut-
tered randomly in wooden boxes. Bianco said he systematically ignored them
because of his office’s space restrictions, but conversely, Borges would go over
them carefully and thoughtfully.
49. Jorge Luis Borges, “Sobre una alegoría china,” in Textos recobrados (Bue-
nos Aires: Emecé, 1997), 203; and “Arthur Waley: Monkey,” in Selected Non-
Fictions, 254.
50. José Luis de Diego, Editores y políticas editoriales en Argentina, 1880–
2000 (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).
51. Rosato and Álvarez, Borges, libros y lecturas, 27.
52. Rosato and Álvarez, Borges, libros y lecturas, 29.
53. Jorge Luis Borges, “Clement Egerton: The Golden Lotus, Routledge,” in
Jorge Luis Borges en Sur, 1931–1980 (Barcelona: Emecé Editores, 1999), 211.
54. Sylvia Molloy, “Borges y la distancia literaria,” Sur 138 (1969): 29.
55. Jorge Luis Borges, “Chinese Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, traducidos por
Wolfram Wberhard,” in Textos cautivos, 204.
56. Borges, “Sobre una alegoría china,” 201.
57. Jorge Luis Borges, “Las versiones homéricas,” in Obras completes, 239;
and “The Homeric Versions,” in Selected Non-Fictions, 69.
58. Jorge Luis Borges, “Las dos maneras de traducir,” in Textos recobrados,
258.
59. Jorge Luis Borges, “Una versión de los cantares más antiguos del mundo,”
in Textos cautivos, 279; “An English versión of the Oldest Songs in the World,”
in Selected Non-Fictions, 190. My emphasis.
60. Giles, Chuang Tzŭ, xvii.
61. Sergio Pastormerlo, Borges crítico (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Eco-
nómica, 2007), 23.
62. Haiqing Sun, “Hong Lou Meng in Jorge Luis Borges’s Narrative,” Varia-
ciones Borges 22 (2006): 17.
63. Jorge Luis Borges, “El sueño del aposento rojo, de Tsao Hsue Kin,” in
Textos cautivos, 102.
64. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay
on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 81.
65. Borges, “Clement Egerton,” 211.
66. Annick Louis, Borges ante el fascismo (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 140.
67. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism,” Social Text 1, no. 5 (1986): 69.
68. Borges, “Clement Egerton,” 211.
69. Borges, “El sueño del aposento rojo,” 103.
71. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Borges, una teoría de la literatura fantástica,”
Revista Iberoamericana 95 (1976): 179.
73. Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,” xiii.
74. Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition,” xi.
75. Fernando Degiovanni and Guillermo Toscano y García, “‘Las alarmas
del Doctor Américo Castro’: Institucionalización filológica y autoridad discipli-
naria,” Variaciones Borges 30 (2010): 11.
76. Jorge Luis Borges, “Las alarmas del doctor Américo Castro,” in Obras
completas; and “The Alarms of Doctor Américo Castro,” in Other Inquisitions,
1937–1952 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964).
77. Borges, “Las alarmas del doctor Américo Castro,” 654; and “The Alarms
of Doctor Américo Castro,” 27.
C ha pter 3
1. In the sources from the 1950s Xiao San is transcribed “Emi Siao.”
2. Evar Méndez, “Examen de consciencia chino,” Revista Cultura China 2
(1954–55): 38.
3. Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Uni-
verse, 1945–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 3.
4. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New
York: Public Affairs, 2004), 24.
5. Gisele Sapiro, “How Do Literary Works Cross Borders (or Not)? A Socio-
logical Approach to World Literature,” Journal of World Literature 1 (2016): 82.
6. James Peck, “The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of Ameri-
ca’s China Watchers,” in America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American
Relations, ed. Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (New York: Pantheon Books,
1971), 45.
7. Ho-Fu Hung, “Orientalism and Area Studies: The Case of Sinology,” in
Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science Versus the Humanities in the Modern
World-System, ed. Richard E. Lee, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Aytar Volkan
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 97.
8. This debate can be illustrated in the polemic between the Belgian sinol-
ogist Simon Leys (1935–2014) and the intellectuals from the Tel Quel group,
who, according to Leys, were wickedly mesmerized by the utopian vision of
the Cultural Revolution: “comment expliquer que tant d’éminents esprits se
soient laissé abuser, manipuler quand d’autres, idéologues professionnels, ado-
raient Mao comme ils avaient adoré Staline?” (How come so many eminent
spirits have let themselves be abused and manipulated when others, professional
ideologues, adored Mao just like they had adored Stalin?). Pierre Boncenne, Le
parapluie de Simon Leys (Paris: Éditions Philippe Rey, 2015), 24.
9. Herzovich, La desigualdad como tarea, ii.
10. Los diarios de Emilio Renzi: Los años felices (Barcelona: Anagrama,
2016); and Los diarios de Emilio Renzi: Un día en la vida (Barcelona: Ana-
grama, 2017).
11. Victor Alba, “The Chinese in Latin America,” China Quarterly 5 (1961):
56.
12. I have analyzed these trips in “Intellectual Cartographies of the Cold War:
Argentine Visitors to the People’s Republic of China, 1952–1958,” in Handbook
of Literature and Space, ed. Robert Tally (London: Routledge, 2016), 337–48.
13. Long-term visitors were known, according to Anne-Marie Brady, as
“foreign experts, waiguo zhuanjia or, more generally, foreign friends, waiguo
pengyou. In addition to their technical assistance, they had an important sym-
bolic role, one of which they were very conscious. They were nominated as a
mark of their special status differentiating them from diplomats and other for-
eigners in China. . . . The China-based friends worked as scientists, military ad-
visers, propagandists, translators, teachers, medical personnel, researchers, and
technicians. In the 1950s they were mostly from the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, and after 1960 their makeup was more diverse. Despite the economic
and political changes of the post-Cultural Revolution era, foreign experts work-
ing in China continue to have a symbolic role.” Anne-Marie Brady, Making
the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners the People’s Republic (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 19.
14. For a comprehensive study of Brazilian visitors to the PRC, see Siwei
Wang, “Transcontinental Revolutionary Imagination: Literary Translation be-
tween China and Brazil (1952–1964),” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Lit-
erary Inquiry 6, no. 1 (2019): 70–98.
15. The Guoji Shudian opened strategic branches worldwide and supplied
printed culture for free. The Venezuelan architect Victor Ochoa-Piccardo ex-
plains that thanks to the subsidies of the Chinese government, his father’s
bookstore in Caracas, El Viento del Este, was a facade of a business meant to
spread the Maoist creed. With the opening of China in the late 1970s, the Guoji
Shudian started operating as a regular commercial firm, which forced Ochoa-
Piccardo’s father to file bankruptcy: “He was devastated” (interview with Victor
Ochoa-Piccardo, June 2017). Local distributors were instrumental in furthering
this effort. According to William Ratliff, the Communist publisher Ediciones
Pueblos Unidos from Uruguay listed over 125 books dealing with China in
1957.
16. William E. Ratliff, “Chinese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward
Latin America, 1949–1960,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 1
(1969): 70.
17. Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 45.
18. Darlene Sadlier. Americans All: The Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy
during World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 147.
19. Yiwei Wang, “Public Diplomacy and the Rise of Chinese Soft Power,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008): 259.
20. Jorge Joaquín Locane and María Montt Strabucchi, “Cultura china y
Capricornio: Dos proyectos pioneros para el comercio simbólico (y material)
entre América Latina y China,” Revista Izquierdas 49 (2020): 2522.
21. “Estimado camarada,” unpublished letter, c. 1956, Alberto Giudici War-
schaver Archive, Buenos Aires.
22. Fina Warschaver, “Amistad y cultura,” Revista Cultura China 1 (1954): 3.
23. Fina Warschaver, Revista Cultura China 2 (1955).
24. Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Prob-
lems, and Debates in Post-War Argentina (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2022), 6.
25. Elías Castelnuovo to Fina Warschaver, 1949, Alberto Giudici Warschaver
Archive, Buenos Aires. Bracketed ellipses in the original.
26. Fina Warschaver to Gerónimo Arnedo, 1956, Alberto Giudici War-
schaver Archive, Buenos Aires.
27. Rosemary Roberts and Li Li identify the Red Classics as the following
novels: Wu Qiang, Red Sun; Yang Yiyan and Luo Guangbin, Red Crag; Li-
ang Bin, Genealogy of the Red Flag; Liu Qing, The Builders; Yang Mo, Song
of Youth; Zhou Libo, Great Changes in a Mountain Village; Du Pengcheng,
Protect Yan’an; Qu Bo, Tracks in the Snowy Forest; along a less fixed set of
secondary works that included narratives such as Zhi Xia, Railroad Guerillas,
and Zhou Erfu, Morning in Shanghai. Rosemary Roberts and Li Li, The Making
and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics”: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture
(Hong Kong; Hong Kong University Press, 2017).
28. Liu Kang, “Maoism: Revolutionary Globalism for the Third World Re-
visited,” Comparative Literature Studies 52, no. 1 (2015): 18.
29. Nicolai Volland, “Inventing a Proletarian Fiction for China: The Sta-
lin Prize, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Creation of a Pan-Socialist Identity,” in
Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia, ed. T. Vu and W. Wongsurawat (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 94.
30. Adrián Celentano, “El maoísmo argentino entre 1963 y 1976: Libros,
revistas y periódicos para una práctica política,” Políticas de la Memoria 14
(2013/14): 151–65.
31. Amelia Aguado, “1956–1975: La consolidación del mercado interno,” in
Editores y políticas editoriales en Argentina, 1880–2000, ed. José Luis de Diego
(Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014), 129.
32. Gustavo Sorá, “El libro y la edición en Argentina: Libros para todos y
modelo hispanoamericano,” Políticas de la Memoria 10/11/12 (2009/11): 138.
33. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1
(2000): 65.
34. Cheng Sheng, Mi madre, trans. Ernesto Ibarra, prologue by Paul Valery
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Cauce, 1942).
35. Cheng Sheng, Mi madre y yo a través de la revolución China, trans. Er-
nesto Ibarra (Buenos Aires: Editorial Cauce, 1942).
36. David Der-wei Wang, introduction to The Rice Sprout Song by Eileen
Chang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), vii.
37. David Der-wei Wang, “Three Hungry Women,” in Modern Chinese Lit-
erary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, ed. Rey
Chow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 60.
38. Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 2.
39. Eileen Chang, La canción de arroz, trans. Alfredo Weiss (Buenos Aires:
Goyanarte, 1956), inside flap.
40. Álvaro Yunque, “Liminar,” in Poetas chinos vertidos del francés, trans.
Álvaro Yunque (Buenos Aires: Quetzal, 1958), 8.
41. Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, “Prólogo,” in Poesía china, trans.
Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León (Buenos Aires: Compañía General Fabril
Editora, 1960), 7.
42. Spivacow argued that books were a basic need, which should cost
cheaper than a kilo of bread; see Judith Gociol, Más libros para más: Coleccio-
nes del Centro Editor de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional,
200), 12.
43. Karl-Heinz Pohl, “Mao Zedong’s Poetry: Form as Statement,” in Tyrants
Writing Poetry: The Art of Language and Violence, ed. Konstantin Kaminskij
and Albrecht Koschorke (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017),
173.
44. Sarandy Cabrera, “Nota preliminar,” in Los 37 poemas de Mao Tsetung,
trans. J. E. Adoum (Buenos Aires: Schapire, 1974), 21.
45. Mao Tun, “Nuevas realidades y nuevas tareas de los escritores chinos,”
Cuadernos de Cultura 16 (1954): 8.
46. Fina Warschaver, “Confrontaciones literarias para el conocimiento de
China,” Cuadernos de Cultura 43 (1959): 71.
47. Lu Xun, Diario de un loco (Buenos Aires: Lautaro, 1956), front flap.
48. Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman was translated in Buenos Aires from the
English by Julio Galer (translator too of Langston Hughes and Arthur Miller)
from a 1954 Beijing Foreign Languages Press English edition. Fina Warschaver
wrote the preface to the first edition and included the first chapter of La ver-
dadera historia de AQ, translated by Estela Canto, in the first volume of Cultura
China. The 1970 CEAL edition of La verdadera historia de AQ is a reprint of a
1962 edition from the Beijing Foreign Languages Press.
49. Richard King, Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–
76 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 6.
50. Bernardo Kordon, 600 millones y uno (Buenos Aires: Leviatán, 1958),
China o la revolución para siempre (Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez, 1969), Re-
portaje a China: Una visión personal del país que conmueve al mundo (Buenos
Aires: Treinta Días,1964), Testigos de China (Buenos Aires: Carlos Pérez Editor,
1968), and Viaje nada secreto al país de los misterios: China extraña y clara
(Buenos Aires: Buschi, 1985).
51. Bernardo Kordon, “Estudio preliminar,” in El cuento chino: Li Fu-yen,
Chen Ki-tsi y otros (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1981), viii.
52. Bernardo Kordon, “Diez milenios de escritura china,” in Así escriben
los chinos: Desde la tradición oral hasta nuestros días (Buenos Aires: Ediciones
Orion, 1976), 13.
53. Juan José Sebreli, El tiempo de una vida (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana
2005), 234.
54. Up until the 1960s, trips to China were combined with tours of the
USSR, so most visitors entered the country through northern border points in
Mongolia after stopping in several cities in Western and Eastern Europe. With
the Sino-Soviet split, the routes were diverted to Southeast Asia and had Hong
Kong as the principal entry port to mainland China. The only Western airline
that operated flights to China since 1966 was Air France. Central Intelligence
Agency, Intelligence Memorandum: Communist International Civil Air Activi-
ties in the Free World since 1965 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency,
1968).
55. Interview with Jorge Lafforgue (Buenos Aires, September 15, 2015). I
find Mariano López Seoane’s metaphor of “excess baggage” remarkably apt to
express the crucial role of the informal importer of cultural goods in forging
a relation of cultural dependency that is by no means a subaltern one but is,
because of its displacements and slips, the source of South American originality.
Mariano López Seoane, “Exceso de equipaje: La cultura argentina y el encanto
de lo importado” (Excess baggage: Argentine culture and the charm of imports)
(PhD diss., New York University, 2010).
56. Jorge Lafforgue, “Kordon: Crónica de una amistad,” in Hipótesis y Dis-
cusiones 31 (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2016),
23.
57. Gustavo Sorá, Traducir el Brasil: Una antropología de la circulación in-
ternacional de las ideas (Buenos Aires: Libros del Zorzal, 2003).
58. Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanaly-
sis and Religion in Times of Terror (New York: Verso, 2012), 215.
59. Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America, 216.
60. “y por lo otro, parece que no saldrá el diario de la China, Ricardo no
lo quería publicar porque no llegó a revisarlo” (email message to author from
Edgardo Dieleke, Piglia’s friend and assistant, September 3, 2017).
61. Ricardo Piglia, “Un día perfecto,” Revista Ñ, April 27, 2012, 5.
62. Sylvia Saitta, Hacia la revolución: Viajeros argentinos de izquierda (Bue-
nos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007).
63. Piglia, “Un día perfecto,” 5.
64. Piglia, “Un día perfecto,” 5.
65. Piglia, “Un día perfecto,” 5
66. Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America, 199.
67. See Yu Lou, “El día que Piglia llegó a los lectores chinos,” Anfibia, Janu-
ary 9, 2017, http://www.revistaanfibia.com/ensayo/dia-piglia-llego-los-lectores-
chinos/
68. Piglia, “Un día perfecto,” 5
C ha pter 4
1. The phrase was coined by the radio journalist Luis Elias Sojit on Octo-
ber 17, 1945, the day when trade unions and workers gathered in a massive
demonstration at Plaza de Mayo to demand the liberation of Perón. Legend has
it that it was a shiny spring day, and Sojit exclaimed, “hoy es un día peronista!”
signaling to the combination of brightness, optimism, and the working class
(Juan Sasturain, “Sojit el meteorólogo,” Página 12, March 17, 2004). This calls
for a longer discussion on the omnipresence of Peronist lingo in Argentine cul-
ture, where to this day even a staunch anti-Peronist will use the expression “día
peronista” to refer to a sunny day.
2. The red characters ( ri ming guang: day/sun, bright, light) are a
slightly modified version of the three last characters of the first line of Li Bai’s
poem: ( ming yue guang: bright, moon, light). In a nod to the yin and
yang, Santoro changes moon/night for sun/day.
3. Daniel Santoro, Manual del niño peronista (Buenos Aires: La Marca Ed-
itora, 2003).
4. Judith Gaultier, Le livre de jade (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre Editeur, 1867);
and Franz Toussaint, La flûte de jade: Poésies chinoises (Paris: L’Édition d’Art
Henri Piazza, 1920).
5. Pauline Yu, “Your Alabaster in this Porcelain: Judith Gautier’s ‘Le livre de
jade,’” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 465.
6. “Me deleitan la seda, el oro, el raso. / Gautier adoraba a las princesas
chinas.” Rubén Darío, “Divagación”, in Prosas Profanas, Obras Completas, vol.
2 (Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1917–20), 29; “I am delighted by silk, gold, satin.
/ Gautier adored Chinese princesses” Rubén Darío, “Digression,” Stories and
Poems—Cuentos y poesías. A Dual-Language Book, trans. Stanley Appelbaum
(Mineola NY: Dover Publications, 2002), 97.
7. Joaquim F. Machado de Assis, Falenas (Rio de Janeiro: B.-L. Garnier,
1870).
8. Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires, 191–92.
9. Paz, “Further Comments,” 47.
10. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays,
1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 7.
11. Haroldo de Campos, “Translation as Creation and Criticism,” in Novas:
Selected Writings by Haroldo de Campos, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile
Cisneros (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 316–17.
12. Paz, “Further Comments,” 49.
13. Borges, “Arthur Waley: Monkey,” 252.
14. Among their translations are Miguel Ángel Petrecca, Un país mental. 100
poemas chinos contemporáneos (Buenos Aires: Gog y Magog, 2010; Santiago
de Chile: LOM, 2013); Un país mental. 150 poemas chinos contemporáneos
(Buenos Aires: Gog y Magog, 2023); Fernando Pérez Villalón. Escrito en el aire:
Tres poetas clásicos chinos (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Tácitas, 2003); Guill-
ermo Dañino, Manantial de vino (poemas escogidos) (Lima: Fondo Editorial,
1998; Madrid: Ediciones Hiperión, 2016); La montaña vacía (poemas de Wang
Wei) (Lima: Fondo Editorial, 2004; Madrid, Ediciones Hiperión, 2004); Bosque
de pinceles (poemas de Tu Fu) (Lima: Fondo Editorial, 2002: Madrid, Ediciones
Hiperión, 2006). About Latin American translations of Asian poetry in general,
see Álvaro Fernández Bravo “Traducción, tráfico y transcripción: Huellas de la
lírica asiática en la poesía latinoamericana,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latino-
americana 87, no. 1 (2018): 39–66.
15. See Miguel Ángel Petrecca, “Algunas cuestiones en torno a las traduc-
ciones chinas de Juan Laurentino Ortiz,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral
Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 9, no. 3 (2020): 74–97; and
Haroldo de Campos, “A retórica seca de um poeta fluvial,” Folha de São Paulo,
September 14, 1997.
16. Let us briefly illustrate a Spanish-language translator’s dependency on
the mediating language in the case of classical Chinese poetry. Following Wein-
berger’s exercise in Nineteen Ways, let us compare the Argentine poet Raúl A.
Ruy’s two versions of Wang Wei’s “Deer Park.” The first one, “En el parque de
los ciervos” from 1961, is an almost literal translation Soame Jenyns’s “The
Deer Park,” in A Further Selection from the Three Hundred Poems of the T‘ang
Dynasty (London: John Murray, 1944), 74. Ruy mimics the English syntax,
choice of pronouns, and the uncanny botanical image of “blue lichens” to refer
to what almost all translators render as “green moss/grass:”
Una colina vacía y nadie a la vista;

Solamente oigo el eco de las voces.
El oblicuo sol del atardecer
penetra en los tupidos bosques
Y brilla reflejado en los azules líquenes
(trans. Raúl A. Ruy, 1961)
An empty hill, and no one in sight

But I hear the echo of voices.
The slanting sun at evening penetrates the deep woods
And shines reflected on the blue lichens.
(trans. Soame Jenyns, 1944)
In a 1977 edition of the same anthology, Ruy uses an older English-language

model. Judging by the references he cites in the foreword it is probably Witter
Bynner’s “Deer-Park Hermitage” (The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology
Being Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty, 618–906 [New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1929], 189) that now operates as the mediating text. This can be de-
tected not so much in the lexicon or syntax of Ruy’s version, but rather in the
deliberate subjective imprint over the grammatically impersonal text (I think,
I hear, shines back to me, translates Bynner). Ruy’s lines in this subsequent
edition are fairly similar to his 1961 version, but the poem is now entitled “De-
solación” (Desolation), conveying not only the ontological state of emptiness of
the silent mountain but also the phenomenological anguish of the lyrical voice
in front of a sublime landscape:
Una colina desierta

y nadie a la vista;
Sólo el eco de unas voces
llega a mis oídos.
El oblicuo sol del atardecer
penetra en los espesos bosques
Y se refleja en los verdes musgos.

(trans. Raúl A. Ruy, 1977)
There seems to be no one on the empty mountain . . .

And yet I think I hear a voice,
Where sunlight, entering a grove,
Shines back to me from the green moss.
(trans. W. Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu, 1929).
Whereas the comparison of the two versions traces a sharp genealogy of indi-
rect translation, it still offers little insight into the profuse poetic possibilities of
Chinese verse, à la Pound.
17. Hilario Fernández Long renders these four layers in the Argentine poetry
periodical Diario de poesía. A structural engineer, polyglot, and the founder of
the Go Argentine Federation, Fernández Long’s amateur translations of classical
Chinese convey his scholarly pedagogy as well as his fascination with Chinese
grammar. Hilario Fernández Long, “Lengua y poesía china: Poesía de la Dinas-
tía Tang,” Diario de Poesía 39 (1996): 32–33.
18. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 76.
19. Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19.
20. Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 3
21. Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 3.
22. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 5.
23. Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 1.
24. Bruno, Surface, 3.
25. Roland Barthes, “Variations sur l’écriture,” in Oeuvres complètes IV:
1972–1976, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 93–94.
26. Campos, “Translation as Creation and Criticism,” 315.
27. Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 74.
28. I follow Shu-mei Shih’s transregional concept of the Sinophone (Shih,
“Concept of the Sinophone”) to refer to the Sinitic script as well as well as other
writing systems within the borders of China (e.g., Tibetan) and languages that
borrowed elements from its writing system (e.g., Japanese uses a combination
of logographic kanjis, which are adopted Chinese characters, and the syllabic
katakana and hiragana scripts).
29. “Nuestros sabios solamente han estudiado bien las escrituras antiguas:
la ciencia de la escritura nunca ha recibido otro nombre que el de paleografía,
descripción finita, minuciosa, de los jeroglíficos, de las letras griegas y latinas,
instinto de los arqueólogos para descifrar antiguas escrituras desconocidas;
pero, acerca de nuestra escritura moderna, nada: la paleografía se detiene en el
siglo xvi, y, sin embargo, ¿cómo no pensar que de una “neografía” que no existe
saldría toda una sociología histórica, toda una imagen de las relaciones que el
hombre clásico mantenía con su cuerpo, sus leyes, sus orígenes?” (Our sages
have studied ancient writings only. The science of writing has never received
any other name than paleography, a finite, meticulous description of hiero-
glyphs, Greek and Latin signs, by the instinct of archaeologists to decipher
ancient writings. Yet, there is nothing about our modern writing: paleography
stops in the sixteenth century. To what extent such non-existent “neography?”
could produce an entire historical sociology depicting the total set of relation-
ships that the classical human maintained with their body, their laws, their
origins?). Roland Barthes, Variaciones sobre la escritura (Barcelona: Paidós,
2002), 93–94.
30. Rodolfo Mata, “José Juan Tablada: La escritura iluminada por la im-
agen,” in José Juan Tablada: Vida, letra e imagen, Instituto de Investigaciones
Filológicas, Coordinación de Publicaciones Digitales DGSCA Universidad Na-
cional Autónoma de México, 2003, www.tablada.unam.mx.
31. Tablada, “Divagaciones,” 128.
32. José Juan Tablada, Un día: Poemas sintéticos (Caracas: Imprenta Bolívar,
1919), El jarro de flores (New York: Escritores Sindicados, 1922), and Li-Po y
otros poemas (Caracas: Imprenta Bolívar, 1920).
33. Ramón López Velarde, Poesías, cartas, documentos e iconografía, ed.
Elena Molina Ortega (Mexico: Imprenta Universitaria, 1952), 77.
34. Pauline Yu, “Alienation Effects: Comparative Literature and the Chinese
Tradition,” in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to The-
ory and Practice, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1988), 163.
35. Kathlyn Liscomb, “Li Bai Drinks with the Moon: The Cultural Afterlife
of a Poetic Conceit and Related Lore,” Artibus Asiae 70, no. 2 (2010): 331.
36. See Adriana García de Aldridge, “Las fuentes chinas de José Juan Tab-
lada,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 60, no. 2 (1983): 109–19; and Esther Hernán-
dez Palacios, “Antes de Tablada: Li-Po,” Biblioteca de México 6–7 (1991/92):
34–38.
37. Michele M. Pascucci, “José Juan Tablada y el ideograma kotobuki: Sus
fuentes y su uso en ‘Li-Po,’” Hispanic Review 82, no. 1 (2014): 44.
38. Susan Kotz, ed., Imperial Taste: Chinese Ceramics from the Percival Da-
vid Foundation (Los Angeles: Chronicle Books and Los Angeles County Mu-
seum of Art, 1989), 45.
39. José Juan Tablada, Li-Po y otros poemas (Caracas: Imprenta Bolívar,
1920), 7; and José Juan Tablada, The Experimental Poetry of José Juan Tablada:
A Collection in Spanish and English, trans. A. Scott Britton (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2016), 97.
40. José Juan Tablada, Al sol y bajo la luna (Paris: Librería de la Vda. de Ch.
Bouret, 1918), and Hiroshigué: El pintor de la nieve y de la luvia, de la noche y
de la luna (Mexico City: Monografías Japonesas, 1914).
41. Salvador Elizondo, “José Juan Tablada,” in Escritos Mexicanos (Mexico
City: ISSSTE, 2000), 57–58.
42. Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name:
Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology since the Fifteenth Cen-
tury,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152, no. 1 (2008): 40.
43. José Juan Tablada, “Del corazón de China al riñón del cabaret,” Excél-
sior 5, no. 2 (1478), April 3, 1921, 21.
44. Tablada, “Del corazón de China,” 21.
45. Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chi-
nese Books and Inscriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 143.
46. Edward L. Shaughnessy, Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered
Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts (New York: Columbia
47. José Juan Tablada, “La gloria del bambú,” in En el país del sol, 62.
48. Haun Saussy, “Impressions de Chine; or, How to Translate from a Non-
existent Original,” in Hayot, Saussy, and Yao, Sinographies, 64–85.
49. Saussy, “Impressions de Chine,” 72.
50. The fact that jianzhi (papercuts) illustrate the cover of the two volumes
of the Argentine magazine Cultura China, discussed in chapter 3 (see fig. 3),
further illustrates the Communist government’s emphasis on tradition, folklore,
and popular art in the early years of the People’s Republic of China.
51. Throughout her chapter on Tablada, Laura Torres-Rodríguez provides a
detailed contextualization of Tablada’s transpacific politics, since his years in Ja-
pan responded to Porfirio Díaz’s rule, while his later work, to the revolutionary
government that actually overthrew Díaz.
52. José Juan Tablada, La feria (New York: F. Mayans, 1928); and Tablada,
foreword to Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, i–xxvi.
53. Torres-Rodríguez, Orientaciones transpacíficas, 75.
54. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territo-
riality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 74.
Mignolo’s understanding of the book as a hegemonic object during the time
of the conquest has been heavily criticized on the grounds that by that time
the book was only starting to replace parchment, vellum scrolls, codices, and
thus was only becoming the standard reading format of the following centuries.
My point is based on this latter claim of the book as the predominant format
of Western modernity at large, not specifically of the Spanish conquistadores’
habitus. I take Mignolo’s scene as the initial contact zone of European and Me-
soamerican writing technologies to stress the Atlantic provenance of the book.
For a more elaborate critique of Mignolo, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to
Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Ties in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 2001).
55. Severo Sarduy, “The Concrete Poetry Movement,” The Courier 12
(1986): 28.
56. Sarduy, “Concrete Poetry Movement,” 28.
57. Pedro Erber, Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Bra-
zil and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 135.
58. Haroldo de Campos, “A quadratura do círculo,” in Arte no horizonte do
provável (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1969), 121.
59. Haroldo de Campos, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” in Novas, 218.
60. Haroldo de Campos, Hagoromo de Zeami: O chame sutil (São Paulo:
Estação Liberdade, 1993), Crisantempo: No espaço curvo nasce um (São Paulo:
Perspectiva, 1980), and Escrito sobre jade: Poesia clássica chinesa / Reimagi-
nada por Haroldo de Campos a partir dos ideogramas originais, ed. Guilherme
Mansur (Ouro Preto: Tipografia do Fundo, 1996).
61. Haroldo de Campos, “Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Differ-
ence in Brazilian Culture,” in Novas, 157–77.
62. Octavio Paz, “Introducción,” in Versiones y diversiones (Mexico City:
Joaquín Moritz, 1973), 9.
63. Campos, “Translation as Creation and Criticism,” 315.
64. Accoring to Simon Mortley, “in 1927, the quest for an internationally
and universally applicable alphabet led to the most perfect embodiment of the
new rationalist, geometric, spirit—‘Futura,’ designed by Paul Renner at the
Bauer Type Foundry in Germany. ‘Futura’ is still widely used, though it has since
been joined by other sans serifs that also build on ‘grotesque’ and ‘Renaissance’
styles.” Simon Mortley, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 79.
65. Gonzalo Aguilar, Poesia concreta brasileira: as vanguardas na encruzil-
hada modernista (São Paulo: EdUSP, 2003), 223.
66. Take the example of La montaña vacía, an anthology of poetry by Wang
Wei translated in 2004 by the Peruvian Beijing-resident Guillermo Dañino.
Published by the renowned Spanish poetry press Hiperión, the bilingual edi-
tion exhibits a structural typographical error in the transcription of Chinese
signs that runs through the four hundred pages of the book: the tone markers
of the pinyin romanization change the font of the tonic letters, making them
stand out visually and thus revealing that the typeface used by the Spanish
publisher did not include Chinese tonal markers in its font family. Indeed,
this evidences the rarity of Chinese bilingual publishing in Spanish, but it also
speaks of the challenges of Chinese type design in general. Guillermo Dañino,
Wang Wei: La montaña vacía, trans. Guillermo Dañino (Madrid: Hiperión,
2004).
67. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 52.
68. Haroldo de Campos, Escrito sobre jade: Poesia clássica chinesa / Re-
imaginada por Haroldo de Campos a partir dos ideogramas originais, ed. Tra-
jano Vieira, 2nd ed. (Cotia, São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2009).
69. Octavio Paz’s Blanco (Mexico City: Joaquín Moritz, 1967) indeed made
a case about fonts to multiply the possible readings of the juxtaposed colored
columns of the remarkable mantra-like poem. But like Paz’s poetical artifacts
Discos visuales (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1968) and Vrindaban (Geneva, Switzer-
land: C. Givaudan, 1966), Blanco further explored the physical architecture of
the poem by arranging the text in a single page folded vertically like the tantra
scrolls that Paz had become familiar with in India. In a later reflection on the
choice for such format, Paz wrote:
Mis modelos fueron los rollos de pintura oriental. No los rollos de

pintura china—pienso sobre todo en los rollos de la época Sung, que al
desenrollarse muestran un paisaje. La sensación que dan estos rollos es
la de caminar mentalmente por un sendero entre montañas, riachuelos,
etc. No: mis modelos fueron los rollos tántricos—de Nepal, Bengala y
el Tíbet. En estos rollos, a medida que se desenrollan, se despliega ante

nuestros ojos una sucesión de figuras, pero estas imágenes son, más
que nada, signos. En fin: en un rollo chino, contemplamos un paisaje;
en el rollo nepalés o tibetano leemos un ritual. Bueno, yo lo que quise
fue eso: una especie de ritual. (Paz, “Cuarenta años de escribir poesía,”
in Archivo Blanco, ed. Enrico María Santí [Mexico City: Ediciones del
Equilibrista / El Colegio Nacional, 1995], 118)
My models were Oriental painting scrolls. I am not referring to Chi-

nese painting—particularly the Sung dynasty scrolls that reveal a
landscape when unrolled. Those scrolls convey the feeling of a mental
stroll through a trail in the mountains, among streams, etc. No: my
models were Tantric scrolls—from Nepal, Bengal, and Tibet. As they
unfold, these scrolls reveal a sequence of figures, which are, above
all, signs. In sum: in a Chinese scroll, we witness a landscape; in the
Nepalese or Tibetan, we read a ritual. So, this is what I aimed at: a
kind of a ritual.
It is striking that despite their common scrutiny of logocentrism and their

profound interest in Asian literatures, Paz and Haroldo do not mention the
formal aspects of Asian poetry in their intense correspondence. Although they
dedicate several letters to comment (or rather, to celebrate) Haroldo’s Portu-
guese translation of Blanco in 1981, their dialogue on Asian lyric is limited to
scattered observations on Pound (see Haroldo de Campos, Transblanco: En
torno a Blanco de Octavio Paz, 1986).
70. Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 2004), 123.
71. Gustavo Guerrero, “El Oriente de Severo Sarduy,” in El Oriente de
Severo Sarduy (Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Cervantes, 2008), 22.
72. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Conversación con Severo Sarduy,” Revista de
Occidente 93 (1970): 320.
73. Severo Sarduy, “El Cristo de la rue Jacob,” in Obra completa, ed. Gus-
tavo Guerrero and Francois Wahl (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1999), 78; and
“Christ on the Rue Jacob,” trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier (San
Francisco: Mercury House, 1987), 86.
74. Severo Sarduy, “Para recibir la aurora. La fabricación de los manuscritos
sagrados en el Tibet,” in Obra completa, 49.
75. Severo Sarduy, “Escrito sobre un cuerpo,” in Obra completa, 52; and
Written on a Body, trans. Carol Maier (New York: Lumen Books, 1989), 41.
76. Première leçon d’acupuncture is included in the Severo Sarduy Collection
(GC190), Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University Library (see François
Wahl, Françoise Gramet, and Richard Sieburth, “Biography of a Few Paintings,”
Princeton University Library Chronicle 73, no. 3 [2012]: 443–62). However,
during the production of this book, the copyright holders of Sarduy’s work
claimed that this drawing is not his, and thus I have been unable to include a
reproduction of it in these pages. I think it is.
77. Sarduy, “Escrito sobre un cuerpo,” 52; Written on a Body, 41.
78. Severo Sarduy, “Dessin et dessein / Inscription and Intention,” in Jean

Cortot, by Jean Cortot (Paris: Maeght Éditeur, 1992), 5.
79. Sarduy, “Para recibir la aurora,” 34.
80. Severo Sarduy, “Cromoterapia,” in Obra completa, 36.
C ha pter 5
1. No intenso agora, dir. João Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro: Videofilms
2017).
2. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004): 3–22.
3. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Mem-
ory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3.
4. Irene Depetris Chauvin and Natalia Tacceta, Afectos, Historia y Cultura
Visual: Una aproximación indisciplinada (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2019), 10.
5. The periodization of the Cultural Revolution is as disputed as many other
episodes in recent Chinese history. The official party version situates it between
May 1966 and October 1976, a decade of “domestic turmoil and catastrophe”
initiated my Mao Zedong, marked by the rise and fall of Lin Biao, and the
arrest of Jiang Qing. The social conflict version coincides with this chronology
but attributes the agency of the revolution to the antagonism of rebel and con-
servatives factions, rather than to top ruling elite. “Three-year” versions focus
on the main thrust of the violence in 1966–69 directed against what the Rebel
Red Guards called the “bureaucratic class” or the “red capitalist class.” See J.
Zhang and J. D. Wright, Violence, Periodization and Definition of the Cultural
Revolution (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 131–38. For the purposes of this
chapter, I take the more capacious formulation that situates the Cultural Revo-
lution roughly between 1966 and 1976.
6. Lynn Shapiro and Judy Kaplan, Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Commu-
nist Left (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 3.
7. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Volver la vista atrás (Bogotá: Penguin Random
House 2020), 453; and Retrospective, trans. Anne McLean (New York: River-
head Books, 2023), 414.
8. I only mention the work of Latin Americans “red diapers,” although there
are works by individuals of many nationalities.
9. Jie Li, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial of the Mao Era (Durham, NC: Duke
10. Li, Utopian Ruins, 266.
11. Bosteels, Marx and Freud, 21.
12. Graff-Zivin, Anarchaeologies, 37.
13. For the former, see Susana Draper, 1968 Mexico Constellations of Free-
dom and Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and for the
latter, Samuel Steinberg, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico
1968 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016).
14. Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo,
una discusión (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2005), 22.
15. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (New York: Columbia
16. Pankaj Mishra, “What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for Our
Current Moment?” New Yorker, February 1, 2021, https://www.newyorker
.com/magazine/2021/02/01/what-are-the-cultural-revolutions-lessons-for-our-
current-moment.
17. Florencia Garramuño, Mundos en común: Ensayos sobre la inespecifici-
dad en el arte (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015).
18. Hotel de la amistad, dir. Pablo Doudchitzky (Buenos Aires: Buenos Aires
Produce, 2016), 68 min.
19. Hotel de la amistad.
20. Hotel de la amistad.
21. Martín Kohan. “La apariencia celebrada,” Punto de vista 78 (2004):
24–30; Cecilia Macón, “Los Rubios o del trauma como presencia,” Punto de
Vista 80 (2004): 44–47; Martín Kohan. “Una crítica en general y una película
en particular,” Punto de Vista 80 (2004): 47–48.
22. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 20.
23. Martin Parr, The Chinese Photobook: From the 1900s to the Present
(New York: Aperture, 2015), 217.
24. In September 1983, the Argentine visual artists Rodolfo Aguerreberry
(1947–97), Julio Flores (1950–), and Guillermo Kexel (1953–) joined the Moth-
ers of Plaza de Mayo in an artistic action to reclaim the lives of the disappeared
by the state. They cut thousands of life-sized silhouettes on cardboard paper
and painted them black, inviting militants and passersby to join their collective
workshop at Plaza de Mayo during the March of Resistance. The action lasted
until midnight and quickly rippled into similar interventions across parks and
public spaces throughout the country in the months that followed. In the midst
of a hostile and repressive context, a temporary space of collective creation
redefined the artistic and political practice in the struggle for human rights.
See Ana Longoni and Gustavo Bruzzone. El Siluetazo (Buenos Aires: Adriana
Hidalgo, 2008).
25. Laurence Coderre, “The Curator, the Investor, and the Dupe: Consumer
Desire and Chinese Cultural Revolution Memorabilia,” Journal of Material
Culture 21, no. 4 (2016): 431.
26. Laurence Coderre, “Breaking Bad: Sabotaging the Production of the
Hero in the Amateur Performance of Yangbanxi,” in Listening to China’s Cul-
tural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities, ed. Laikwan, Paul
Clark, and Tsai Tsan-Huang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 65.
27. Laikwan Pang, “Dialects as Untamable: How to Revolutionize Canton-
ese Opera?” in Pang, Clark, and Tsai, Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution,
129.
28. Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama
in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 33.
29. Victor Ochoa-Piccardo, Cartas de Jingzhai: Reminiscencias estudiantiles
en China 1976–1981 (Singapore: Partridge Publishing, 2014), 175, 64.
30. Ochoa-Piccardo, Cartas de Jingzhai, 121, 311.
31. Ochoa-Piccardo, Cartas de Jingzhai, 232.

36. Vásquez, Volver la vista atrás, 173; Vásquez, Retrospective, 152.
42. Vásquez, Volver la vista atrás, 456; Vásquez, Retrospective, 417–18.
44. Vásquez, Volver la vista atrás, 474–75; Vásquez, Retrospective, 435.
45. Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 16.
46. Paola Hernández, “Biografías escénicas: Mi vida después de Lola Arias,”
Latin American Theatre Review 45, no. 1 (2011): 119.
47. Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Sergio Cabrera in Conversation,” HAY Fes-
tival, Cartagena, Colombia, January 30, 2021, https://www.hayfestival.com/
p-17364-juan-gabriel-vasquez-and-sergio-cabrera-in-conversation-with-claud
ia-morales.aspx.
48. Marcelo Machado, dir., A ponte de bambú (São Paulo: MMTV, 2020).
49. Gonzalo Aguilar, Más allá del pueblo. Imágenes, indicios y políticas del
cine (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015), 92.
50. Matthew Rothwell, “Gonzalo in the Middle Kingdom: What Abimael
Guzmán Tells Us in His Three Discussions of His Two Trips to China,” Trans-
modernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic
World 9, no. 3 (2020): 115.
51. Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, Memorias de un soldado desconocido: Auto-
biografía y antropología de la violencia (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos,
2012); and José Carlos Agüero, Los rendidos: Sobre el don de perdonar (Lima:
Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2015); José Carlos Agüero, The Surrendered:
Reflections by a Son of Shining Path, ed. Michael J. Lazzara and Charles F.
Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)
52. Michael J. Lazzara and Charles F. Walker, editors’ introduction to José
Carlos Agüero, The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining Path (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 2.
53. Matthew D. Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revo-
lution in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2013).
54. Mikael Wiström, dir., Tempestad en los Andes (Stockholm: Mänharen
Film; Lima: Casablanca, 2014), 100 min.
55. Fernando Rosenberg, After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and
Film in Latin America, 1990–2010 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2016), 59.
56. Rosenberg, After Human Rights, 63.
57. Two other recent documentaries about second generation Peruvians in
exile looking back on the internal armed conflict through the lens of the post-
memories of the armed left are Alias Alejandro (2005) by Alejandro Cárdenas-
Amelioa and Sibila (2012) by Teresa Arredondo.
Notes to Afterword ❘ 279
58. Admir Skodo, “Sweden: By Turns Welcoming and Restrictive in its Im-
migration Policy,” Migration Information Source, December 6, 2018, https://
www.migrationpolicy.org/article/sweden-turns-welcoming-and-restrictive-
its-immigration-policy.
59. “Gabriel” quoted in Carlos Trelles Steind, “¿Ni calco ni copia? Memorias
de la política, violencia y exilio de la izquierda peruana en España” (PhD diss.,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2019).
60. Walter Alejos Calderón, Casualidad o propósito, de rockero a congre-
sista (Lima: Edición de Autor, 2015), 66.
61. See, e.g., Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, The Shining Path: Love, Mad-
ness, and Revolution in the Andes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); and Um-
berto Jara, Abimael: El sendero del terror (Lima: Planeta, 2017), to name a few.
62. Agüero, Los rendidos, 57; Surrendered, 53.
63. “Sendero en Canto Grande,” Caretas: Ilustración peruana, July 30, 1991,
37.
64. Coderre, “The Curator,” 430.
65. Anouk Guiné, “Iconography of a Prison Massacre: 15 Drawings by Peru-
vian Shining Path War Survivors,” in Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, ed. Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García, and Victoria H. F.
Scott (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 289.
66. Alberto Moravia, La rivoluzione culturale in Cina ovvero il convitato di
pietra (Milan: Bompiani, 1967); Alberto Moravia, The Red Book and the Great
Wall: An Impression of Mao’s China, trans. Ronald Strom (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1968).
67. Marco Abel, “The Film Is the Sweat: An Interview with João Moreira
Salles,” Senses of Cinema 89 (2018), https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2018/
latin-american-cinema-today/the-film-is-the-sweat-an-interview-with-joao-mor
eira-salles/.
A fterwor d
1. Santiago Gamboa, Los impostores (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2002), 78.
2. Said, Orientalism, 20.
3. Rosario Hubert, “Rewriting Travel Literature: A Cosmopolitan Critique
of Exoticism in Contemporary Latin American Fiction,” in Peripheral Trans-
modernities: South-South Intercultural Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic
World and “the Orient,” ed. Ignacio López Calvo (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2012), 42.
4. Sylvia Molloy, “The Politics of Posing,” in Hispanisms and Homosexuali-
ties, ed. Sylvia Molloy and Robert Irwin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1998), 142.
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Index
abolitionism, 30, 54, 56, 58, 259n68 Ahmed, Sara, 20

abstract expressionism, 184, 188 Ai Qing, 107, 116, 123, 131
academia, 11, 12, 110–11, 200; US, Aira, César, 238
7. See also universities Alba, Victor, 112
Académie Française, 46 Albert, Stephen, 72–75, 78–79, 83,
Acapulco, 45, 173 102, 103
achinado, 45 Alberti, Rafael, 128–29
acupuncture, 22, 150, 189–90 Alejos Calderón, Walter, 227
adaptation, 150, 184, 243 Alicante, 104
adequatio, 156 alienation, 119
adventure fiction, 21, 84, 240 Alonso, Amado, 10, 11, 105
aesthetics, 27, 46, 76, 102, 137, 155, alphabet, 154–55, 158, 164–67, 169,
202, 230, 240; Japanese, 42, 141; 182; metaphysics of, 161, 187
Maoist, 5, 110, 145; Marxist, 110 Altamirano, Carlos, 138
A.F.D.D. (Agrupación de Familiares Althusser, Louis, 110
de Detenidos Desaparecidos), 200 Alvarez, Germán, 91
affect, 7, 18, 195–96, 200, 205, 213, Amado, Jorge, 113
221, 234, 240; “affective turn,” 20, amnesia, 199
196; transfer of, 9, 192, 194 amoxtli, 175
Africa, 19, 102, 202; North, 50 Amoy (Xiamen), 62
agrarian reform, 112, 225 anarchism, 214
agriculture, 31, 40, 44 anatomy, 189
Aguado, Amelia, 122 ancestors, 75, 171, 173, 185, 210
Agüero, José Carlos, 222, 228; Los Andahuaylas, 223
rendidos. Sobre el don de perdonar Andalusia, 104
(2015), 222 Andes, 222, 225
Aguilar, Gonzalo, 82, 180, 221 Andrade, Genese, 183
Aguilo, Macarena, 204; El edificio de animalization, 33, 39
los chilenos (2010), 204 Annamites, 52
299
300 ❘ Index
anthropology, 12, 137, 225; cultural, art criticism, 22, 42, 158, 160, 194
13 Arthur, Chester Allan, 38–39
anti-Communism, 125–26, 128 “Asia-Latin America” (as method),
anti-imperialism, 32 19–20
Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–58), Asian Studies in Latin America, 13,
131 87
Antilles, 35 Asociación Argentina de Cultura
antiquity, 5, 105, 151, 161, 168–69; China (AACC), 111–20
Chinese, 13, 110; Greek and Latin, Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 113
152 asylum seekers, 225–26. See also
Antología de la literatura fantástica refugees
(1940), 4, 90 Ateliê Editorial, 180, 183
Antwerp, 48 Ateneo de la Juventud, 11
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 164, 176; Auerbach, Erich, 93, 103, 253n11,
Calligrammes; Poèmes de la paix 253n16; Mimesis, 103
et da la guerre, 1913–1916 (1918), Australia, 29
164 authoritarianism, 101
applied arts, 44, 46, 177, 184 autobiography, 99, 135, 221–22
Apter, Emily, 8, 156, 253n7 autochthony, 45, 171, 173, 225
arabesques, 190 avant-garde, 1, 5, 18, 21, 44, 107,
Arabian Nights. See Thousand and 145, 154, 161–63, 183, 191; and
One Nights, The primitivism, 173, 176; neo-, 182
archaeology, 5, 170; “anarchaeology,” Ayacucho, 222, 226–28
23, 199 Aztecs, 52, 112, 168
architecture, 48, 208 Azul, 25
archives, 5–6, 9, 21, 28, 54, 58–59,
103, 132, 160, 165, 243; affective, Bachner, Andrea, 17, 158; “figurative
113, 195, 199, 201, 205, 216, specters,” 158; “sinographs,” 158
218, 223, 232; family, 194, 235; badges (Mao), 231
personal, 22, 217–18 Badiou, Alain, 199; The Communist
area studies, 9, 13–14, 19, 110, 251– Hypothesis (2015), 199
52n7 Baily, Edgar, 142
Argentina, 4, 11, 14, 84–87, 91, Balderston, Daniel, 74, 263n48
114–15, 121–23, 127, 132, 137, Balfour, Frederic Henry, 97–98; The
147, 202–4, 206; 1955 coup, 128; Divine Classic of Nan-hua, 97
Chinese immigration to, 88–89, ballet (revolutionary model), 114,
107; Communist Party, 111, 115, 132, 195, 230
118, 132; Law of Immigration and bamboo, 165, 171
Colonization (1876), 35 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 52–53; The
Ariel, 43 Native Races of the Pacific States
Aristotle, 84 (1886), 53
Arlt, Roberto, 86, 138–39 banners, 173
armed struggle, 205, 222, 224–25, barbarians, 75
231 Barcelona, 212, 213, 215
Arnedo Álvarez, Gerónimo, 118 baroque, 76, 83, 159, 177, 189;
ars critica, 92 Spanish, 184
art: objects, 156; revolutionary, 207– Barthes, Roland, 157, 159, 185;
8; space of, 156 seminars, 189; L’empire des signes
Index ❘ 301
(1970), 187; “Variations sur blood, 52, 190–91

l’écriture” (1973), 157 body, the, 22, 150, 184, 188–92,
Bashō, Matsuo, 151 195–96; skin, 157, 190–91;
Basque (language), 17 wounds, 190
Bauhaus, 180 Bogotá, 62, 63, 212
Beckman, Ericka, 27 Bolsheviks, 202
Beijing, 49, 107–8, 110, 115–16, bone, 170–71
118, 135, 137, 141, 196, 198, Book of Changes, The (Yi jing, I-
202, 204, 207, 210, 223, 232, Ching), 90, 171
241; Chaoyang, 207; Tiananmen Book of Odes. See Book of Songs
Square, 141, 143, 221, 237 Book of Songs, The (Shi jing), 87, 88,
“Beijing Consensus,” 20 96, 98, 182. See also Waley, Arthur
Beijing Film Academy, 212 bookbinding, 184
Beijing Foreign Languages Press, 113, bookstores, 91, 108, 210; second-
121, 129, 131, 267n48 hand, 123
Beijing Foreign Languages University: borders, 9, 101, 109
Spanish department, 202; Borges, Jorge Luis, 3–4, 6, 17, 52, 65,
Portuguese department, 218 67, 71, 74, 76–87, 91–93, 99–105,
Beijing Forum on Literature and Art, 138, 157, 184, 240, 243, 262n45;
201 on translation, 96, 153–54;
Beijing People’s Arts Theatre, 123, polemics, 11, 104–5; reviews, 12,
246; Entre marido y mujer (1954), 21, 87–98, 124–25, 136
123, 246 Borges, Jorge Luis, works by: “El
Beijing University, 113 arte narrativo y la magia” (1932),
Bellatín, Mario, 239 102; “El escritor argentino y la
Belloc, Hilaire, 81 tradición” (1951), 84, 129; “El
Benjamin, Walter, 217; “aura,” 217 guardián de los libros” (1969),
Bergel, Martin, 13 70; “El idioma analítico de
Berry, Chris, 114 John Wilkins” (1941), 67–70,
Berti, Eduardo, 239; La máquina de 260n12; “El jardín de senderos
escribir carácteres chinos (2017), que se bifurcan” (1941), 70–79,
239 101–3; Historia universal de la
Best Maugard, Adolfo, 44–45, 173; infamia (1935), 83; “Kafka y sus
Método de dibujo: Tradición, precursores” (1951), 84, 89; “La
resurgimiento y evolución del arte busca de Averroes” (1949), 73; “La
mexicano, 44–45, 173 muerte y la brújula” (1944), 77;
Bhutan, 186 “La muralla y los libros” (1950),
Biblical Primitive Language, 73 70; “La prolongada búsqueda de
bibliography, 4, 91–92, 110, 115, Tai An” (1942), 71, 76–78, 80;
122–23, 133, 164, 178, 180 “La viuda Ching, pirata” (1936),
Biblioteca Nacional, 89; Borges 70; “Las alarmas del doctor
Collection, 89, 91 Américo Castro,” 104; “Las dos
bildungsroman, 212, 215 maneras de traducir” (1926),
biographism, 100 96; “Las versiones homéricas”
Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 4, 76, 77, 82– (1932), 95; “Los traductores de
83, 90; “V. W. W. S. Purcel: The las, 1001 noches” (1936), 95, 151;
Spirit of Chinese Poetry” (1941), “Palabrería para versos” (1926),
90 90
302 ❘ Index
Bosteels, Bruno, 138–39, 143–44, Caliban, 37, 43

199; Marx and Freud in Latin California, 26–27, 29, 34, 37, 183
America (2012), 138 Callao, 56, 58
boundaries, 6, 59, 84, 110, 153, 194, calligrams, 162, 164, 176
196, 216, 223, 228, 236 calligraphy, 129, 134, 149, 157, 159,
“bourgeois formalism,” 119 162, 170–73, 177, 180, 182–84,
Boxer Rebellion, 40, 241 188, 191–92
Bramah, Ernest, 81 camelid, 45
Brazil, 14, 35, 218, 220, 237, Canada, 29
255n35; Chinese and Japanese canals, 34, 51, 53, 63–65
diasporas in, 14, 44; Chinese labor Canto Grande prison, 230
in, 60 Cao Xueqin, 88, 99. See also Dream
Britain, 13, 74, 90 of the Red Chamber, The
British Broadcasting Corporation Cape of Good Hope, 56
(BBC), 230 capitalism, 3, 35, 37, 46, 50, 197,
British East India Company, 41 210; in China, 48–49; peripheral,
Britton, A. Scott, 171 112
bronze(s), 27, 170–71 capitalist bloc, 125, 219
Brooklyn Bridge, 32–3, 37, 52. See capitalization, 179
also José Martí Capricornio, 135–36, 246, 248
Bruno, Giuliana, 156–57, 191–92 Caracas, 35, 172, 210, 265n15
brushes, 68, 134, 168, 171, 187–88 Caretas, 227, 230
Buck, Pearl S., 4 Caribbean, 29–30, 32, 35, 54, 62–63,
Buddhism, 13, 87, 89, 160, 187–89, 186
191, 262n45; Mahayana, 185–86, Carri, Albertina, 204
190; Tantric, 189 cartography, 105, 126, 174–75,
Buenos Aires, 10, 11, 17, 69, 76, 79, 243; literary, 4, 12, 18–19, 92;
89, 91, 105, 107, 122–23, 132, revolutionary, 211
135, 144; Hispanist intelligentsia Carvalho, Bernardo, 239, 240;
in, 71 Mongólia (2003), 240; Reprodução
Builders, The, 121 (2014), 239
Burakumin, 43 Casa Rex, 180, 183
bureaucracy, 74, 127, 135, 276n5 Casal, Julián del, 25, 27
Burton, Richard Francis, 96 Castelnuovo, Elías, 119
Bush, Christopher, 42, 155–56 Castilian, 21, 104
Bustos Domecq, Honorio, 76, 82–83; Castro, Américo, 11, 104–5; La
Seis problemas para Don Isidro peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense
Parodi (1942), 76 y su sentido histórico, 104
Catalan, 17
Cabrera, Fausto, 197–98, 211–14, Catalunya Film Archive, 212
236 Catelli, Nora, 12
Cabrera, Luz Elena, 211 Cavalcanti, Guido, 152
Cabrera, Marianella, 211, 218 Celentano, Adrián, 122
Cabrera, Sarandy, 129–30, 197–98, “Celestials,” 30
211 censorship, 122, 135, 143, 199
Cabrera, Sergio, 6, 197, 212, 215–18, Centro de Estudios Históricos de
236, 242 Madrid, 105
Index ❘ 303
Centro Editorial de América Latina Chine, La, 138

(CEAL), 122, 136 Chinese Educational Mission, 57,
ceramics, 25, 43, 166, 231 259n70
chakras, 188–89 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 34–
Chambi, Martín, 225 36, 38
Chang A-chin () (Zhang Chinese Folk Tales and Fairy Tales, 87
A-Jin), 57 Chinese (language): Cantonese, 150;
Chang, Eileen, 125; La canción de Classical, 80, 129, 154; dialects,
arroz/The Rice Sprout Song (1955), 55, 57, 62, 73, 207; grammar,
125 154; Mandarin, 16, 149, 196, 203;
Chang, Jason, 19, 31, 258n55 putonghua, 219; radicals, 149
Ch’en Hsio-Chou () (Chen Chinese literature, 15, 65, 71, 85–
Xuezhou), 57 86, 102, 123, 129, 137, 147, 171;
Chen Xiaomei, 208 English translations of, 89, 95,
Cheng, François, 153 164; French translations of, 150,
Cheng, Sheng, 125; Ma mère (1928), 164; German translations of,
125; Ma mère et moi à travers 69, 94; “modern,” 131; Spanish
la première révolution chinoise translations of, 8, 16–17, 21, 87,
(1929), 125 90, 108–9, 123–26, 132–36, 184
childhood, 125, 160, 174, 193–94, Chinese Literature, 113
196, 198, 202–3, 205–6, 232 Chinese Medical Journal, 113
Chile, 14, 56, 107, 203–4 Chinese (script), 1, 18, 21, 123, 154–
China: 1949 revolution, 105, 108, 57, 159–60, 178, 191, 271n28;
120; as “Cathay,” 73; as “Celestial conventional styles, 170; as
Empire,” 142; energy companies, “pictographic,” 161, 164, 169;
219; Fujian Province, 239; Great poetics of, 149
Wall, 193; “Red China,” 125, Chinese Studies, 13, 17, 87, 123
143; semicolonial status of, 74, Chinese Trade Unions, The, 113
261n14; Shanxi Province, 235; chinoiserie, 1, 5, 21, 26–28, 46, 49,
state examinations, 129; transition 65, 79–80, 151, 162, 167, 207
to market economy, 219, 236 choreography, 16, 204–5, 208, 212;
China Merchants Steam Navigation military, 230
Company, 61 Christianity, 64, 82, 186
China, People’s Republic of, 107, chronotope, 79
207; Brazilian embassy, 221; chrysalis, 168, 170
Constitution, 201; cultural policy, cinema, 113–14, 215, 221, 233–34;
130, 205, 212; “New China,” 113, Chinese, 235; collectivist, 233–34;
116, 129, 131, 133 commercial, 114
China Pictorial, 113 cinematograph, 156, 197, 207
China Publications Center (Guoji Cinétique, 138
Shudian, China International circulation, 5–9, 14–15, 17–18, 26,
Book Trading Corporation), 113, 42, 79–80, 86, 89, 108, 111, 121,
265n15 137, 145, 195–96
China watchers, 110 Claridad, 122
China Writers’ Association, 130 Clarín, 139
China’s Sports, 113 class (social), 4, 35, 46, 61, 222,
Chincha islands, 30 276n5
304 ❘ Index
classics (Greco-Roman), 11 Communist Party (Peru), 231

cocoliche, 104–5 Communist Party (Soviet Union), 118
Coderre, Laurence, 207, 231 comparative literature, 4, 7–10,
codices, 169, 183, 188 273n54 12, 65, 71, 156, 163, 251–52n7,
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 193 253n16
Cold War, 1, 6, 65, 105, 110–11, Comparative Literature Studies, 121
116, 226; and area studies, 13–14, comparativism, 8, 12, 251–53n7
251–52n7; cultural, 21, 111–12, comparison, 7–9, 18, 241;
124–28, 231 infrastructures of, 22
Colegio de México, 10, 14; Centro de compte rendu, 81–82
Estudios de Asia y África, 14 concretism, 17, 176–78, 182, 184,
Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, 188, 190–91; post-, 178, 182
11 concretistas, 1
collectors, 42, 79–80, 166, 183, 206 Confucianism, 80; ethics, 210; filial
Colón Theatre, 132 piety, 210; and social order, 210–
colophons, 124, 183 11
Colombia, 14, 35, 62, 197, 211–15, Congress for Cultural Freedom
217, 241–42, 244; drug wars, 216 (CCF), 126–27
colonialism, 19, 41, 47–48, 150; Connecticut, 56–57, 58, 259n70
psychodynamics of, 75 connoisseurship, 42
colonos asiáticos, 30, 63 consumer culture, 26, 28, 80, 231
Columbia University, 10; Spanish contact zone, 19, 273n54
program, 10 contradiction, 35, 38, 78
Comercio, El, 56 “coolie passage,” 21, 28, 54, 56–560,
comics, 231 62–63, 243, 258–59n67; mutinies,
Comisión de la Verdad y 21, 28, 54, 56–57
Reconciliación (Commission for coolie trade, 6, 20, 29–32, 35, 43,
Truth and Reconciliation), Peru, 46, 53–54, 56, 59–60, 64, 255n35,
222; Final Report (2003), 222 259n67
commerce, 35, 59 copyright, 205, 275n76
commodities, 5, 27, 49, 79, 171, 207, Cortot, Jean, 190
231 cosmopolis, 51–52, 63
communes (China), 112, 219 cosmopolitanism, 10, 47–48, 65, 71,
communication, 171, 178; meta-, 79, 83, 85, 92, 108, 121, 139, 143,
178; technologies, 23 152, 168, 240
Communism, 21, 107, 116, 122, Costa Rica, 14
127, 132, 154, 196–97, 203, cotton, 40, 45, 48–49
216, 222; culture, 17, 119; front Couchoud, Paul-Louis, 164; Sages et
organizations, 21; networks, 6 poètes d’Asie (1916), 164
communist bloc, 111–12, 125 Courier, The, 176
Communist Party (Argentina, PCA), Covarrubias, Miguel, 174
111, 115, 118–20, 123, 128, 132; Coyoacán, 42, 174
Chinese Faction, 115; Communist creole, 21
Youth, 202 Croatto, Virginia, 204; La Guardería
Communist Party (China), 108–9, (2015), 204
121 criollo, 29, 71, 175, 225; neo-, 90,
Communist Party (Colombia), 211 263n47
Index ❘ 305
crónica modernista, 19, 21, 28, 31– de Assis, Machado, 150; “Lira
33, 35–37, 39, 42–44, 48, 53, 65, Chinesa” (1870), 150
160, 170–71, 256n14 de Campos, Augusto, 176
crystals, 27, 49 de Campos, Haroldo, 4, 6, 17, 22,
Cuadernos de Cultura, 123, 130, 149–50, 152, 154, 176, 184, 190–
Cuba, 6, 19, 27, 29–32, 38, 53–54, 91
56–59, 62–63, 113–14, 184–86, de Campos, Haroldo, writings by:
205; Sino-Cuban community, 31– “Anthropophagous Reason:
33 Dialogue and Difference in
Cuba Commission Report (1876), 30, Brazilian Culture” (1981), 178;
56–57 Crisantempo (1998), 178; Escrito
Cuban Revolution, 112, 125–26 sobre jade. Poesia clásica chinesa
cult of originality, 138 reimaginada por haroldo de
cult of personality, 128; cult of the campos (1996), 159; Hagoromo
leader, 228–29 de Zeami (1993), 178; Ideograma:
Cultura China: Revista trimestral Lógica, poesia, linguagem (1977),
de arte, literatura e información 160; “Li Fu-Jen,” 179–80; “O
general sobre la Nueva China, 107, dique das magnólias,” 179;
115–17, 120, 123 “O refúgio dos cervos,” 179;
cultural criticism, 7, 120 “transcreation,” 157–59
cultural industry, 105, 114, 201 de Goncourt brothers (Edmond and
Cultural Revolution (Great Jules), 42
Proletarian, China), 5–6, 22, 110, De la Paloma, 123
114, 120, 131–32, 138, 144, 192, de Montesquiou, Robert, 43
193–96, 198–99, 201–3, 205–12, de Rokha, Pablo, 113
219, 222, 228, 232–34, 236, 264– decadence, 105, 164, 184
65n8, 276n5 deconstruction, 18, 150, 161, 176
Cultural Revolution (Peru), 229–32 decorative arts, 26, 42
cummings, e.e., 157–58 Degiovanni, Fernando, 10, 105
cuneiform, 187–88 dekasegi, 44
curriculum design, 15, 252n7 Delano, Amasa, 56
cutouts, 206 Delano, Luis Enrique, 113
Czechoslovakia, 84, 193, 234 democracy, 11–12, 35, 114, 127, 201
Czudnowski, Luciana, 239; Chuan Deng Xiaoping, 209
(2016), 239 Depetris Chauvin, Irene, 196
Derrida, Jacques, 155, 187; De la
Damrosch, David, 8, 252n7 grammatologie (1967), 187
dance, 196, 205, 212, 231 design, 149, 158, 177, 183;
Dañino, Guillermo, 154, 274n66 concretist, 188; graphic, 158, 180,
Dante, 8 184; modernist, 22
Dario, Rubén, 25, 43, 150–51; detective fiction, 76–79, 83
arielismo, 43; “Divagación” dialogism, 76
(Prosas profanas), 151; “La muerte Diario de la Marina, 53
de la emperatriz de la China” diaspora: Chinese, 5, 19, 29, 48, 50,
(1890), 25–26, 150; “Japoneses de 125; Hispanist, 10; Japanese, 14,
París” (1904), 43 19
de Acosta, José, 169 Diaz, Porfirio, 30, 44, 273n51
306 ❘ Index
dictatorships, 138, 200, 211 East Asia, 28, 40, 163

Dikötter, Frank, 75 Eckermann, Josefin Augusta, 223
dilettantes, 136, 233 ecumenism, socialist, 115
Ding Dungling, 150 edge, 20, 65, 70–71, 79, 85, 92, 103,
Ding Ling, 125 105, 244. See also Sarlo, Beatriz
diplomacy, 12, 30, 35, 41, 44, 57, Ediciones del Tiempo, 123
107, 125–26, 218–19; cultural, 4, edited volumes, 19, 138
15, 21, 108–11, 114–15, 121, 124, Editorial Lautaro, 131
126, 128, 132, 136–37, 142, 154, Editorial Sudamericana, 122, 124
196, 241; Maoist, 20–21, 111–12, editors, 11, 43, 107, 116, 126, 129,
121, 130, 145; media, 114; Soviet, 136, 183, 185
112 education, 10–11, 14, 35, 92, 120,
diplomats, 1, 34, 46, 52, 59–60, 151, 173, 197, 210; proletarian, 213
196, 265n13; ambassadors, 135, Egerton, Clement, 88, 92–93; The
219 Golden Lotus, 88, 92–93
Dirección Nacional contra el Egypt, 48, 51–52, 168, 169
Terrorismo (DIRCOTE), 232 Ejército Popular de Liberación, 211
disenchantment, 202–3, 207, 211, El País, 139
233 Eliot, T. S., 152
disorientation, 5, 19–20, 22–23, 53, elitism, 119
56, 64, 69, 140–41, 201, 237, 243– Elizondo, Salvador, 150, 159–60,
44 168–69
dissidents, 122, 125, 128, 143–44, Émigré Foundry, 183
205–6 émigrés, 10, 38, 184
distributors, literary, 16, 105, 108, emotions, 16, 22, 194–96, 201, 213,
113, 265n15 235
division of labor, 28, 46 Enciso, Jorge, 168
documentaries, 12, 22, 193, 198–200, Encyclopedia Britannica, 90
202–5, 207, 218–21, 223–24, 227– encyclopedias, 3, 67–70, 81, 104
28, 230; autobiographical turn, English (language), 8, 13, 15, 17–18,
221 21, 29, 56–57, 71, 87, 91–92, 98,
dolce stil novo, 163 110, 124–25, 128, 150–53, 270n16
Dominican Republic, 211 entrepreneurs, 37
Doudchitzky, Pablo and Yuri, 198, enunciation, 71, 75, 184, 224, 243–
202–3, 205–6, 208–9, 212; Hotel 44
de la Amistad (2016), 198, 202, Epic of Gilgamesh, 8
206 epigrams, 138–39, 143–44
Dragon Book, The, 87 epigraphy, 103, 164
dragons, 80 epistemes, 69
drama, 108, 123, 196, 207, 216–17, epistemology, 5, 77; Chinese vs.
230 Western, 69–70, 103; corporeal,
drawing, 134, 162, 189–90 192, 195
Dream of the Red Chamber, The, 4, eroticism, 4, 87, 92–93, 141, 151
87, 89, 99–100 erudition, 4, 69, 72, 93–94, 103, 133,
dreams, 4, 5 253n11
Du Fu (Tu Fu), 4, 136, 154 Escuela de Estudios Orientales, 87
dysentery, 56 Escuela Libre, 11
Index ❘ 307
Espasa-Calpe, 122 foreign debt, 112

Estrategia del caracol, La (1993), foreign experts, 196, 224, 265n13
213–14 Foreign Languages University
ethnic studies, 9, 13–14, 19, 252n7, (Beijing), 211, 218
255n35 foreign policy, 4, 15, 43
ethnocentrism, 175 forewords, 4, 62, 77, 128–29, 145,
ethnography, 6, 16, 63, 117, 194, 208 173, 190, 270n16
Etiemble, 94 Foster, Hal, 194
Eurocentrism, 8, 163 Foucault, Michel, 67–69; The Order
Excélsior, 170 of Things (1966), 67–69
exile(s), 10–11, 13, 17, 21, 32, 63, “Four Classic Novels, The,” 17
71, 105, 122, 135, 144, 184–86, “Four Olds, The,” 132, 195
202, 216, 223–24, 226, 253n11, fragmentation, 161
278n57 France, 13, 30, 43, 62, 143–44, 151,
exhibitions, 118, 190 154, 193, 233
exoticism, 5, 9, 14, 26–27, 47, 70, Franco, Francisco, 211
75–76, 83, 151, 161, 169, 171; freedom of speech, 35
self-, 240 “friends of China,” 199, 202
extremists, right-wing, 201 Friendship Associations, 15, 17, 116,
132, 135, 142, 210
Facebook, 220 Friendship Hotel, 202–3, 219–20
factories (model), 112 Fritsch, Killian, 234
factory workers (model), 130 Frodon, Jean Michel, 235
falsification, 138 Frontón, El, 223
famine, 29 Fujimori, Alberto, 226, 231
fanaticism, 216 Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis
Fang She, 76–78 Borges, 89
fascism, 101, 110, 115, 126, 216, funerals, 32, 212, 234
224; symbology of, 147 Futurism, 163
fatherhood, 211
Faulkner, William, 124 Galician, 17
Feinsod, Harris, 53, 64 Galland, Antoine, 96
fellow travelers, 109, 126, 135 Gallimard/Folio, 172
Feng Tchang, 134 Gamboa, Santiago, 240–44; Los
Fenollosa, Ernest, 13, 90, 155, 178; impostores (2002), 240–41, 242,
“The Chinese Written Character 244; Octubre en Pekín (2001), 242
as a Medium for Poetry” (1920), Gao, Xingjian, 139, 143–44; El libro
155, 178 de un hombre solo (2001), 143–44
fin de siècle, 28, 42, 46, 65, 164 García de Aldridge, Adriana, 164
First World War. See World War I García y García, Guillermo, 59–60;
Five Blessings, 166 “Informe que contiene importantes
Flauta de jade, La (1951), 129 detalles sobre la conducta con los
folk art, 44, 159, 173 emigrantes chinos y otros datos
folk tales, 109, 132 relativos a esta inmigración”
folklore, 5, 18, 131, 133, 160, 162, (1873), 59–60
173 gardens, 43, 103, 219
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 122 Garramuño, Florencia, 201–2
308 ❘ Index
gauchesco/a, 104–5 Goupil, Romain, 234; Mourir à

Gavilán Sánche, Lurgio, 223; trente ans (1982), 234
Memorias de un soldado Goyanarte, Juan, 126–27
desconocido: Autobiografía y Graff-Zivin, Erin, 23, 199–200
antropología de la violencia graffiti, 234
(2012), 223 Granet, Marcel, 89; La pensée
geishas, 43 chinoise (1934), 89
genealogy, 7, 12, 54, 225 Great Changes in a Mountain Village,
Geneva, 89 121
geographies, 20, 79, 131, 244 Greco-Roman culture, 152
geopolitics, 14, 23, 65, 70, 185, green cards, 220
252n7 Grupo Especial de Inteligencia
George Allen & Unwin, 91 (GEIN), 230–31
Germany, 13, 30, 48–49, 75; Nazi, Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 225;
127 El primer nueva crónica y buen
Gestalt psychology, 178 gobierno (1615), 225
ghosts, 4, 132 guano, 27, 30, 53
Gilded Age, 37 Guatemala, 32, 46
Giles, Herbert Allen, 89, 97–98, 164; guerrillas and guerrilla warfare, 5,
Chuang Tzu, Mystic, Moralist, and 137, 204, 208, 211, 217; aesthetics,
Social Reformer (1889), 89, 97– 230
98; History of Chinese Literature Guiné, Anouk, 231
(1901), 89, 95, 164 Gulf of Mexico, 173
Giudici, Ernesto, 120 guqin, 172
globalization, 46, 216; maritime, 64 Guzmán, Abimael, 222, 230–31;
glyphs, 3, 22, 149, 157, 159, 165– “Chairman Gonzalo,” 222, 230–
66, 168, 182, 189, 243. See also 31; as “fourth sword of Marxism,”
hieroglyphs 222; “Gonzalo Thought,” 222
Go (game), 172, 271n17
Godard, Jean Luc, 233–34; La Hagimoto, Koichi, 38
Chinoise (1967), 233 haiku, 3, 151, 159; Hispanic
gods, 173 American, 42, 161
Goethe Institut, 91; Bookstore, 91 Hamburg, 48
Gómez Carrillo, Enrique, 12, Hamman, Byron, 169
21, 28, 41, 46–53, 63–64; De Han dynasty, 172
Marsella a Tokio (1906), 48, 51; Han Feizi, 87
“Paisajes y emociones” (1906), Han Yu, 84
28, 48; “Shanghai. Los chinos que Hanseatic League, 48
trabajan,” 48; “Singapur. El paraíso hapticity, 6, 145, 150, 156–57, 177,
de los chinos,” 48–50 183, 191, 196
Gómez de la Serna, Ramón, 86 Harbin, 205
Gonzáles, Claudio, 223, 225 Hare, Pablo, 232; Esquirlas del odio:
Gonzáles, Flor, 23, 223 violencia de, 1980 al VRAEM
González, Samuel, 225 (2016), 232; Incautados (2017),
González Tuñón, Raúl, 123 232
Good Neighbor Policy, 4, 114 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 54,
Gorriti, Gustavo, 226–27, 230 55, 56, 259–60n67
Index ❘ 309
Hartford, 56–57, 259n70 Hollywood, 114, 231; musicals, 195

Harvey, David, 51; “time-space Holy Land, 64
compression,” 51 home videos, 193
Hata, 43 Homer, 51, 95, 152; Iliad, The, 95
Hatzfeld, Helmut, 11 Hong Kong, 26, 60, 63, 110, 123–24,
Havana, 11, 54, 113; Chinatown 126, 268n54
(Barrio Chino), 159, 185 Hong Lou Meng (Hong Leou Mong),
Hawaii, 59 95, 100. See also Dream of the Red
Hayashiya, Eikichi, 151 Chamber, The
Hayot, Eric, 7, 22, 185 hospitality, 17
Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Hoyos, Héctor, 216
Knowledge, 67, 69 Hsi P’êng, 74
Hebrew, 188 Hsu, Sung-Nien, 95; Anthologie de la
Heilongjiang Daily, 205 littérature chinoise, 95
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 11 Hu-Dehart, Evelyn, 19
hermeneutics, 70–71, 73, 79, huaju (spoken drama), 230
92, 101, 103, 217, 253n11; Huemul, 123
“interpretación,” 217 Huidobro, Vicente, 162; Ecuatorial
Hernández Palacios, Esther, 164 (1918), 162; Poemas árticos
Hernández, Paola, 217 (1918), 162
Herzovich, Guido, 111, 137 human rights, 200, 222, 224–26,
heterotopia, 68 277n24
hieraticism, 230 human sciences, 67
hieroglyphs, 15, 167–68; human trafficking, 15, 21, 29, 61
Mesoamerican, 5, 169 humanism, 6, 13, 21–22, 70–71, 79,
H.I.J.O.S (Hijos por la Identidad y 103, 109, 111, 114, 145
la Justicia contra el Olvido y el humanities, 7, 22–23, 122, 138, 251–
Silencio), 200 52n7
Himalayas, 160, 186–87, 190, 240 Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956),
Hinduism, 13, 87, 132
Hiroshige, Utagawa, 42, 165
Hirsch, Marianne, 200 iconography, 147
Hispanism, 10–11, 17, 71, 105; idealism, 207
Castilian, 21 identity, 9, 31, 75, 185, 194, 199,
Hispanophone, 19, 104–5 201–2, 228, 252n7; ethnic, 9, 195;
history (discipline), 6–7, 13; gender, 195; national, 31, 59, 61;
philosophy of, 155; “subjective sexual, 195
turn,” 22, 194 ideographs/ideograms, 3, 5, 17–18,
history, 194 21–22, 73, 90, 145, 149–50, 155–
Hochschule, 74 64, 167–68, 177–78, 182, 184,
Hogar, El, 71, 81, 85–87, 88, 89–91, 187, 190, 241–43
99, 263n48; “Foreign Books and ideology, 41, 105, 110, 126, 138,
Authors,” 86 142–43, 201; nationalist, 84
Hokusai, 42 illumination, 196, 215
Holden, Edgard, 54; “A Chapter in imagination, 26, 69, 74; moral, 216
the Coolie Trade” (1864), 54, 55, Immigration Act (1924), 38, 44
258–59n67 Incas, 112, 225
310 ❘ Index
indentured labor (Chinese), 5, 27, Italy, 28, 52, 163, 183; literature,
29, 31, 54; in Cuba, 6, 19, 57; in 122, 152
Mexico, 19. See also coolie trade ivory, 80
India, 48–49, 51–52, 151, 186–87, Ivy League, 11
274n69; Colombian embassy, 241;
Sikkim, 186 jade, 80
Indian Ocean, 49, 51, 63 Jameson, Fredric, 101–2; “Third-
indigeneity, 19, 53, 175, 222–25, 244; World Literature in the Era of
indigenismo, 225 Multinational Capitalism” (1986),
Indigenous languages, 11 101–2
individualism, 119 Japan, 26, 28, 39–50, 151–52, 160,
industrialization, 49, 112; 171, 255n35; emigration policy,
industrialism, 48 43; Meiji period, 40
inequality, 37, 128 Japonisme, 42, 44, 46, 154, 160
infrastructure(s), 14–15, 21, 23, 28– Jeanmaire, Federico, 239; Tacos altos
29, 33, 35, 50–51, 65, 135, 171, (2017), 239
182, 195, 244; critical, 6, 9, 14–15, Jesuits, 5, 13, 73, 80, 155, 169, 189
20–22, 71, 87, 105, 108–9, 124, Jews, 47, 77, 84
126, 137, 153 Jia Zhangke, 235–36
ink, 16, 171, 173, 189 Jiang Qing, 195, 276n5
inscriptions, 15, 172, 177, 187 Jiangnan, 135
Institute for World Literature, 8 jintishi (modern form poetry), 163
Instituto de Filología, 10, 105, 160 journalism, 11, 32, 43, 132, 184, 196,
Instituto Latinoamericano de 205–6, 208, 218, 219–20, 226,
Investigaciones Comparadas 231, 241
Oriente y Occidente, 14, 87 journals, 62, 75, 107, 109, 115–16,
instrumentation, 149, 157, 159, 191 118, 126, 130, 137, 139, 142–44
intellectuals, 10, 59, 86, 115, 119, Journey to the West, 87. See also
126, 132, 144, 219; Communist, Waley, Arthur
139; left-wing, 21, 110–11, 114; Juan, Marcela de, 87, 262n42
peripheral, 4–5, 108–9, 135, 222; Jundiaí 220
Spanish, 105 jurisprudence, 38
intelligence agencies, 21, 126, 231
interface, 150, 157, 186, 189 kabuki, 43
international cooperation, 3 Kafka, Franz, 84, 89, 210
international relations (discipline), Kang, Liu, 131
6, 194 kanji, 159, 165, 271n28
Internationale, The, 231 Kierkegaard, Søren, 84
internationalism, 10, 185; socialist, Kim, Junyoung Verónica, 19
108, 199 Kin P’ing Mei (Jin ping mei/Kin Ping
interpreters, 107 Meh), 4, 92–93, 94
interviews, 57, 198, 202, 218, 236 Kircher, Athanasius, 169
intimacy, 157, 236 Kitasono Katué 178; “litaoipoema,”
irony, 4, 73, 135, 231, 234 178; “Monotonous space,” 178;
Irwin, John, 77 “via chuang-tse,” 178
ishokumin, 43–44 kitsch, 82–83, 231; memorabilia, 207
Islam, 13, 87, 175 Klauss, Gisbert, 243
Index ❘ 311
Kline, Franz, 188 Leibniz, 79

Kordon, Bernardo, 6, 12, 132–37, Leipzig, 69
141–42; Así escriben los chinos: León, María Teresa, 128
desde la tradición oral hasta Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 65
nuestros días (1976), 133–34; letters, 13, 26, 34, 73, 116, 118, 162,
Cuentos chinos con fantasmas 208, 210, 213
(1969), 132; Cuentos de la Ley de Arrepentimiento, 226
Dinastía Tang (1965), 132, 136; El Li A-ch’iang () (Li A-Yang), 57
cuento chino (1981), 133 Li Bai (Li Po), 129, 136, 147, 150,
Kordon, Marina, 135 154, 163–65, 180; drunkenness of,
Korea, 41 164; “Quiet Night Thoughts,” 147;
Kristeva, Julia, 185 as “poet-icon”; “The Banished
Krupp, 48 Immortal,” 165
Kuhn, Franz, 67, 69, 92–93 Libros, Los, 138
Kuomintang (Guomindang), 125, Li Chih Hua, 123; Reacción en la
202 aldea china: pieza en un acto, 123
Kutani, 161 Li He, 129
Li, Jie, 199
La Torre, Augusta, 222, 227, 232; Li Shangyin, 129
“Comrade Norah,” 223; “lideresa,” Li Zhensheng, 205–6; Red-Color
229 News Soldier (2003), 205–6
labor, 27, 29–31, 36, 39, 44, 46, 49– Liang A-yu () (Liang A-You),
50, 62, 119, 181; intellectual, 108, 257
114; market, 28; migration, 28, 33, Liberal, El, 53
37–38, 50, 60 liberalism, 11–12, 38
labyrinths, 72–73, 78–79, 103, 198 libraries, 13, 65, 70; personal, 90–91
lacquerware, 25, 26, 49, 80, 129 Librería Sarmiento, 91
Laffont, 172 Lida, Maria Rosa, 10
Lafforgue, Jorge Raúl, 135–36 Lida, Miranda, 10
Lalo, Eduardo, 239; Simone (2012), Lida, Raimundo, 10
239 light, 214–15
land reform, 225 Lima, 45, 54, 58, 225, 226
land seizures, 227 Lin Chin () (Lin Jin), 57
landowners, 29, 225 Lin Yutang, 124–26
landscapers, 43 lingua franca, 73, 155, 203
landscapes, 42, 129, 149 linguistics, 8, 11–12, 178, 194
Lane, Edward William, 96 Lisboa, Henrique Carlos Ribiero,
languages, study of, 10, 91–92 60–62; A China e os Chins.
Larkin, Brian, 14 Recordações de viagem (1888), 60;
Latin American Studies, 18, 31, 110 Os Chins dos Tetartos (1894), 60
Latin Americanism (discipline), 10, Liscomb, Kathlyn, 164
244 Lisias, Ricardo, 239; O livro dos
lebensraum, 101 mandarins (2009), 239
lectures, 84, 118 literary agencies, 16
Lee, Ana Paulina, 59, 255n35 literary criticism, 6–7, 11, 14–15, 23,
legislation: amnesty, 200; 70, 87, 92, 99, 109, 111, 137, 196
immigration, 28, 33–34 literary exchange, 15
312 ❘ Index
literary studies, 8, 12, 23 Malaysia, 208

Lobscheid, William, 52–53; Evidence Mallarmé, Stéphane, 157, 162–64,
of the Affinity of the Polynesians 176; “Las de l’amer repos” (1914),
and American Indians With the 164; Un coup de dés (1897), 162
Chinese and Other Nations of Manchuria, 41
Asia. Derived From the Language, Manet, Edouard, 42
Legends and History of Those manifestos, 17, 162
Races (1872), 53 Manila, 45; Galleon, 22, 44–45, 53,
localism, 19; translocalism, 19 149, 173–74
logocentrism, 3, 130, 175, 186–87, Mansur, Guilherme, 180, 183
275n69 mantou, 208
logopoeia, 152 manuscripts, 13, 58, 95, 171, 176,
López, Kathleen, 19, 31–32 182, 184, 225, 241
López-Calvo, Ignacio, 19, 31 Mao Dun, 125, 130; Minister of
López Velarde, Ramon, 162 Culture, 130
Losada, 11, 122 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), 110,
Loti, Pierre, 25–26 121, 131–34, 180, 195, 207, 229;
loudspeakers, 205 “Chairman Mao,” 127–28; death,
Louis, Annick, 101; Borges ante el 143; Little Red Book, 193; Los, 37
fascismo (2007), 101 poemas, 197–98; poetry, 123, 129–
love, filial, 213–14, 236; paternal, 30; Thirty-Seven Poems
213 Mao Zedong Thought, 110, 122, 203
Lu Xun, 125, 131, 136; Diario de un Maoism, 3, 15, 17, 22, 108, 110, 121,
loco (Diary of a Madman), 131 135, 137–39, 143–45, 185, 200–1,
Lugar de la Memoria, Tolerancia e 206, 223, 233–34; and aesthetics,
Inclusión, 232 5, 121; in Argentina, 121–22, 132;
Luisa Canevaro, 58 visual culture, 147
lujo asiático, 51 mappemonde, 47
Lukács, György, 100 Mardrus, Jean-Charles, 96
lunfardo, 104 marginalia, 103
marginalization, 17, 19, 22
Macao, 54, 58, 60, 150, 185 margins, 12, 54, 83–84
Machado, Marcelo, 198, 218–21; Mariátegui, José Carlos, 222
A ponte de bambú (2019), 198; Marín-Lacarta, Maialen, 16–7
Viagem ao Anhui (2003), 220 maritime literature, 54, 259n67
Mackern’s and Mitchell’s, 91 maritime trade, 15, 54
Madame Hsin, 76–77 Marker, Chris, 232
Madden, Richard, 72 market (literary), 11, 15–16, 86, 88,
Madrid, 10 91–92, 111, 124, 128, 221, 224,
magazines (literary), 11–12, 21, 53, 241
71, 86, 90, 110–11, 185 Martí, José 21, 25, 28, 31–39, 46, 50,
Magnus, Ariel, 239; Un chino en 52, 256n14; “El presidio político
bicicleta (2007), 239 en Cuba” (1871), 31; “El Puente
Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des de Brooklyn” (1883), 32, 37; “Los
Traducteurs (Saint-Nazaire), 144 indios en los Estados Unidos”
Málaga, 212 (1885), 31; “Nuestra América,” 31;
Malay Peninsula, 50 “Teatro chino” (1899), 32; “Un
Index ❘ 313
funeral chino” (1888), 32; “Una merchants, 48, 59; Arab, 49; Chinese,
boda china” (1888), 32; Versos 12, 31, 46, 48, 50, 52; Indian, 49
Sencillos (1891), 31 Mesoamerica, 5, 151, 161, 168–69
Martín Fierro, 107 Messageries Maritimes, 51
Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, 86 mestizo, 10–11, 18, 176; mestizaje, 31
Martins family (Angelina, Andrea, meter, 179
Raquel), 199, 220–21 metonym, 85, 117, 225
Martins Filho, Plinio, 183 Mexican Revolution, 173–74
Martins, Jayme, 218 Mexico, 11, 14, 19, 28–30, 32, 42,
Marxism, 136; Marxism-Leninism, 44–46, 52, 122, 160, 162, 175;
222; “rural,” 112 modernization, 171
Marxismo de Hoy, 123 Mexico City, 42
masks, 26 Michaux, Henri, 75–76, 187; Un
Mata Hari, 47 barbare en Asie (1933), 75
Mata, Rodolfo, 160; “La escritura Middle East, 50–51
iluminada por la imagen” (2003), Middle Kingdom, 175
160 Middle Passage, 54, 58
materiality, 18, 149, 157–59, 161, Mignolo, Walter, 175, 273n54
171–72, 176, 181, 186, 213 migration, 3, 9, 19, 31, 43–44, 47,
maxims, 143 50, 216, 220; forced, 59, 64;
May, 1968 (France), 122–23, 193–94, transpacific, 28, 53–54
233 militancy, political, 15, 112, 218,
May Fourth Movement, 125 220; Maoist, 22, 136, 139, 200,
Maya, 168–69, 175 206, 228
media, 33, 56, 114, 118, 145, 149, Minas Gerais, 182
157–58, 170, 177, 191–92, 218; Ming dynasty, 93
mass, 177, 182, 195 mining, 30
mediation, 17, 86, 108, 196, 270n16 minoritization, 19
medicine, Asian, 189; Chinese, 189 Miranda, Carmen, 114
meditation, 188, 192 mise en abyme, 36, 118, 167
Mediterranean, 51, 53, 63, 212; mise en scène, 162–63
traditions, 74 misogyny, 40
Melville, Herman, 56, 259n67; missionaries, 40, 74, 175
Benito Cereno (1855), 56 mobility, 15, 20, 53; social, 31
memoirs, 12, 22, 58, 125, 143, 198, modernism, 9, 53, 75, 158, 176;
200, 222, 227–28; “red diaper,” Anglo-American, 5, 13, 18, 21,
223 91, 128, 152; Euro-American, 9;
memorabilia, 207, 228, 231 European, 155; Latin American, 5
memorial literature, 17, 144 modernistas, 3, 19, 21, 25–29, 33,
memorial sites, 199 39–40, 43, 46–48, 50–51, 54, 150–
memory, 198, 206, 223; archival, 22, 51, 161–63, 167, 169, 192
194; collective, 194, 215; cultural, modernity, 12, 27, 34, 47, 69, 112,
59; embodied, 46, 205, 208; 176, 181; digital, 182; French, 48;
individual, 194; post-, 6, 200–1; literary, 3, 6, 18, 243; Mexican, 44;
transgenerational, 199 revolutionary, 175
Méndez, Evar, 107–8; “Examen de modernization, 41, 51; colonial, 47;
conciencia chino” (1955), 107 economic, 44, 171
314 ❘ Index
Molloy, Sylvia, 72–73, 93, 244 narrators, 56–59, 69, 80, 184, 194,
monasteries, 186, 188, 190 215, 232, 234
Mong Futi (Meng Futi), 202, 205–7 national allegory, 101–2, 125
“mongolization,” 31 National Library (China), 58
monks (Tibetan), 159, 186, 190 nation-state, 34, 224
monographs, 19, 136, 168 nationalism, 11, 65, 84, 104, 125;
Montaldo, Graciela, 33 aesthetics of, 76
Montenegro, Gervasio, 76–77, 81–82 Nativa, 123
Montevideo, 202 Nazism, 101, 127
Montoneros, 205 Nemirovsky, 76–77
Moravia, Alberto, 233; La Neoclassicism, 152, 183
rivoluzione culturale in Cina. Nepal, 186, 274–75n69
Ovvero il Convitato di pietra Neruda, Pablo, 107, 113
(1967), 233 Nestorian stele, 172
Moreira Salles, João, 6, 193–94, 232– networks, 5, 12, 14–15, 23, 46, 65,
37; China, O Império do centro 74, 128, 144; Communist, 6, 21,
(1987), 237; No intenso agora 108, 111, 120, 125, 136; human
(2017), 193, 232–33 trafficking, 21, 29; trade, 26–27,
Moretti, Franco, 124, 252n7 49
Morris, William, 42 New China News Agency (Xinhua),
motifs, 18, 45, 129, 173, 176 113, 208
motion, 20, 244 New Delhi, 151
mourning New England, 58, 259n70
Movimiento Femenino Popular, 230 New Left (Latin America), 5, 121,
Movimiento Popular Perú-Alemania, 137, 139, 194, 205, 232
232 New Spain, 45
MRTA, 226 New World, 169
Mufti, Aamir, 53, 253n11 New York (City), 10, 52, 160, 171,
multiplicity, 19, 69, 162–63 206; Chinatown, 32–33; Grand
Mungello, D. E., 73 Central Palace, 170; Manhattan,
murals, 173, 231 32
Murasaki, 153 New Yorker, The, 201
Museo de Arte de Lima, 232 newspapers, 32, 34–35, 53, 56, 85,
museums, 46, 118, 177, 199, 232 139, 170; clippings, 220
music halls, 43 Nikkei, 44, 255n35
music notation, 187–88 Nobel Prize, 113; literature, 143
mutinies, 21, 28, 54, 56–57 Noh, 152–53
Noigandres group, 177
Nación, La, 12, 32, 38, 41, 53, 71, Nombre falso, 138
85, 87, 89–91 non-Communist Left, 126
nannies, 203–4 North America, 30, 35, 86, 105,
“Nao de la China,” 174 158
narcotics, 32. See also opium Norway, 54, 258–59n67
narrative, 31, 54, 62, 99–100, 133, nostalgia, 135, 140, 198, 207
140; Indigenous, 223; heroic, 206– novels, 3–4, 103, 119, 128, 143,
7; meta-, 78–79; travel, 12, 123, 185, 197, 212, 215–18, 224–
132 25; adventure, 83, 240–43;
Index ❘ 315
“biographical form,” 100, 211; Padilla, Ignacio, 240; La Gruta del

Chinese, 17, 93–95, 99–103, 124– Toscano (2006), 240
28, 136, 239–40, 243; fantastic, paideuma, 176
102; mutiny, 56; peripheral, 124– pain, 131, 190, 206
25; popular, 120, 123; realist, 4, painting, 15, 148–49, 159, 172, 187,
102 191–92, 231; action, 188; Chinese,
numismatics, 103 136, 275n69; landscape, 42;
Nuñez Negrón, Manolo, 239; Barra portrait, 42, 98, 134; watercolor,
China (2012), 239 43, 160
Palach, Jan, 234
Ocampo, Silvina, 4 palanquin, 164
Ocampo, Victoria, 86, 126 paleography, 150, 159, 171, 184,
ocean liners, 15, 65 271–72n29; neography, 159, 271–
Ochoa Gómez, Víctor José 208 72n29
Ochoa-Piccardo, Victor, 198, 208–10, Palestine, 62, 64
212, 265n15; Cartas de Jingzhai palimpsests, 154, 172
(): Reminiscencias pamphlets, 31, 113
estudiantiles en China, 1976–1981 Panama, 211, 216; Canal, 65
(2014), 198 Pan-Americanism, 31
Oliver, María Rosa, 107 Pandora’s box, 220
onomatopoeia, 179 “papel de China,” 173
operas, 3; Peking, 113, 132, 137, 195, papel picado, 18, 173
208; revolutionary model, 17, 109– paper, 16, 18, 157, 162, 170, 173,
10, 114, 132, 207–8 175–76; mills, 175
Opinión Nacional, La, 34–35, 38 paradox, 121, 130, 140, 175, 231
opium, 31–32, 38, 40 parataxis, 179
Opium Wars, 29, 32, 41, 64, 261n14 paratexts, 16–17, 145, 183
oral histories, 19 parchment, 16, 52, 157, 168, 171
orchestras, 207 parents, 113, 197, 201, 203–4, 208,
Orient (as direction), 20, 26, 140 210–11, 219–20, 229
Oriental Studies, 14. See also Asian Paris, 43, 47–48, 62, 125, 135, 160,
Studies 184, 232, 241, 252n7; Gaité 234;
Orientalism, 5, 9, 19, 26, 28, 32, 40, Latin Quarter, 43; Pagode de
73–74, 82, 128, 161, 190, 240–41; Vincennes, 187
French, 47. See also Said, Edward Parodi, Isidro, 76–79, 83
ornament, 18, 26, 49, 82–83, 98, parody, 52, 76–79, 81–83, 121, 185,
129, 190 233
orphanhood, 139, 144, 205 Parr, Martin, 206
Ortiz, Juan L., 123, 154 Pascucci, Michele, 164
Otálora, Nelson Chouchán, 241 pastiche, 195
overpopulation, 43 Pastormerlo, Sergio, 99
Oxford, 72 patois, 150
Patria, La, 56
Pacific Ocean, 18, 21, 27, 30, 44, 53– patriotism, 75, 201, 205, 212
54, 56, 63–65, 162, 173–76 paulistano, 219
Pacific Northwest, 34 Paz, Octavio, 6, 18, 150–54, 156,
Pacific Rim, 19, 41 159–60, 179, 183, 186, 188, 191,
316 ❘ Index
Paz, Octavio, continued Petrarch, 162–63, 197–98

274–75n69; Blanco (1966), 151, Petrecca, Miguel Angel, 154, 239;
160, 183; El signo y el garabato Pekin (2017), 239
(1973), 151, 159; Ladera este phenomenology, 16, 202
(1978), 151; Vislumbres de la India Philippines, 13, 173
(1995), 151 philology, 4, 6–11, 17, 70, 74,
peaceful coexistence, 65, 111–12, 95, 110, 118, 133, 165, 194,
115–16 241; comparative, 13, 71, 184;
Pearl River Delta, 29, 62 hermeneutic, 92, 101, 103;
peasants, 29, 61, 121, 130, 134, 142, European Romance, 10, 21,71,
222, 225, 230 103–4, 253n11, 253n16; Spanish,
pedagogical literature, 134 104–5
pedagogy, 10, 114, 130, 153, 205, philosophy, 23, 86; Chinese, 89,
211 118; Indian, 151; of language, 11;
Peking Review, 113 Western, 187, 191
Peninsular and Oriental Steam phoenixes, 45
Navigation Company, 63 phonetics, 178
Peonía roja see The Red Peony photographs, 165, 194, 197, 199,
“People of the Shining Path” (1992), 202, 205–6, 224–29, 234
230 pictograms, 164, 168, 189–890
People’s Liberation Army, 130; Piglia, Ricardo, 112, 138–44,
military training, 213 140, 185, 199; Conversación en
peoples of color, 19 Princeton (1999), 139; “Homenaje
Peranakans, 50 a Roberto Arlt” (1975), 138–39;
Perez Villalón, Fernando, 154 Los diarios de Emilio Renzi (2015–
performance, 46, 187, 190, 192, 195– 17), 139, 144; “Lucha ideológica
96, 215, 217 en la construcción del socialismo,”
periodicals, 12, 56, 113; Communist, 138; “Mao Tse Tung: Práctica
21, 108, 123 estética y lucha de clases,” 138;
periodization, 123 Respiración Artificial (1980), 138;
Perloff, Marjorie, 182 “Un día perfecto” (2012), 139–44
Perón, Eva, 147 Pignatari, Décio, 176
Perón, Juan Domingo, 128, 147 pilgrimage, 64, 184, 186
Peronism, 115, 127–28, 147–49, 163, Pindar, 163
202; “Peronist day,” 147, 268– pinyin, 154, 202, 274n66
69n1 pirates, 3, 70, 83
Perse, Saint-John, 128, 153 plagiarism, 138
Peru, 14, 19, 28–30, 35, 44, plantation owners, 27
54, 56, 58–59, 206, 222–32, plastic arts, 6, 21, 86, 149, 160–61,
241; Apurimac, 225; Foreign 176, 189
Ministry Archives, 58; Truth and plays, 3, 153; revolutionary model,
Reconciliation Commission, 222, 121, 123, 207
224, 231; Viceroyalty of, 46 Pleynet, Marcelin, 185
Peru Commission, 57 plot, 100, 134; emplotment, 216,
Peruvian-Scandinavian community, 221
226 Plum in the Golden Vase, The, 87
Petra, Adriana, 119 pneumonia, 56
Index ❘ 317
Poe, Edgar Allen, 77; Narrative of proletarian literature, 131

Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), 56; propaganda, 3, 5, 109–10, 114, 118,
“The Purloined Letter,” 77 121, 147, 230–31
poesia concreta, 177, 180, 182. See Propertius, 152–53
also concretism prophets, 83
Poesía china durante la época Tang, Proseguir, 226
La (1952), 129 Prussia, 48
Poetas chinos vertidos del francés psychoanalysis, 12, 110, 119, 138
(1977), 128 public sphere, 195, 200
Poetas de la dinastía Tang, Los publishers, 16, 90, 108–9, 123, 126,
(1970), 129 239; corporate vs. independent,
Pol Pot, 230 122, 243; Republican, 122
polemics, 11, 105 publishing, 8, 10, 15, 91, 105, 110–
political prisoners, 200 11, 121, 124; bilingual, 178,
polysystems approach, 16 274n66; mass market, 11
populism, 128, 201 Puchner, Martin, 16
porcelain, 25, 45, 49, 76, 80, 157, Puck, 43
162, 173; Puebloan style, 45; royal, Puebla, 173–74
166 punctuation, 179
Port Said, 64 Punto de Vista (2004), 204
Porter, David, 79–80 Pygmalion, 91
ports, 28–29, 46, 53, 65; treaty, 49,
61–62 qilin, 45
Portuguese (language), 3, 6, 8, 29, Qing dynasty, 50, 57, 61–62, 99;
137, 150, 152, 178, 184, 197 empire, 30, 35
postcolonial theory, 9, 19, 252n7 Qingdao, 74
posters, 195, 231 Quechua, 222, 225
poststructuralism, 12, 22, 67, 149, Quindici, 138
159, 182, 252n7. See also theory
posture, 244; posing, 244 race, 19, 31, 33, 75
pottery, 15, 22, 118, 149 racism, 22; racist ideology, 41
Pound, Ezra, 90, 128, 152, 154–55, Radio Peking (China Radio
157–58, 176–7; Cantos, 178; International), 218
Cathay (1915), 155 railroads, 30, 34
Prado-Fonts, Carlos, 13 rainforest, 170
Prague Spring, 193 raw materials, 27, 162, 164
Prashad, Vijay, 241 readers, 15, 59, 153, 172
prayer books, 188 realism, 76, 92, 100, 102; magical,
Prensa Latina, 113 240; socialist, 10, 120, 137, 195
Presbyterianism, 124 Rebolledo, Efraín, 154
primitivism, 18, 75, 162, 173, 176 Recanati, Michel, 234
Princeton University, 139, 144 reception, 17, 121, 133, 172
print culture, 6, 111 Red Classics (hongse jingdian), 17,
printing press, 175–76 120–21, 125, 136
Prisma, 53 Red Crag (1957), 121
prisons, 31, 83, 223, 229–30 Red Detachment of Women, The,
proletarian art, 130 230
318 ❘ Index
“red diapers,” 196–98, 201, 219–20, robber barons, 37

223, 242 Rococo, 26
Red Guards, 193, 202–3, 209, 213, Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 103
233 romanization, 155, 202
Red Peony, The (1961), 124 Rome, 140
Red Sun (1961), 121 Ronsard, Pierre de, 197–98
reeducation, 114, 131, 236 Rosa Blindada, La, 123
referentiality, 76, 101, 158, 177, 243 Rosato, Laura, 91
refugees, 58, 226 Rosenberg, Fernando, 224
regionalism, 19 Rothko, Mark, 188, 191
Registro Único de Víctimas, 223 Rothwell, Mathew, 222–23
reminiscence, 141, 198, 203 Rotker, Susana, 35; La invención de
Renaissance, Italian, 163, 183 la crónica (1992), 35
reparations, 222 Routes of the Fourteen Meridians
repertoires, 14–15, 26, 46, 131, 196, and their Functions (Shisijing
205, 208, 253n11 fahui), 189
representation, 5, 13, 23, 26, 47, 69, Routledge, 91–92
71, 101–2, 137, 221; phonetic, 163; Rovetta Dubinsky, Pablo Vicente,
scenic, 217; visual, 28, 149, 163 198; Los años setenta en China:
reproducibility, 46, 172 Recuerdos de un Oriental en
resistance, 19, 119, 195 Oriente (2020), 198
responsibility, 222 Roy, Claude, 153
reviews, 12, 21, 71, 85–94, 96–98, Royal Danish Library, 225
99–100, 102–4, 124, 136, 160. See Rubios, Los (2003), 204
also Jorge Luis Borges Russia, 30, 50, 202
revisionism, 131, 202, 230 Russian-Japanese War, 41
Revista Moderna, 39, 44 Russian Revolution, 112
revolution, 109–10, 112, 126, 139, Ruy, Raul, 129, 270–71n16
141, 144, 199, 201, 208, 222;
cultural, 110, 131, 185, 229, 231– Said, Edward, 19, 74, 103, 253n11;
3; theory of, 137. See also Cultural Orientalism, 19
Revolution (Great Proletarian, Saigon, 47
China) Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 47
Reyes, Alfonso, 10–11 Saítta, Sylvia, 141
rhetoric, 33, 68, 80, 103, 115, 182; Salles, Walter, 235–36; Jia Zhangke.
revolutionary, 109 Un homem de Fenyang (2014),
rhythm, 133, 157, 178 235–36
Ricci, Matteo, 79 samurai, 43
Richard, Timothy, 94–95; A Mission San Francisco, 52
to Heaven (1940), 94–95 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 15
rights, 35–36; citizenship, 220–21; Sanskrit, 151
Indigenous, 225 Santiago (Chile), 107
Río Piedras, 10 Santoro, Daniel, 147–51, 163; Días
ritual, 32, 183, 191–92, 275n69; peronistas (2002), 147–51
religious, 159, 187–88; -ity, 151, São Paulo, 177, 180, 219
183 Sarduy, Severo, 4, 6, 22, 150, 158–60,
Rivera, Diego, 173 176–77, 184–92; Cromoterapia,
Index ❘ 319
191; Cobra (1972), 185; De donde Shanghai, 47–48, 220, 232; airport,
son los cantantes (1967), 185; 142; Bund, 48; “Paris of the Far
El Cristo de la Rue Jacob, 187; East,” 48
“Escrito sobre un cuerpo” (1969), Shingo, Nakamura, 42
159, 189–90; Maitreya (1978), short stories, 13, 25, 58, 76, 132–34,
185; “Para recibir la aurora. La 136, 138
fabricación de los manuscritos shou (“longevity”), 159, 165–67,
sagrados en el Tibet,” 188; 167, 172–73
“Première leçon d’acupuncture” Shu T’ung, 76, 79–82
(1971), 189; Première leçon signified, 157
d’acupuncture, Demi-visage à la signifier, 158; “verbivocovisual,”
chinoise, 159; scripturality, 189; aspects, 158, 178–79, 191
“Towards Concreteness” (1979), signs, 157, 165, 168, 177, 179, 181,
160; “Ying Yang” (1969), 159 189
Sarlo, Beatriz, 68, 71, 83, 85, 138–39, silence, 196, 233–36
200 silk, 22, 26, 45, 48–49, 80, 149, 157,
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 110 162, 170–71, 173, 183
Sato, Aline, 183 Silk World Fair, 170
Saussy, Haun, 7, 172 silkworms, 168, 170
savants, 73, 79 Siluetazo, 206
“scar literature,” 17, 143 silver, 45
scenic arts, 113–14, 212, 236 simultaneity, 78, 98, 177–78
Schmucler, Héctor, 138 Singapore, 12, 49–50, 52
scholar-officials, 129 Sinitic languages, 123, 151, 154, 165,
science, 22, 74, 80 189
Scientia Sinica, 113 Sino-Argentinian Friendship
screens, 16, 80, 207, 234 Association, 132
scribes, 182, 184 Sino-Japanese War, 75
scrolls, 13, 16, 22, 52, 149–50, 157, Sino-Soviet split, 118, 132
160, 183–84, 188, 192, sinography, 7, 158–59
274–75n69 sinology, 7, 13, 65, 69–74, 76, 79,
scurvy, 56 85–87, 90, 102, 110, 116, 128,
Sebreli, Juan José 135 150; English, 3; German, 3, 241;
secrets, 78, 215–16, 236 proto-, 73
Segalen, Victor, 75, 153, 158, 172; sinophilia, 14, 27, 90, 129, 132, 150,
Essai sur l’exotisme. Une estétique 158, 233
du divers, 75; Stèles (1912), 172 sinophobia, 27, 31
Seine, 234 Sinophone, 15, 19, 31, 59, 271n28
Seix-Barral, 243 Siskind, Mariano, 47, 151;
semantics, 98, 154, 156, 177–78, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global
184 Modernity and World Literature in
semiology, 138, 158, 182 Latin America (2014), 47, 151
Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), “Sixth Generation,” 235
206, 222–231 slang, 104–5, 153
series (publishing), 11, 12, 21, 110, slavery, 6, 27, 29–31, 37, 54, 60, 63
122, 124, 128, 135–36 smoke, 214–15, 217
servants, 52, 98 social Darwinism, 110
320 ❘ Index
social scientists, 110 Stalin Prize, 121

socialism, 118, 201–2, 207, 221 Stalinism, 120; anti-, 120
sociology, 13, 28, 92–93, 116–7, 131 Stanislavski system, 213
soft power, 109 statistics, 209
Solar, Xul, 90; Relatos de los mundos Steinbeck, John, 124
superiores, 90 Stewart, Watt, 56
soldiers, 26, 37, 65, 134 stigmatization, 223
Sollers, Philippe, 185 Stockholm, 226
Somme, 72 Straits Settlement, 49
songs, 131, 203–5, 208, 212, 230; structuralism, 12, 110, 138, 189;
lip-synching, 207; “Sailing the French, 12
Seas Depends on the Helmsman,” students, 34, 193, 200, 203, 222,
203, 205; “The East is Red,” 232–34
207, 212; “We are the Heirs of study groups, 12
Communism,” 203, 205 subaltern, 4, 9, 71, 200, 244
sonority, 151, 157, 179 subjectivity, 47, 99, 151, 188, 196
Sophocles, 153; Trachiniae, 153 Sudamericana, 122, 124, 126;
Sorá, Gustavo, 122, 136–37 “Horizontes,” series, 124
Sorensen, Diana, 20 Suez Canal, 51, 53, 63–64
sound, 158, 177–78, 203 sugar, 7, 30, 53
soundtrack, 203 Sui Hu Chuan (Shui hu zhuan), 4
South America, 27, 29, 44, 60–61, suicide, 57–58, 98, 191, 202, 233–34
71, 102, 105, 111, 147, 225; Sumerian (language), 8
market, 27 Sun, Haiqin, 99–100
South China Sea, 49, 58 Sung Ian Lin, 220
Southern Cone, 35, 200, 206 Sur, 4, 71, 85–87, 89–91, 126, 157;
souvenirs, 107, 195, 207, 218 Editorial, 75
Soviet Union (USSR), 115, 120, 127, surface, 20, 22, 149, 156–57, 186–87,
265n13 190–92, 244; tension, 157
Spain, 10, 12–3, 16, 32, 53, 87, 104, Suriname, 29
151, 173, 211, 224 Sweden, 197, 223, 226–27
Spanish (language), 16–17, 104; Sydney, 51
American, 87, 162; dialects, 17; syncretism, 174–75, 186
standardization of, 10; vernacular, syntax, 96, 178, 270n16
10 synthesis, 86, 161, 163
Spanish Civil War, 10–11, 71, 105, systematization, 15, 23, 68, 70
111, 122, 216
Spanish Conquest, 175, 225 Tablada, José Juan, 3, 6, 18, 21–22,
Spanish Crown, 13, 30 25, 28, 39–46, 50, 52, 149–50,
Spanish empire, 28, 44–46, 175 154, 158–76, 183–84, 191, 242–
“Spanish Pacific,” 13 43; Al sol y bajo la luna (1918),
spatiality, 73, 177 168; “De aztecas y japoneses,” 168;
spices, 49 “Del corazón de China al riñón
spies, 3, 71–72, 74–75 del cabaret” (1921), 170–71; El
spiritism, 13 jarro de flores. Disociaciones líricas
Spitzer, Leo, 11, 253n11, 253n16 (1922), 161; “El puñal,” 164;
Spivacow, Boris, 129, 267n42 En el país del sol (1919), 39, 44,
Index ❘ 321
46, 160–61; “Exégesis,” 168–69; Thais, 162–63

Hiroshigué (1914), 165, 168; La theater, 43, 73, 113, 208, 212–14,
feria (1928), 173, 174; “La gloria 230; biodrama, 217
del bambú” (1901), 171; “Li-Po,” theatricality, revolutionary, 207, 228–
162, 164, 167, 171, 173, 242; Li- 29
Po y otros poemas (1920), 18, 150, theory, 5, 12, 21, 184–85; literary, 14,
159, 161–62, 164, 165, 167, 170, 138; translation, 16, 28, 153, 156
172, 183, 241; “Talón rouge,” 164; theosophy, 13
Un día: Poemas sintéticos (1919), Third World, 5, 14, 20, 101–2, 108,
161 112, 115, 121, 199, 201, 203, 219
tabula rasa, 131 Thousand and One Nights, The, 95
Taccetta, Natalia, 196 Tibet, 159, 185–88, 190–91, 274–
Tai An, 71, 76–80 75n69
Tai Chi, 203 Tinajero, Araceli, 18–19, 167;
Taiping Rebellion, 40 Orientalismo en el modernismo
Taiwan, 41, 123, 219, 220 hispanoamericano (2004), 18–19
Tanco Armero, Nicolás, 62–65; Viaje tipoeta, 180
de Nueva Granada a China y de Tipografía do Fundo de Ouro Preto,
China a Francia (1860), 62–65 180
Tang dynasty, 4, 12, 128, 148, 163, Tlatelolco massacre, 199–200
183; lyric poetry, 17, 21, 128–31, Tokyo, 41, 48, 50, 151, 160; 1923
133, 136, 147, 150–51, 154, 163– earthquake, 44; red-light districts,
64, 180; narrative, 132–33, 136 43
Tangshan earthquake, 209 tolerance, 224
tapestries, 27, 40 Tor, 122
tattoos, 22, 150, 189–91 Torres-Rodríguez, Laura, 20, 44,
Tautin, Gilles, 234 171, 174–75; Orientaciones
taxonomy, 68–69, 153 transpacíficas. La modernidad
Taylor, Diana, 195 mexicana y el espectro de Asia
tea, 80, 161 (2019), 20, 44
teachers, 203, 205, 265n13 Toscano y García, Guillermo, 105
Teatro Shanghai, 185 totalitarianism, 105, 126–28, 230
technologies (linguistic), 158, 171, Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 42
175, 177, 182–84, 273n54 tourism, 21, 28, 51, 53, 59, 63–65,
Tel Quel, 110, 185, 233, 264–65n8 113, 114, 207, 232
telegraph, 156 tours (of China), 108, 112, 268n54
teleology, 74, 155, 243 toys, 76, 176, 195
television, 193, 214, 234 transfer, 9, 28, 109, 157–58, 194,
temples (Buddhist), 160, 193 229; linguistic, 150; media, 145,
terrorism, 222, 228, 232; state, 5, 147, 180, 191–92
200–1, 223 transformation, 16, 41, 120,
testimonio, 19, 117 134, 157, 170, 183–84, 211;
Texas, 241 morphological, 154
textbooks, 11, 149 transitional justice, 217–18, 224,
textiles, 45, 166, 173, 187–88 231
textual analysis, 18 translatability, 9, 22, 54, 86; un-, 9,
textuality, 161, 172, 184, 252n7 18, 23, 53, 156
322 ❘ Index
translation, 6–9, 11–13, 16–18, United States, 10–11, 13, 19, 28,
20–21, 28, 65, 71, 91, 94–98, 32–34, 36–39, 44, 46, 50–54, 57,
102, 109, 123, 128, 145, 150–57, 110, 112, 124–25; Capitol, 201;
160, 191–92, 194; Classicist vs. Civil War, 54, 259n67; Congress,
Romantic, 96; industry, 111, 196; 36; Constitution, 36; Midwest,
Jesuit, 189; literal, 80; materiality 37; Northeast, 37; presidential
of, 181–82, 192, 196; programs, election, 201
105, 108; “traduttore traditore,” United States Information Service,
95 126
Translation Studies, 111 universal language, 67, 73, 155, 169,
translators, 15, 46, 55, 69, 90, 97, 260n12
108, 113, 122, 126, 137, 182, 196, Universidad Central de Venezuela,
219; poet-, 3, 18, 153–54 210
trata amarilla, 30 Universidad de Buenos Aires, 105;
trauma, 110, 128, 200, 206, 222, Instituto de Filología, 105
226, 230 Universidad de Puerto Rico, 10
travel guides, 48 Universidad del Salvador, 14;
travel writing, 17, 117, 133 Instituto Latinoamericano de
treaties, 35, 43, 59; “unequal,” in Investigaciones Comparadas
China, 40 Oriente y Occidente, 14, 87
Treaty of Versailles, 101 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
Trinity College, 241 México (UNAM), 160; Instituto de
tropes, 5, 17, 28, 32, 47, 50, 53–54, Investigaciones Filológicas, 160
79, 140, 197, 212 Universidade de São Paulo, 183
troubadours, 152 universities, 7–8, 13, 110–11, 136,
Ts’ui Pên, 72–73, 77–79, 102–3 219; public, 10–11
Turkey, 93 University of Leipzig, 69
tusan (“locally-born Chinese”), 14, urbanism, 14–15
241 Uruguay, 14, 129, 140, 144, 197–98,
Twain, Mark, 83; Life on the 203–4
Mississippi, 83 utopia, 5, 68–69, 194, 199, 216;
twist, 20 revolutionary, 143, 201, 224, 233
typefaces, 177, 180–83, 274n66;
Bodoni, 183; Futura bold, 181, Valcárcel, Luis E., 225
274n64; Heiti, 182; Roman, 183 Valéry, Paul, 125
typhoons, 161 vampires, 82
typography, 16, 172, 180–84 Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, Volver la vista
atrás (2020), 197, 211, 215–18,
ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), 42–43, 242
159, 165 Venezuelan-China Friendship
underdevelopment, 102 Association, 210
UNESCO, 14, 123, 176; East-West Venturelli, José 113, 118
Major Project for Intercultural Veracruz, 173
Dialogue, 14; Index Translationum, vernaculars, 10–11, 73, 133, 159;
123; The Courier, 176 Chinese, 131, 182–83; European,
united front 155
Index ❘ 323
vesre, 104–5 West Berlin, 126

Vieira, Trajano, 183 West Indies, 13
Viento del este, El (The East Wind), Wilhelm II, 48
210, 265n15 Wilhelm, Richard, 94; Chinesisch
Vietnam, 47 Volksmaerchen, 94
Vilariño, Idea, 197–98 Wilkins, Chester John, 67
Vilariño, Onetti, 197–98 Wiström, Mikael, 223–26; Compadre
violence, 222; epistemic, 19; (2004), 224–25; Tempestad en los
revolutionary, 201 Andes (2014), 223–25
Virgil, 139–40 Woolf, Virginia, 124
virtuality, 178 workers, 130, 134, 193; migrant,
visual arts, 42, 149, 160; visual 19, 37, 39–40, 44, 46, 53, 57, 60;
artists, 158, 277n24 indentured vs. free contract, 27–30
visual culture, 147, 158, 196 “world authors,” 143
visuality, 151, 159, 161 world literature, 8–9, 15–18, 20, 22,
“Volk ohne Raum,” 100–101 53, 65, 70, 92, 96, 105, 108, 126,
Volland, Nicolai, 108, 121 139, 143–44, 183–84, 216, 241;
Vossler, Karl, 11 anthologies, 8; institutions of, 5,
vuh, 175 7, 14–15, 153; vs. local literature,
84; vs. World Literature, 8–9, 12,
Wahl, François, 185 14, 86, 111, 252–53n7. See also
Waley, Arthur, 13, 89–90, 94–96, 98, Weltliteratur
153; Monkey, 89; Three Ways of World Peace Council, 107, 115
Thought in Ancient China, 87; see World War I, 72, 74
also Book of Songs world-systems theory, 16; center vs.
Wang, David Der-Wei, 125 periphery, 125
Wang Ping, 207; The East is Red World War II, 101, 208, 216
(1964), 207 writing, 5–7, 16, 34, 155–58, 161,
Wang Wei, 4, 147, 151, 153–54, 179– 164, 169, 171–73, 176–7, 184–85,
80, 274n66; “Deer Park,” 147, 188–90, 272n29; alphabetic, 164,
151, 179, 270n16 187; body, 22, 150; as “matter,”
wanshou wujiang , 166 189; nonalphabetic, 154–55;
warlords, 83, 127–28 phonetic, 155, 159
Warschaver, Fina, 6, 111, 115–20,
130–31, 133, 135, 137, 142; La Xi Jinping, 201; “Thought,” 201
casa modesa (1949), 119
Water Margin, 87. See also Sui Hu Yale University, 58, 253n16, 259n70;
Chuan (Shui hu zhuan) Beinecke Library, 58
Weinberger, Eliot, 151–52, 179, Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,
270n16; Nineteen Ways of 132, 134, 194, 201
Looking at Wang Wei (1987), 151– yangbanxi (model dramas and
52. See also Wang Wei operas), 132, 195
Weiss, Alfredo, 126–28 Yangzi River (Yangsen), 134–35
Weltliteratur, 8 Yao, Steven G., 7
Wen, Siu Kam, 6, 58–59; “En alta “Yellow Peril,” 31, 32, 49
mar” (1985), 58 “Yellow Question,” 28
324 ❘ Index
Yellow Sea, 51 Yu Tsun, 72–75, 79

Yip, Wai-Lim, 151 Yun, Lisa, 19
Yokohama, 25–26, 46–47, 52, 171; Yunnan, 72, 76, 79
Chinatown, 39 Yunque, Alvaro, 128–29
Young, Elliott, 54
Young Pioneers, 203 Zhang Longxi, 5
youth, 130, 196, 199, 203, 233 Zhuangzi, 87, 89–90, 98
Yu, Pauline, 163
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fig. 1. Edgar Holden, “Coolies embarking,” Harper’s

fig. 10. Handscroll-like book cover of Haroldo de Campos,

table 1. Jorge Luis Borges’s reviews of recent translations of Chinese

ner, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt-Strabucchi, Ana Hosne, Pablo Blitstein,

A very early version of chapter 1, published as “Chinoiseries” in

sinologists will expand their understanding of Du Fu or Wang Wei by

act of translation, a form of writing that involves the physical dislocation

pherable with the conventional tools of literary criticism. Therefore, it

The complex nature of specialized knowledge of foreign cultures is the

tures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), David Damrosch looks

fossilized notions such as indigeneity, exoticism, or modernism, as well

translated, because, after all, comparative literature—the cosmopolitan

The exile of European Romance philologists to the Americas during the

and in constant flux due to immigration—and to conduct research on

liberal and democratic debate to other venues). In an article that seeks to

My second understanding of indiscipline refers to the lack of spe-

exemplifying how, although these are essentially intended to transport

Thinking of literary artifacts instead of literatures also helps overcome

(Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque), Marín-Lacarta observes that

ican literary traditions, which, as I discuss in chapter 4, I find superficial.

Disor ien tat i ons

“Asia and Latin America” is a comingling of disciplines, corpora, and

the analysis of cultural exchanges between Latin America and Asia

gaps, cacophonies, and jagged encounters that cannot easily dislocate

Chapter 1 examines modernismo’s taste for chinoiserie as a politi-

writing from early modernity to poststructuralism, Latin American

temological and evidentiary practices to study the lifeworld of beings

Trade, Tourism, and Traffic

Modernistas loved china: porcelain, ceramics, and lacquerware furnish

había leído buenos exotistas, adoraba a Loti y a Judith Gau-

things from Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kyoto, Nankin and Pe-

Recaredo’s thirst is an intellectual one, fueled by the French readings

gift—which, given your love of things of the Yellow Kingdom, should

political discussion of Chinese labor. While I acknowledge the promi-

English-language press and travel literature, although less common in

Along with manufactured Chinese-style products, many Chinese peo-

mand for manpower increased owing to commodity bonanzas. Because

Scholars of sinophone cultures in Latin America make a valid point

calls the “full-blown Orientalist erasure” hypothesis, but still acknowl-

este puente colgante de Brooklyn, entre cuyas paredes al-

Between the bridge’s high walls of steel wire . . . there now

En vano dijo un senador que la nación que hacía gala de lla-

raza respetuosa, útil y pacífica. En vano dijo un economista

The last sentence of this passage opens a mise en abyme of immigration,

menester de altos salarios contra un pueblo de trabajadores que les ven-

“Y para terminar: el Presidente Arthur sensatísimo, niega su firma al

If Martí offers an ambivalent portrayal of the Chinese migrant commu-

Salen los chinos de sus “bungalows” y de sus sótanos y van

The Chinese vacate their “bungalows” and basements and

flowery tapestry of the Japanese prairie in autumn with their

Portrayed as famished, addicted, and misogynistic and set in a dark and

of the International Legations in Tianjin onto what he describes as

at the time in their native country is apparent in the perhaps apocryphal