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

With this fascinating and theoretically sound study, Rosario Hubert has produced a key text not only in Asia-Latin American studies, but also in Latin American studies and Asian studies. In Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, she explores, from the theoretical perspectives of world literature and cosmopolitanism, not so much how Latin American authors have mimetically represented China in their works but, rather, how their own misreadings (hence, the “disoriented” in the title of the book) of Chinese culture allowed them to reconsider world literature and join global cross-cultural debates. Hubert explores the sui generis circulation of Chinese culture in Latin America outside academic circles or the discipline of sinology. She does so by focusing in different chapters on topics such as the meaning of chinoiserie for modernistas, Chinese script for vanguardia writers, and Maoist propaganda on the New Left and Latin American cultural and political debates.

Among the reasons for this “indiscipline,” as she calls it, were the intermittent closing of universities by dictatorial regimes and the absence of specialized programs for the study of Chinese language and culture. Instead, this cultural translation of seemingly untranslatable cultural traditions—understood as a material act of transfer that decentered the authority of the text—was carried out, according to Hubert, through the book industry, diplomacy and the arts.

Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature by Rosario Hubert (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2024. 324 pp.)

In this context, instead of providing close readings of literary texts, she mostly considers a large archive of primary sources composed of chinoiserie, “coolie” testimonies, travel narratives, visual poetry, Maoist prints, book reviews, periodicals, published series, short stories, Cold War memoirs and documentaries as spaces of critical intervention. Although, as Hubert explains, these conversations rarely expanded knowledge of Chinese culture in Latin America, they reveal the dispersed cultural construction of China as an object of knowledge. The circulation of Chinese culture in Latin America is a peculiar type of translation, she finds, in the sense of displacement, media adjustment, intellectual adaptation and transfer of affect. She explores the extent of the archives, debate and frameworks facilitating cross-cultural exchanges of people and objects between China and Latin America since the 19th century.

Lacking the knowledge of Chinese language, the Sinophile intellectuals that populate Disoriented Disciplines with their comparative criticism (including canonical writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, José Juan Tablada and Haroldo de Campos, among many others) read Chinese literature in translation and interpreted it in the context of their own knowledge of different literatures: “untranslability is impoverishing in terms of textual analysis, but fruitful for a material, sensorial, and affective approach to world literature” (18). According to Hubert, the infrastructure for their acquisition of literary artifacts available to them was composed of maritime trade routes, commercial navigation, human trafficking, cultural diplomacy, political militancy and key cultural agents.

In its first chapter, Disoriented Disciplines provides an against-the-grain interpretation of modernistas’ well-known taste for chinoiseries: for Hubert, they represent a political critique of Chinese labor that advocates for immigration legislation. Whereas Martí, for example, openly condemned the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, Tablada wrote disparaging remarks about the Chinese workers he saw in Japan but still valued Chinese skilled labor. In turn, Gómez Carrillo was impressed by the prosperity of Chinese merchants he found in his travels throughout colonial Asia and considered China the new power in global capitalism, which led him to believe in the beneficial nature of Chinese migration to the Americas. In this way, the chapter challenges the traditional interpretation of the modernistas’ invention of an imaginary construct of the “Orient” as mere lighthearted escapism.

In Hubert’s view, the crónicas about Oriental tourism and travel infrastructure such as steam navigation as well as about mutinies led by Chinese indentured workers written by José Martí, Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Tablada, provide crucial information not only about material but also human traffic between China and Latin America. Likewise, Rubén Darío’s and Julián del Casal’s disquisitions about the China trade not only reveal the material networks between Asia and Latin America, but also their concern with the global division of labor, human trafficking and the visual representation of foreigners.

Chapter 2 argues that Borges’s writings on China, Chinese philosophers, European sinologists and chinoiserie articulate theories of (mis)translation that challenged Spanish exiled intellectuals’ traditional (hermeneutic) Romance philology, proposing instead an alternative, Latin American, literary type of non-academic criticism. The lack of specialists or specialized books in Argentina at the time led Borges to deliberately misread, misquote or fabricate Chinese literature. Hubert considers this type of comparative literature and criticism as a statement about the potential of translating world literature from the edge. As she explains, Borges does not write about China or Chinese culture but, rather, about sinology, that is, about the ways in which China becomes an object of study. In short stories such as “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” and “La prolongada búsqueda de Tai An,” the Argentine author’s parodies imply that the China that we know is nothing but a philological invention signaling the flaws and misreadings of fascinated Western humanists that tried in vain to make sense of the country. In this way, Borges, as a “bad reader” for a foreign culture, a creator of fictional sinology, and someone who has to rely on the work of English- and German-language foreign sinologists, offers a formula to relate to foreign literatures: “Borges’s sinology is a metaliterary exercise of World Literature, which postulates indiscipline and translability as a method” (86).

Choosing the fantastic over realism, he plays the role of the Devil’s advocate by arguing that translations are superior to the original (and the further from the original, the better), thus proposing a new model of world literature. Hubert posits that his peculiar sinology without having the books on hand to write about them is, besides a type of fictional epistemology of China, an excuse for writing fiction and a critique of the nationalistic discourse of origin in philological studies.

In turn, the third chapter switches to the coincidence of the mid-century book industry and translation boom and the appearance of leftist intellectuals involved in Maoist cultural diplomacy who became agents of the Cold War in Latin America. Together, we learn, they produced a catalog of Tang poetry indirectly translated into Spanish by poets unfamiliar with the Chinese language. The chapter looks at institutions, canons, aesthetics and paratexts to show how these intellectuals influenced by French theory created a now forgotten catalog of Chinese literature in Spanish that appeared in publishing series, Communist periodicals and front organizations.

The word “twisted” in the title of this chapter refers to the informal, people-to-people diplomacy that took the place of public diplomacy. Hubert explains that, even though after the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, many Spanish-language communist publications reached Latin America through communist networks outside academic circles, the interpretations of China and Chinese culture did not necessarily go as planned by Chinese cultural diplomacy’s soft power. Instead, they followed the dynamics of Latin American cultural fields: local intellectuals used these Chinese initiatives to pursue their own singular aesthetic projects, which exposes the limitations of trying to impose a global method of reading during the Maoist years and showcases the at times unexpected relationships between politics and culture. Therefore, focusing on Argentina as a case study, the chapter demonstrates that it was thanks to Maoist diplomacy as well as the local boom in book and translation industries that there was a significant interest in Chinese culture during this period.

Chapter 4 claims that, along with plastic artists, visual poets, like Haroldo de Campos, Tablada and Sarduy, engaged—albeit superficially—with Chinese script to innovate the genre by blurring the boundaries between the word and the image of the kanji (ideograph). In this way, they—rather than lyrical poets—established a dialogue with avant-garde ideogrammatic experiments and Anglo-American modernism’s obsession with Chinese culture. The chapter addresses the material circulation of Chinese classical poetry in relation to optical and haptical creative experimentations with Chinese script, which Hubert conceives of as a type of translation that “transcreates” media temporally and geographically. The ideograph, then, is no longer considered only as text but also as texture, thus producing a transfer of tangible techniques and writing methodologies and processes that shed light on material and medial aspects of world literature. Curiously, Chinese scriptural poetics arrived in Latin America through the visual instead of the textual arts. In fact, the three authors analyzed in the chapter, Tablada, Haroldo de Campos, and Sarduy, were also visual artists and carried out their ideogrammatic translations in both their textual and plastic works.

The closing chapter homes in on the affective transmission of embodied memories in the writing of history among Latin American Maoist families who experienced the Cultural Revolution. Concentrating on the human body’s ability to affect and be affected, translation in this chapter is understood as a transfer of affect. Affect, the main theoretical thread in this chapter, is therefore understood as a bodily and transferable type of knowledge. From this perspective, Hubert revisits the relationship between art and politics, as well as the afterlives of political commitment and cultural heritage by exploring recent memoirs, documentaries, and novels. These were produced by “red diapers,” that is, children of long-term Latin American visitors (fellow travelers of Maoism hired as Spanish and Portuguese instructors, journalists, translators, proofreaders) who were educated in revolutionary China. The post-memory, affective archives of this second generation (including the memories of their performances as children during the Cultural Revolution) contest, according to Hubert, their intellectual parents’ beliefs in international solidarity and political art.

This transfer of affect in the writing of contemporary history produces knowledge that ends up being contained in the artistic form of oral and visual records. One of the tropes in these works, explains Hubert, is the disenchantment upon realizing that their parents’ sacrificed family life in the pursuit of utopian political ideals sometimes only to end up falling from grace of the Cultural Revolution. The chapter also records the dire consequences of the parents’ stifling political expectations for their children: the initial euphoric political passion guided the pedagogy chosen for their children, but their offspring ended up overwhelmed by a disoriented disillusionment with Maoism.

An afterword explains why the author ended up ridding herself of the chapter where she had planned to include close readings of a few mimetic Latin American novels about China that she had read. Instead, she adds, she became more interested in the circulation of these texts. The title of the afterword, “Imposture,” refers to her favorite of these novels, Santiago Gamboa’s Los impostores, which encompasses in fictionalized form all the translations of China included in Disoriented Disciplines: “coolie” migration, transplantation of sinology, transfer of ideograms, and creolization of Maoism.

Together, these beautifully written and thoroughly researched chapters reconsider the contingent, unplanned, and “undisciplined” Latin American infrastructures of comparative criticism to draw conclusions about the geopolitics of knowledge and the political undertones of representation. Again, translation, one of the keywords in the book, is understood as the displacement of the visual and haptic qualities of a cultural artifact through time, space, and different cultures. Along the way, Disoriented Disciplines advocates for this type of alternative cosmopolitan indiscipline that, blending the concrete and the sensorial, appeared at the juncture of the literary market, commerce and diplomacy, as a methodological option for comparative literary studies outside the philological field. The best theoretical exploration of the writing of China in Latin America to date, this book recovers, along the way, a never-before analyzed catalog of texts in variegated media. Its main message is that the representations and circulation of Chinese culture (a culture often considered unreadable and undecipherable with conventional critical tools in the region) went well beyond the boundaries of the academic disciplines through different types of “undisciplined translation,” including ethnography, philology, international relations, linguistics and transfer of affect.

Ignacio López-Calvo is Presidential Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of 32 books, including 9 monographs. The last two are The Mexican Transpacific (2022) and Saudades of Japan and Brazil (2019).