Orientalism and Identity in Latin America: Fashioning Self and Other from the (Post)Colonial Margin. Ed. Erik Camayd-Freixas. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2013.
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Chasqui 43.1 (May 2014): 195-99
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of California, Merced
Published in Chasqui (Spring 2013)
Published in Chasqui (Spring 2013)
This timely volume of essays, which analyzes
the centuries-old encounter between Latin Americans and Arabic, Chinese, and
Japanese cultures, adds to other recent collections that look at Orientalism in
the Hispanic world. In this case, the focus is on the "the formation of
Latin American constructs of the Other and the self, from colonial times to the
present" (3). In the introduction to the volume, titled "The
Orientalist Controversy and the Origins of Amerindian Culture," the
editor, Erik Camayd-Freixas, provides an enlightening approach to Hispanic
Orientalism that concomitantly provides coherence to the volume. Perhaps its
most original contribution is his analysis from the perspective of the probable
Asian origin of Amerindian peoples. As he points out, the connection between orientalization
of both "degenerated" Asians and "primitive" Amerindians
produces a continuum of exoticization and otherness. Camayd-Freixas also presents
the traits that make Hispanic Orientalism different from that of other European
countries. He then delves into the self-orientalization that characterizes some
Latin American publications, including the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas's Pueblo enfermo (1909) and the Peruvian
César Augusto Velarde's Patología
indolatina. Next, the editor addresses the veneration of the Orient in
Latin American literary modernismo,
which, in his view, "departs from hegemonic paradigms to reconfigure the
Orient in parallel with Latin America's own peripheral, uneven, and conflictive
modernity" (8). Camayd-Freixas eventually comes to the conclusion that the
orientalization of the Amerindian has been used as an ideological tool by
Europeans, criollos, and mestizos at
the expense of the first peoples themselves. He closes his introduction with a
study of Octavio Paz's appropriation of Asian philosophy and culture to
understand his native Mexico: "Paz's poetic quest-to return to Asia in
order to arrive at America through the time bridge of dualistic thought and
ideographic writing--may be considered a culmination of Hispanic
Orientalism" (16).
Brett Levinson opens the volume with the most theoretical of its essays, "The Death of the Critique of Eurocentrism: Latinamericanism as a Global Praxis/Poiesis," which was originally published in 1997. Focusing on the topics of truth, silence and objectivity, he explores the contradictions present in the Latinamericanist and de-orientalist critiques of Orientalism and
Eurocentrism. In his view, the American academia's attempt
to redeem the purportedly "silenced" voices in the Third World ends
up reinforcing Western hegemonic concepts of truth and othering the objects of
study. At the same time, it clings to a First World/Third World dichotomy that
globalization has rendered obsolete: "De-orientalism stages the Other's
metaphorical death or silence in order to save itself--a postcolonial discourse
that perhaps should have been dissolved along with the Second World in
1989" (28). Levinson suggests that De-orientalism's exposing of the
"truths" about the "Other" as well as the illusion of
Western superiority is futile, as this is something that its readers likely
already know as untrue. In Levinson's own words, "Latin American
de-orientalism repeats Orientalism rather than critiquing it, because it
ontologizes alterity and cultural difference" (21). Among the texts that
he presents as examples of de-orientalism are Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
and Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions:
The Wonder of the New World. Levinson ends his essay by warning that
De-Orientalism runs the risk of taking advantage of the Other, instead of
freeing him, by capitalizing on the academic and intellectual marketplace.
The second essay, Hernán G. H.
Taboada's "The Mentality of the Reconquest and the Early Conquistadors,"
and the third, Christina Civantos's "Orientalism Criollo Style: Sarmiento's 'Other' and the Formation of an
Argentine identity," concentrate on Arabic influences in Latin American
during the colonial and independence periods. The first analyzes the
Eurocentric ideological remnants of the Reconquest mentality during the Spanish
Conquest of the Americas and, in particular, the association of Amerindians
with Muslims that contributed to the negative orientalization of the former. Taboada
provides numerous examples of analogies or identifications between Indians and
Muslims made in texts by Columbus, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Motolinia, and
others. In many cases, we learn, conquistadors compared their deeds to those of
heroes of the Reconquest of Spain to imply that they deserved similar rewards.
This Orientalist discourse, however, turned out to be ephemeral: Cortés, for
instance, soon abandoned the term "mosque" to refer to Aztec edifications,
calling them "temples" instead. In other cases, such as Las Casas's
writings, the conquistadors are the ones compared to Moors. The Tlaxcaltecs and
the Peruvian chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala would likewise call Spaniards who
mistreated them Jews and Moors. In the late seventeen-century, the Moor
disappears from the Latin American imaginary and is "transmogrified into
the Oriental, not because of a new real presence but because of the new
dimensions he had acquired in European discourse" (42).
Civantos's essay, taken from her 2006 Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity, looks at Sarmiento's criollo orientalism in his ambivalent comparison of Argentine gauchos with Bedouins. In particular, she studies what this comparison made in Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism and Viajes por Europa, África y América 1845-1847 meant for Argentine self-identification. When Sarmiento attempts to find tools in French-dominated Algeria to "civilize" the gaucho, the Orient suddenly acquires an important role in
In turn, Julia María Schiavone
Camacho's "Journeys and Trials of the Fu Family: Transpacific
Reverberations of the Anti-Chinese Movement in Mexico," which draws from
her 2012 book Chinese Mexicans:
Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960, reveals
the trial of Chinese immigrants during the 1930s anti-Chinese movement,
focusing in particular on one Chinese Mexican family as a microcosm of its
community. The essay begins with the story of Fu Gui, who migrated from
Guangdong Province to Sonora around the turn of the century. He married a
Mexican woman who would later die partly as a result of the stress produced by
the viciousness of the anti-Chinese movement. Sonoran officials deported the
widower and his seven young children to the U.S., where they were soon deported
to Macau. Schiavone summarizes anti-Chinese campaigns and exclusionary policies
in different Mexican states, especially in Sonora during the Mexican
Revolution. As she explains, "anti-Chinese sentiment was neither
widespread nor organized in Sonora until the revolutionary era" (82).
Economic competition and anxiety over the gender imbalance (most Chinese were
men) fueled these sentiments. The new discourse of mestizaje and the indigenismo
of the revolutionaries never benefited blacks or Asians in Mexico. In fact,
beginning in 1931, Sonora and Sinaloa carried out mass expulsions of Chinese
until their population declined dramatically. Their Mexican wives were also
considered Chinese refugees in the U.S. and deported to China, where they
congregated in Portuguese Macau: "Mexican women would fall deeper into the
interstices of the nation-state once they reached China, where in some cases
Chinese men's previous marriages removed the possibility that local authorities
would consider them Chinese citizens either" (87). President Lázaro
Cárdenas began a repatriation program of these women, leaving their husbands
behind. Schiavone ends the article by describing the Fu family's futile efforts
to reunite in Mexico and by stating that "The anti-Chinese movement and
its mass expulsions have yet to be assimilated into the Mexican national
psyche" (91).
The third cluster of essays concentrates
on Latin American Orientalist poetry. Ivan A. Schulman devotes his
"Narrating Orientalisms in Spanish American Modernism," which was
previously published in 2004, to the Modernista
cult of the Orient during the years 1880 and 1930. He questions previous
critical positions, claiming that this interest in the Orient should not only
be conceived as an intertextual phenomenon but also as a social one, since
Chinese and Japanese plastic arts were as influential in creating the Latin
American Oriental discourse as literary texts: "the engendering sources of
Modernist Orientalisms were the written word of literary texts and art
criticism (principally French), paintings, and the decorative arts. And while
exoticism stands out as the sharper of their discursive modalities, it should
not be taken at face value" (105). Among the authors reviewed are José
Martí, Efrén Rebolledo, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Rubén Darío, Julio Herrera y
Reissig, Julián del Casal, and José Juan Tablada.
Along these lines, Zoila Clark's
"Enrique Gómez Carrillo's Japan and Latin American (Peripheral)
Orientalism" revisits, from the perspective of Said's and Bhabha's
theories, the Guatemalan modernista
Enrique Gómez Carrillo's travel narratives about Japan El alma japonesa (1907) and El
Japón heroico y elegante (1912). In her view, "these chronicles may have
actually set out to prove that tradition had survived in Japan despite the
rapid modernization it underwent during this early globalizing period. Latin
American countries were at a similar juncture: trying to consolidate their
postcolonial identity after independence, while at the same time finding
themselves immersed in the mercantilist progress of the United States"
(112). , Therefore, having beaten Russia at war, Japan is presented as a model
that gives hope to Latin America. Gómez Carrillo's approach, argues Clark, is
one of veneration and respect, rather than being hegemonic or imperialistic; the
Guatemalan even identifies with the Japanese, calling them brothers.
The editor, Camayd-Freixas, also
contributes to this section with an essay titled "The Tao of Mexican Poetry:
Tablada, Villaurrutia, Paz," where he reveals Mexican avant-garde poets'
use of Eastern thought and the Japanese haiku. He argues that "Underlying
the modernista creed was a rejection
of Western rationality" (120) and that their use of synestesia is actually
related to Eastern mysticism. In his late period, Tablada introduced and
adapted the haikai into the Spanish language in a lighthearted way.
Villaurrutia, instead, "internalized, digested, and transformed influences
into a deeply personal style" (124), adopting the haikai in a more grave
way and departing from the Japanese strict metrical form. And, as announced in
the introduction, Paz used these forms of Eastern culture to reconstruct
poetically the lost high culture of Mexican indigenous peoples. He tried to
"construct modern Mexican sensibility as that 'other pole' of the Eastern
world'" (135).
The forth cluster of essays examines
the Chinese diaspora in Cuba and Panama. Rogelio Rodríguez Coronel's "The
Dragon's Footprints along Cuban Narrative," originally published in
Spanish in 2002, deals with the presence of the Chinese in Cuban literature and
culture, addressing works by Severo Sarduy, Ramón Meza, Regino Pedroso, Wifredo
Lam, José Martí, Hernández Catá, and Lezama Lima. In turn, Kathleen López's
"Renace el sueño: Remaking Havana's Barrio Chino" analyzes the Cuban
government's sponsorship of the rehabilitation of Havana's Chinatown and the
annual festival of overseas Chinese, as it influences the formation of a
Chinese Cuban identity. Unfortunately, she explains, these projects organized
by "mixed" descendants of Chinese have left the aging native Chinese--who
are actually commodified as part of the tourist circuit--as mere observers.
López studies the history of Havana's barrio chino and of the revitalization
project. Because it coincided with the government's efforts in promoting
international tourism, it has been criticized in Cuba as being more of an
economic than a cultural enterprise. As to the Chinese descendents, López
argues that "Even third-generation descendents of Chinese in Cuba have
created imaginative ties to an ancestral homeland" (166). Some are taking
advantage of the economic opportunities created by this project, and redefining
themselves as a result. In contrast, native Chinese have only seen incidental
economic benefit. In her own words, "While it has not attracted new
Chinese immigrants, the revival has created economic and cultural pull factors
to draw descendants who may have had little prior Chinese identity. It has also
enabled connections between native Chinese and descendants" (169).
Margarita Vásquez studies, in
"Of Chinese Dragons and Canaries on the Istmus of Panama," the
Chinese presence in Panamanian literature as well as Sino-Panamanian cultural
production, focusing on the struggle to preserve a collective memory. Among the
Panamanian novelists mentioned are Yolanda Camarano de Sucre, José Franco, Luis
Pulido Ritter, and Juan David Morgan. Vásquez analyzes short stories by Rosa
María Britton, Enrique Jaramillo Levi, and Rogelio Sinán. The essay also
mentions Sino-Panamanian authors such as Raúl Wong, Carlos Francisco Changmarín,
Antonio Wong, , Enrique Chuez, Carlos Wong, Lis Wong Vega, and Gloria Young,
analyzing only works by Eustorgio Chong Ruiz and César Young Núñez.
The final group of essays explores
Asian migration in contemporary South America. Debra Lee-Distefano's "Siu
Kam Wen and the Subjectification of Chinese Peruvians in 'El tramo final'"
provides an overview of Chinese migration to Peru and an analysis of Siu Kam
Wen short story "El tramo final," which shows the transnational
experience and the inner workings of Lima's Chinese and Tusán community, as
just one example of the Asian Latin American experience. In Lee-Distefano's
view, the author rewrites the Peruvian experience, representing an overlooked
part of its society: "Siu displaces the focus away from the dominant
culture, objectifying it, while subjectifying the characters" (197).
Cristina Rocha's "Zen in Brazil: Cannibalizing Oriental Flows," adapted
from her 2006 book Zen in Brazil: The
Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity, documents the reception of Japanese Zen
Buddhism in Brazil in contrast with how Japanese Brazilians understand it. As
Rocha explains, European (mostly Parisian) ideas of Orientalism, rather than
the Japanese Brazilian community, were the ones that impacted the Brazilian
cultural elite's understanding of Zen, Buddhism, and Japan. The reason for this
paradox is that Japanese immigrants were not seen as legitimate carriers of
this heritage: their manual labor carried a low social status and prestige. This
is evident in the numerous French terms used in reviews of Japanese-themed
operas. The haiku and zen were two of the most influential Japanese cultural
forms in Brazil. Yet, although Japanese immigrants have written haikus from the
inception of the immigration waves and often half of their local newspaper was
devoted to poetry, the most visible Brazilian haiku writers are not of Japanese
origin. Zen, which provided cultural capital and prestige to the Brazilian
cultural elite, was also creolized. The article closes by pointing out that Zen
is taught to new generations of Brazilians in a different way from how Nippo-Brazilians
practice it. For instance, the latter no longer feel the need to sit on the
floor; instead, they see devotion to ancestors as a priority. As Rocha points
out, "This Western construct of Zen and Buddhism in general, which is
strongly inflected by Orientalism, is so pervasive in the West that conflicts
have sprung up in many Western countries between immigrants and converts on the
issue of what constitutes authentic Buddhist practice" (214). Karen Tei
Yamashita's "Writing and Memory: Images of the Japanese Diaspora in Brazil,"
which includes a second epilogue to her novel on Japanese immigration to Brazil
Brazil-Maru, closes the volume with
an autobiographical account of her interest in the Japanese presence in Brazil.
The volume ends with the bibliography, notes about the contributors, and an
index.
Overall, with a chronological
organization from north to south, Orientalism
and Identity in Latin America: Fashioning Self and Other from the
(Post)Colonial Margin offers an excellent overview of the study of
Orientalism in Latin America, including the study of works by Asian Latin
Americans. Perhaps the only flaw is that several of the essays included were
previously published elsewhere, some of them over a decade earlier, which has
the inconvenient of missing the dialogue with recent scholarship on the same
topics. In any case, it is undoubtedly a key volume to understand the
development of studies on Latin American Orientalism and Asian Latin American
cultural production in recent years.
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