Western imperialism has colonized not only territories across the globe, but it has also occupied extensive terrains of our imaginaries about the self and the other within the world mappings of cultural representation. The transatlantic is the route that has monopolized the attention when it comes to elucidating the world-exchanges that have historically shaped Latin America’s cultural formations. Similarly, the journey to China and its writing are, both in its geographic and imaginary dimensions, telling examples of intellectual trajectories dominated by the West. However, what alternative narratives could South-South connections reveal if the attention is redirected towards a transpacific trajectory?
This dissertation provides a panoramic revision of the history of the Latin American travel writing of the journey to China from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1843–1966). Approaching this question from a broad time scope and an extensive constellation of travel texts produced by a total of twelve voyagers, these pages propose a comparative analysis of how writers from Colombia, Chile and Peru imagined, interpreted, and represented through their travel impressions the different Chinas they witnessed. Furthermore, it aimed at contextualizing and identifying the political, as well as the poetical effects that this encounter caused in the way they positioned China and China’s relation with Latin America within world cartographies.
Methodologically intercepted mainly by literary criticism, this research prioritized the text as its main point of departure. Nonetheless, considering the close attention that was also paid to both the transformation of the conditions that surrounded the Latin American production of meanings of China, as well as the change that “China” had as a Latin American idea, this study is also a contribution to the fields of intellectual history and the history of ideas. Through this thesis it is argued that from the voyage of the lettered Creole to the Qing empire, to the trip of the red tourist to Communist China, this encounter and the writing of it became a space to reimagine and redraw Latin Americanness from other world coordinates. The experience of a wider world that China represented, stimulated the creation of new realities manifested in new political projects, new intellectual and artistic networks, as well as new literary circulations that surfaced at the margins of the colonial bond with the West.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: “Decolonialism and Orientalism in Latin American Literature”
Time and place: Friday 6 September 2024, 10:15 am, Sophus Bugges hus, Aud 2
The trial is open to the public.
Evaluation committee
- Associate Professor Ana Paulina Lee , Columbia University (first opponent)
- Professor Gesine Müller, University of Cologne (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Alvaro Llosa Sanz, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Anne Birgitte Rønning
Supervisors
- Professor Jorge Joaquin Locane, University of Oslo
- Associate Professor Rosario Hubert, Trinity College, USA