Overview

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. Representations of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016) analyses contemporary Latin American novels in which China is the main theme. Using ‘China’ as a multidimensional term, it explores how the novels both highlight and undermine assumptions about China that have shaped Latin America’s understanding of ‘China’ and shows ‘China’ to be a kind of literary/imaginary ‘third’ term which reframes Latin American discourses of alterity. On one level, it argues that these texts play with the way that ‘China’ stands in as a wandering signifier and as a metonym for Asia, a gesture that essentialises it as an unchanging other. On another level, it argues that the novels’ employment of ‘China’ resists essentialist constructions of identity. ‘China’ is thus shown to be serving as a concept which allows for criticism of the construction of fetishized otherness and of the exclusion inherent in essentialist discourses of identity. The book presents and analyses the depiction of an imaginary of China which is arguably performative, but which discloses the tropes and themes which may be both established and subverted, in the novels. Chapter One examines the way in which ‘China’ is represented and constructed in Latin American novels where this country is a setting for their stories. The novels studied in Chapter Two are linked to the presence of Chinese communities in Latin America. The final chapter examines novels whose main theme is travel to contemporary China. Ultimately, in the novels studied in this book ‘China’ serves as a concept through which essentialist notions of identity are critiqued.

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9781836245582

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Montt Strabucchi provides an enormously useful survey of representations of China in contemporary Latin American fiction. As the real China becomes less of a stranger for Latin Americans, fictional China mediates essentialisms and fetishization, a process this book traces with thoughtful detail. An important contribution to a much broader and pressing conversation."" Héctor Hoyos, author of Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel ""In her brilliant study, Montt Strabucchi astutely comes to the conclusion that the signifiers China and Chinese, as imagined and fetishized in contemporary Latin American literature, have become discursive matrixes to reframe the discourse of alterity in a more cosmopolitan way, demand a more accurate depiction of the region’s heterogeneity, and deconstruct essentialist constructions of Latin American community, identity, and difference."" Ignacio López-Calvo, University of California, Merced “This original book highlights representations of China by Argentinian, Mexican, Colombian, and Uruguayan authors. The author is well-read in the field and has many interesting insights into the literature, the field, and the positionality of these representations in Latin America. Moreover, the theories that the author uses are up-to-date and underscore many of the author’s arguments.” - Zelideth Rivas

Author Information

Maria Montt Strabucchi is Associate Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

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