Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-hfldf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T02:24:28.347Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - Chinoiseries

from Part II - Networks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2023

Fernando Degiovanni
Affiliation:
City University of New York
Javier Uriarte
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University, State University of New York
Get access

Summary

Even if the trend of chinoiseries reached its peak in the eighteenth century, in Latin America it persisted and gained new overtones through Modernismo. While in Europe this was a strictly foreign aesthetic found in Asian luxury exports and artifacts mass-produced for a consumer audience, in the Americas it became a racial phenomenon as well. Together with consumer goods, Chinese laborers started migrating to the region, complicating orientalist impressions of China imported from Europe. This chapter reexamines characterizations of Modernismo’s Asian imaginaries as a mere aesthetics of evasion, and instead reads them as a political critique of Chinese labor. While it acknowledges the prominence of the cultural politics of orientalism in the movement’s transcultural imaginaries of chinoiserie, it shows that the portrayal of the China trade opens a discussion on the global division of labor, nineteenth-century migrations, and the desire over foreign bodies.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Chang, Jason Oliver. Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, Jason Oliver.Toward a Hemispheric Asian American History.” The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History. Eds. Yoo, David K. and Azuma, Eiichiro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 3049.Google Scholar
Darío, Rubén. “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China.” Obras completas vol. 4 Azul. Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1917. 157163.Google Scholar
Darío, RubénThe Death of the Empress of China.” Selected Writings. Ed. Stavans, Ilan. Trans. Andrew Hurley, Greg Simon, and Stephen F. White. New York: Penguin, 2005. 302308.Google Scholar
Gómez Carrillo, Enrique. De Marsella a Tokio: Sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón. Paris: Garnier, 1906.Google Scholar
Hu-Dehart, Evelyn. “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor of Neoslavery.” Contributions in Black Studies 12 (1994): 3854.Google Scholar
López Calvo, Ignacio. Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martí, José. Obras completas. Havana: Centro de Estudios Martianos, 2007.Google Scholar
Meagher, Arnold J. The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Labourers to Latin America 1847–1874. Bloomington: Xlibris Corporation, 2008.Google Scholar
Ng, Rudolph. “The Chinese Commission to Cuba (1874): Reexamining International Relations in the Nineteenth Century from a Transcultural Perspective.” Transcultural Studies 2 (2014): 3962.Google Scholar
Porter, David. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Rimner, Steffen. “Chinese Abolitionism: the Chinese Educational Mission in Connecticut, Cuba, and Peru.” Journal of Global History 11 (2016): 344364.Google Scholar
Schulman, Iván A. El proyecto inconcluso: La vigencia del Modernismo. Lingüística y teoría literaria. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2002.Google Scholar
Tablada, José Juan. “La crítica negativa y la obra de Best Maugard.” Introduction. Método de dibujo: Tradición, resurgimiento y evolución del arte mexicano. By Maugard, Adolfo Best. Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación, 1923. xxxxvi.Google Scholar
Tablada, José Juan Los ojos de la máscara. Antología poética. Seville: Renacimiento, 2008.Google Scholar
Tanco Armero, Nicolás. Viaje de la Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia. Paris: Imprenta de Simón Racon y Compañía, 1861.Google Scholar
Young, Elliott. Alien Nation. Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Yung Wing, . My Life in China and America. New York: Henry and Holt Company, 1909.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Chinoiseries
  • Edited by Fernando Degiovanni, City University of New York, Javier Uriarte, Stony Brook University, State University of New York
  • Book: Latin American Literature in Transition 1870–1930
  • Online publication: 14 January 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976367.010
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Chinoiseries
  • Edited by Fernando Degiovanni, City University of New York, Javier Uriarte, Stony Brook University, State University of New York
  • Book: Latin American Literature in Transition 1870–1930
  • Online publication: 14 January 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976367.010
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Chinoiseries
  • Edited by Fernando Degiovanni, City University of New York, Javier Uriarte, Stony Brook University, State University of New York
  • Book: Latin American Literature in Transition 1870–1930
  • Online publication: 14 January 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976367.010
Available formats
×