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Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature (2023, Northwestern University Press, FlashPoints Series) takes us to the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries. As Rosario Hubert demonstrates, in the absence of specialized programs of study, abstract discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce.
Disoriented Disciplines understands translation as a material act of transfer, decentering the authority of the text and connecting seemingly untranslatable cultural traditions. In this book, chinoiserie, “coolie” testimonies, Maoist prints, visual poetry, and Cold War memoirs compose a massive archive of primary sources that cannot be read or deciphered with the conventional tools of literary criticism. Even canonical Latin American authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Haroldo de Campos, write about China from the edges of philology, mediating the concrete as well as the sensorial. As Rosario Hubert reveals, modernism flourishes comparatively, in contexts where cultural criticism is a creative and cosmopolitan practice.
Advocating for indiscipline as a core method of comparative literary studies, Disoriented Disciplines challenges us to interrogate the traditional contours of the archives and approaches that define the geopolitics of knowledge.
Full PDF of the book at the FlashPoints open access platform
The Arts & Humanities Workshop Series fosters scholarly discussions centered on the work of leading academics in the fields of the Arts & Humanities.
Speaker: Rosario Hubert, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Trinity College.
Moderated by Mariano Siskind, Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.
Rosario Hubert is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Trinity College, where she works on the crossover of world literature, geography, and the visual arts. Her book Disoriented Disciplines. China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature (2023, Northwestern University Press, FlashPoints Series) was recipient of the ACLA Helen Tartar First book subvention award and was funded by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is currently working on new project about poetics of the inhospitable and polar modernity.