Orientaciones trasnpacificas is a wide-ranging study that
presents a cross-temporal examination of the discernible
orientation toward East and South Asia that pervades the
work of well-known intellectual and artistic Mexican figures. It
goes from the later years of the regime of Porfirio Diaz in the
1900s to the cultural imaginaries of nationalism in the 1920s, and
from the Cold War to the global spread of neoliberalism at the turn
of the new century. Understanding Orientalism as a form of situated
and historical
orientation grounded in Mexico's own
(post)colonial formation, the book argues that, although after its
independence Mexico's important commercial connection with the
Asian continent became attenuated, East and South Asia continued to
be a crucial point of reference for Mexico to assert global
centrality and to anchor discourses of cultural singularity or
political exception.
By tracing the intellectual turn to Asia in Jose Juan Tablada's
travel narratives and art essays, Manuel Alvarez Bravo's
photography landscapes, Jose Vasconcelos's writing about
mestizaje and in his literacy campaigns, Roger Bartra's
Marxist political economy writings, Rafael Bernal's hard-boiled
novel, Marcela Rodriguez and Mario Bellatin's musical composition
in Ciudad Juarez, and Shinpei Takeda's art installations in
Tijuana, the book recasts the colonial emphasis on a transatlantic
relationship with Europe and displays a transpacific and planetary
imagination--eschewing the Atlantic dialectic between ex-colony and
metropole--that defined Mexican conceptualizations of literary and
cultural modernity. Thus,
Orientaciones trasnpacificas shows
that Mexican orientalism played an instrumental (though often
unremarked) role in the cultural definitions that became
fundamental to the field of Mexican and Latin American Studies,
such as the notion of hybrid modernity (in racial, aesthetic,
economic, or temporal terms).