An invitation to think on the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries.
Presented by Rosario Hubert, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Trinity College
In Discussion with Koichi Hagimoto, Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Wellesley College
When: February 10th @ 5:15PM
Where: Building 14, 14E-304 (
map)
ABSTRACT: In the absence of specialized programs of study, intellectual discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce.
In Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Rosario Hubert decenters the authority of the text by 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. As Hubert demonstrates, even canonical 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.
Advocating for indiscipline as a method, Disoriented Disciplines challenges us to interrogate the traditional contours of the archives and approaches of comparative literary studies. In dialogue with the rise of China globally and the opening of the humanities beyond the university, this book poses a crucial question for the present: what does it mean to be a specialist in a foreign culture?
BIO: 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.