Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections: Latin American Influence in Asia [1st ed.] 9783030557720, 9783030557737

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HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND ASIA

Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections Latin American Influence in Asia Edited by Jie Lu · Martín Camps

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia Series Editors Ignacio López-Calvo University of California, Merced Merced, CA, USA Kathleen López Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA

This series is devoted to the diversity of encounters between Latin America and Asia through multiple points of contact across time and space. It welcomes different theoretical and disciplinary approaches to define, describe, and explore the histories and cultural production of people of Asian descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. It also welcomes research on Hispano-Filipino history and cultural production. Themes may include Asian immigration and geopolitics, the influence and/or representation of the Hispanic world in Asian cultures, Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Hispanic world and Asia, and other transpacific and south-south exchanges that disrupt the boundaries of traditional academic fields and singular notions of identity. The geographical scope of the series incorporates the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean region. We welcome single-author monographs and volumes of essays from experts in the field from different academic backgrounds. About the series editors: Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced, USA and director of the UC Merced Center for the Humanities. He is author of several books on Latin American and US Latino literature. He is coexecutive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. Kathleen López is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. She is author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (2013) and a contributor to Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2015), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (2016), and Imagining Asia in the Americas (2016). Advisory Board: Koichi Hagimoto, Wellesley College, USA Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, USA Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh, USA Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University, USA Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Southeast Missouri State University, USA Shigeko Mato, Waseda University, Japan Zelideth María Rivas, Marshall University, USA Robert Chao Romero, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Lok Siu, University of California, Berkeley, USA Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York, USA Laura Torres-Rodríguez, New York University, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15129

Jie Lu  •  Martín Camps Editors

Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections Latin American Influence in Asia

Editors Jie Lu Department of Modern Languages and Literature University of the Pacific Stockton, CA, USA

Martín Camps Department of Modern Languages and Literature University of the Pacific Stockton, CA, USA

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia ISBN 978-3-030-55772-0    ISBN 978-3-030-55773-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Constructing a New Field of Inquiry: Latin America in Asian Literary and Cultural Studies  1 Jie Lu and Martín Camps Theoretical Frameworks   2 Literary And Cultural Contexts   7 Literary And Cultural Texts  11 Works Cited  16 Part I Latin America and the Philippines in the Transpacific Connections  19 2 A Peripheral, South-South Literary Exchange: Balmori and the Reception of Latin American Modernismo in the Philippines 21 Ignacio López-Calvo Works Cited  42 3 Filipino Poet Jesús Balmori: Testimonials of His Mexican Journey Passing Through Japan (1932–1934) 45 Axel Gasquet Vicissitudes and Conjectures of the Mexican Journey  47 Japanese Deviation of the Mexican Chronicles  51

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Verse Stamps of Mexican Popular Culture  54 Conclusion  63 Works Cited  65 4 Transpacific: The Queering of Philippine and Hispanic American Literatures 67 Eugenio Matibag Beauty Pageant in Manila  67 A Translocal Homoerotics  70 A Place Without Limits  74 Where Inversion Is the Dominant Pattern  76 The Game of “Genderfucking”  79 Sexual and Political Revolution  82 Power, Desire and Resistance  84 Hermaphrodites and mga baklá  87 Beyond the Closet, More Closets  91 The Woman Most in Need of Liberation  95 Works Cited  96 Part II Shared Issues of Identities, Traumas and Migrant Experiences Across Two Continents 101 5 Disrupted Nationalisms in Times of War: Young Ha-Kim and José Revueltas103 Martín Camps Korean Immigration Amid the Mexican Upheaval 105 Trauma and Identity Narratives of the Korean War 113 Conclusion 119 Works Cited 120 6 Common Ground: Shared Textuality and Visuality in China and Latin America123 Miguel Rojas Sotelo Germination 126 Body Territory 128 Seeding and Embodying 135

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Black Soil and Mountain-eaten Beasts 139 Harvesting and Dispersion 150 Works Cited 157 7 Korean Reality Television-Travel Shows in Constructing Latin American Cultural Identities (2010–Present)161 Min Suk Kim The Inclusion of Latin America into Korean Television Productions 164 Latin America in Korean Media: Youth Over Flowers (2014) in Peru 167 Latin Americans in Korean Media: Welcome, First Time in Korea? (Mexico) 174 Conclusion 180 Work Cited 182 Part III Magical Realism in Its Asian Turn 185 8 Beauty Is a Wound: Retelling Modern Indonesian History Through Magical Realism187 Marco Ramírez Rojas Beauty Is A Wound, a Novel in a Magical Realist Mode 191 Dewi Ayu’s Family Story As Indonesia’s Romance of National Formation 196 The Return of The Repressed And The Ghosts of History 204 Conclusion 205 Works Cited 206 9 Representing History, Trauma and Marginality in Chinese Magical Realist Films209 Jie Lu Cinematic Magical Realism 214 History and Trauma in The Sun Also Rises 216 Experiences of Marginality in Hello, Mr. Tree! 221 Conclusion 228 Works Cited 229

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10 Transcontinental Journey of Magical Realism: A Study of Indian Literatures’ Response231 Vibha Maurya Two Geoepistemic Spaces of Magical Realism 232 India  236 Horizontal Dialogue Between Senapati and Márquez  241 Narrative Transculturation in Uday Prakash 245 Marvelous Realist Novels of Vijayan and Carpentier in Conversation 248 Conclusions 254 Works Cited 255 Index257

Notes on Contributors

Martín  Camps  Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American Studies. He is the author of Cruces fronterizos: hacia una narrativa del desierto [Border Crossings: Towards a Narrative of the Desert] (2008) and four editions: Dialogues on the Delta: Approaches to the City of Stockton (2018), La sonrisa afilada: Enrique Serna ante la crítica [A Smile Sharp as a Blade, Enrique Serna’s Writings] (2018), and Acercamientos a la narrativa de Luis Arturo Ramos [Critical Essays on L.  A. Ramos] (2003). He has published more than 30 articles and book chapters in Latin American fiction, and he is the author of six books of poetry, one novel, and two book translations. Axel  Gasquet  is Professor of Latin American literature and culture at University Clermont Auvergne, and principal researcher at IHRIM of French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is the author of La cultura extraterritorial Argentina (forthcoming), El llamado de Oriente, historia cultural del orientalismo argentino 1900–1950 (2015), El cielo protector, la literatura de viajes (2015), Oriente al Sur, el orientalismo literario argentino (2007; French edition 2010, English edition 2020). He is the editor of Cultural and Literary Dialogues between Asia and Latin America (forthcoming), Extremo Occidente y Extremo Oriente (2018), Repenser la relation asiatique: de la Conquête à la Rencontre (2018), Les Orients désorientés, déconstruire l’orientalisme (2013); Cuentos Filipinos by Benigno del Río (forthcoming); Noli me tangere by José Rizal (2019); Contes de la Pampa by Manuel Ugarte (2015, 2018).

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Min  Suk  Kim  is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation “Hallyu Fandom in Latin America: New Media Self-Fashioning of Transcultural Metropolitan Youth Beyond the Nation-State” analyzes the consumption and reception of Korean popular culture by contemporary, digital-literate youth in Latin America. Her research focuses on the ways in which young adults (mostly lower-class young females at college and/or sexual minorities) adopt, hybridize, and indigenize Korean popular culture into their local contexts in order to (re)imagine and fashion their identities beyond social constraints of the nation-state. Ignacio  López-Calvo is University of California, Merced Presidential Endowed Chair in the Humanities, and Professor of Latin American literature. He is the author of more than ninety articles and book chapters, and eight monographs and twelve edited books on Latin American and U.S. Latino literature and culture. He is the co-founder and co-­executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World and theco-executive director of Palgrave Macmillan book series “Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia” and the Anthem Press book series “Anthem Studies in Latin American Literature and Culture Series.” Jie Lu  is Professor of Chinese Studies & Film Studies at the University of the Pacific; the author of Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization (2005); co-editor of China and New Left Vision: Political and Cultural Interventions (2012); editor of China’s Literature and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century (2008), and guest-­ editor of two special issues in Journal of Contemporary China (03, 08). Eugenio Matibag  is Emeritus Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University. His research covers the field of World Literatures in Spanish, especially of the Caribbean and the Philippines. His publications include two books: Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Reflections in Narrative (UP of Florida, 1996), and Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, State and Race on Hispaniola (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). His articles on Latin American and Philippine literature and culture have appeared in journals that include Revista Hispánica Moderna, Kritika Kultura, Dispositio, Caribbean Quarterly, Perspectives on Arts and Humanities Asia, and Hispamérica.

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Vibha Maurya  is a retired professor of Hispanic Studies from Department of Germanic & Romance Studies, university of Delhi, India. She has published dozens of research articles on Spanish and Latin American literature and society in Indian and foreign journals. She is the editor of several books, and the translator of Spanish and Latin American writers and poets like Don Quixote, Pablo Neruda, and García Márquez (into Hindi). She won the Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor of the Government of Chile in 2004; and was elected to the Spanish Royal Academy as Corresponding Member in India in 2010. Marco  Ramírez  Rojas  is an Assistant Professor at Lehman College— City University of New York. His areas of research are twentieth century Latin American poetry, and contemporary narratives. His essays have been published in Revista Hispanófila, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Estudios de Literatura Colombiana, Chasqui Revista de Literatura. He co-edited Narrativas del miedo: Terror en obras literarias, cinemáticas y televisivas de Latinoamérica (Peter Lang, 2018). He co-­ translated a selection of fragments from Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats (Lost & Found, 2019). He serves as the editor of the academic journal Ciberletras. Miguel Rojas-Sotelo  works in the nexus culture, history and the environment from an engage, situated, and contextual approach. His recent books Irrupciones, compresiones, contravenciones. Arte contemporáneo y política cultural en Colombia (2017) and BE PATIENT | SE PACIENTE Artistic and medical entanglements in the work of Libia Posada (2018) are a testimony of such method. He won the 2017–2018 National Prize in Art Criticism by the Colombian Ministry of Culture with his essay “Sobernía Visual in Abya Yala.” He lived and traveled in China during 2018 and 2019 where he developed the comparative approach to his contribution to this volume.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10

Jesús Balmori, on the left. (Excelsior Magazine. Gus Vibal Private Collection. Courtesy of Jorge Mojarro) Photo of the publication of Jesús Balmori’s short story “La princesa está triste” (The Princess Is Sad), in Revista Filipina/The Philippine Review in March 1919 Libia Posada participatory workshop for Signos Cardinales (2008). (Courtesy of the artist) Signos Cardinales (2008) an ongoing project by Libia Posada. (Detail). (Courtesy of the artist) Signos Cardinales (2008). Detail & Conventions. (Courtesy of the artist) Libia Posada. From the series Cuadernos de Geografía. (Courtesy of the artist) Lección de anatomía (2003–2004). (Courtesy of the artist) Qin Ga. Miniature Long March (2002–2005). © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art. (Courtesy of the artist) Remotely following the Long March team’s progress in 2002. © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art & Wang Jixing, Red Star Over China, 2019. (Courtesy of the artist) Behemoth (2016) Zhao Liang. (Stills from the film) Qin Ga, Where Are You Going? From the project 围栏计划 [“Grassland Fence Project”] (2019). Installation. © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art. (Courtesy of the artist) Qin Ga, 围栏计划 [“Grassland Fence Project”], 2019. Videos, pictures, painted wallpaper, and wire. © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art. (Courtesy of the artist)

23 26 131 132 133 134 135 137 137 143 144 145

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.11 Fig. 6.12

El Cerrejón Coal Mine. & Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego, Pájaros de Verano (2018). (My photo and stills from the film) Lixin Fan, Last Train Home (归途列车), 2009; Cary Fukunaga, Sin Nombre, 2009; Diego Quemada-­Díez, La Jaula de Oro, 2013. (Stills from the films)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Constructing a New Field of Inquiry: Latin America in Asian Literary and Cultural Studies Jie Lu and Martín Camps

Asia has been described in Latin American literature as exotic, but also as inspiring. This is especially true in the works of early modernists such as Rubén Darío, José Juan Tablada, Efrén Rebolledo, Gómez Carrillo, Aluíso de Azevedo, José Martí, and Juan del Casal. In her travelogue, Traveling Thousands of Miles in Mountains and Rivers, San Mao, a Taiwanese writer, describes Latin America’s spectacular natural scenery along with its populations, and views this part of the world as her spiritual home, an area where she can contemplate love, life, and human sufferings. Latin America’s literary influence in Asia, though neglected in academic circles, has been profound and began to intensify since the 1970s. This anthology brings Asian and Latin American scholars together to explore how Latin

J. Lu (*) • M. Camps Department of Modern Languages and Literature, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_1

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American concepts and imageries have inspired and influenced Asian writers whose countries share Latin America’s colonial and postcolonial experiences, including the pains and sufferings resulting from all forms of exploitation. These essays aim to make a contribution to Asian Studies by tracing the Latin American-Asian connections and by increasing its frames of reference, including the context of the Global South1 and the diverse trajectories of globalization.

Theoretical Frameworks Global geopolitical and geoeconomic reality has changed in this new millennium. Ariel C. Armony summarizes this change succinctly: “The center of gravity of the world’s economy is shifting toward emerging economies,” a shift that has been stimulated by Asia-Latin America interactions (Armony v.). Until the late 1980s, Japan was the only Asian country with significant political, economic, and demographic ties to Latin America. After its economic slowdown in the late 1980s and 1990s, Japan strengthened these relations, aware of new Asian competitors like China, South Korea, and India, which became involved in this market in 2000. These countries then hoped to diversify their economies and to strengthen their geopolitical position, while Latin American countries began to recognize the importance of Asia in their own global and economic aspirations. The Latin American-Asian connection is not only remapping the transpacific trade, but also influencing the Europe-U.S.-led globalization by creating trajectories other than those created during a colonial and post-colonial past. Thus, this century is witnessing intensified transnational links and networks between these two regions, far beyond those historically established by the West. In contemporary geopolitics, a “reorientation” is taking place in which emerging economies are moving away from the “American model,” partially on account of increasing American isolationism and the vertical structure of imperil power, and developing ties with industrialized nations that are increasingly accepting horizontal relationships. Such new geoeconomic dynamics are reflected in a growing body of literature that analyzes 1  The Global South is broadly understood to include the former Third-world countries, or developing countries, or non-European/U.S. postcolonial countries.

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the role that Asian countries have played in Latin American economies (in trade, investments, foreign policies, international relations, and geopolitical issues). These studies are typically undertaken from a Latin American perspective and tend to focus on topics such as China’s economic challenge to the United States in the region. They appear in major journals on Latin America published in the United States, Britain, and Latin American (Armony & Aníbal Pérez-Liñan). Citing specific cases, these studies raise general concerns about the Asian presence in Latin America. For example, the ever-expanding Chinese presence in the region is analyzed to determine whether China is following known patterns of transnational investment, migration, and diplomacy (Armony & Strauss 8), or it is offering “alternative and concrete examples of economic success and heightened global influence that are quite separate from the United States” (12). While China, Japan, South Korea, and India clearly represent different models of development, the question remains whether their experiences imply a new form of globalization. Significant to the focus of our anthology is the fundamental concern, raised by these studies, regarding the presence of “benchmark” cases, predominantly referencing the United States, against which Latin American countries are measured and viewed (Armony & Strauss 12). For instance, in discussing public attitudes toward China’s presence in Latin America and in assessing China’s economic and soft power, the United States is used as the baseline (Carreras 2). Although Armony and Strauss have shown deep concern with America as the “benchmark,” their analysis of China’s role still uses the United States as the point of reference. The “known patterns” they mention refer to the economic and cultural patterns established in Latin America by the United States and Europe. The use of the American paradigm in discussions of Asian-Latin American relationships raises the questions that have also been introduced by scholars of comparative literature, area studies, ethnic studies, and world literature. As Rey Chow observes regarding the field of comparative literature, Europe is the universal point of reference: This hierarchical formulation of comparison, which may be named ‘Europe and Its Others,’ remains a common norm of comparative literary studies in North America today. In this formulation, the rationale for comparing hinges on the conjunction and; the and, moreover, signals a form of supplementation that authorizes the first term, Europe, as the grid of reference, to which may be added others in a subsequent and subordinate fashion…. The

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and thus instigates not only comparison but also a politics of comparison…. These other histories, culture, and languages remain, by default, undifferentiated—and thus never genuinely on a par with Europe—within an ostensibly comparative framework. (quoted in Kim 99)

If the West is used as the sole point of reference, it becomes “an invisible yet naturalized context” while the rest of the world is assumed to provide only “local and/or particular knowledge” (Kim 99). Consequently, in comparative or area studies, the “local” and “particular” are relegated to a second tier while the West’s universality is affirmed. In discussing European novels, Franco Moretti points out that the “movement [of influence] from one periphery to another (without passing through the center) is almost unheard of; that movement from the periphery to the center is less rare, but still quite unusual, while that from the center to the periphery is by far the most frequent” (112). Moretti’s point does not apply to European literature alone; it speaks to all comparative/area studies. Where Western categories dominate the “politics of comparison,” all alternative frameworks by which to understand global situations are precluded. Direct comparisons between the so-called “locals” or “particulars” of areas outside of Europe and North America are prevented. As a result, in the center-­ periphery relations that Stuart Hall calls the West and the rest, the periphery-to-periphery relations are “silenced, marginalized, and delegitimized” (Kim 106). To confront the West’s dominant role in this “politics of comparison,” concerted efforts by scholars from multiple fields have begun to challenge centers/peripheries dichotomies and the hierarchical production of knowledge.2 These efforts do more than simply activate a “dislocation” of current Western paradigms (Naoki Sakai’s word quoted in Kim); they suggest new epistemological approaches for the understanding of the changing global dynamics. The special issue on remapping the Transpacific that highlights less-explored Asia-Latin American “connections” and espouses hybrid and myriad ways of understanding the regions aims to “unsettle simplistic oppositions between universal and particular” and to move beyond “naturalized relationships” (Bachner & Erber vii). Broadening the Western canon for World Literature, Muller, Locane, and Loy regard the 2  This is also reflected in Cold War Studies and Global 60s Studies. For a “revisionist” and thorough study of the Cold War in Asia, see Zheng, Yangwen, Hong’an Liu and Michael Szonyi.

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Global South as “the location where new visions of the future are emerging and where the global political and decolonial society is at work” (3). They regard the Global South as both a geopolitical and epistemological concept. This conceptualization is suggested by “the struggle and conflicts between imperial global domination and emancipatory and decolonial forces” (Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo, quoted in Muller 3). Ignacio López-Calvo proposes that Asian-Latin American literature introduces the negotiation of plurality of identities beyond national and cultural boundaries, as well as the formations of different transnational identities based on the sociopolitical and economic circumstances (18); he calls for “planetary consciousness” as foundational elements for a critical model (4) or geopolitical paradigm that avoids Eurocentric assumptions. The introduction to Sur/South Poetics and the Politics of Thinking Latin American/India indicates that “cultural South-South relationships,” including those within the Global South itself, are neglected (Klengel/ Wallner 8). “The Global South” has become a shorthand for non-­ European and postcolonial societies and a region excluded from the Global North’s capitalist organization. The Global North has spun theories in which the South is assumed to be synonymous with uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states, and nations fraught with corruption, poverty, and strife. The South is rarely seen “as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events” (Comaro/Comaro quoted in Klengel & Wallner, 10). In their examination of the cultural relationship between Latin America and India, Klengel and Wallner advocate “the ecology of knowledge.” This perspective emphasizes the plurality of heterogeneous knowledge and inter-knowledge, and regards a South-South relationship as a “horizontality” of similarities and a mutual Sur/South understanding as opposing the bipolar vertical structure of difference (13). Here the South-South is an ontological and epistemological location that moves to the forefront as “active elements in the discourse” (14) in addition to its value as a position from which to advocate for the transformation of unequal power relationships that dominate the global production of knowledge. A conclusion of this perspective is that the Global South is not only a site of anti-imperialism, as Latin America clearly is, but also of knowledge production. In their book, Border as Method, or, The Multiplication of Labor, Mezzadra and Neilson challenge the standard conceptual mapamundi by composing new cartographies that redistribute power balances. These constructs respond to renewed efforts by the North to construct

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granite walls and steel fences to maintain the status quo and impede a global flow from South to North. These new cartographies divide the world into three groups: the globals, locals, and mobals. This last group tracks migrants, people tired of waiting for civic peace or employment to arrive in their home countries so they move to more promising areas. These efforts make obvious that current borders exist to protect a divisive global economic system and Northern interests. Then again, “the border can be a method precisely insofar as it is conceived of as a site of struggle” (18). So, to turn the discursive tools of neocolonialism against itself, the Global South can make the border and cartography sites of new knowledge production and alternative conceptual reconfiguration. In his critique of the Eurocentric paradigm, Kuan-Hsing Chen starts with an analysis of recent historical developments in East Asia. He then calls for, in Asia As Method, multiple frames of reference. He proposes using “the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt” (212). He also calls for an ethics based on critical syncretism, a “decolonization’s strategy of identification, to avoid reproducing colonialism and to go beyond the politics of resentment that binds colonizer and colonized together” (72). As Chen points out, the West has created “a structure of knowledge, a series of images” that “the backward and disposable is differentiated from the desirable and progressive” as depicted by Stuart Hall within the geographical space of the West, but in the third world, “the West has become the object of both desire and resentment” (217). To dilute anxiety over the West and to dislocate it without fear of reproducing it as the Other (Chen 223), the Global South should become the loci of producing new knowledge and a new “imaginary horizon for comparison” and a method of “inter-inferencing” (Chen 223). Drawing on such theoretical frameworks and “de-colonial thinking” (Mignolo, 2007, 111), this volume specifically addresses the interaction between Latin America and Asia. While echoing the calls for Asia/Third World as method (Chen) and Asia-Pacific as method (Kim), we propose forming a new field of inquiry in Asian Studies that incorporates Latin American intellectual and cultural influences. Latin America-Asia connections should be viewed as a means to make sense of the regions, transforming knowledge production, reckoning with the challenges of Western

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epistemology, modernization and development, and locating Latin America-Asia in the broader Global South as “a process and practice” (Kloß 8).

Literary And Cultural Contexts As global geopolitical and geoeconomical structures shift, understanding the theoretical and practical linkages between Latin America, Asia, and other regions in the Global South can be instructive for these areas as they continue to be engaged in the incomplete project of what Chen terms deimperialization and decolonialization or anti-U.S. led neo-imperialism since World War II. In Asia, there have been two broad movements following the War. First, American neo-imperialism was protected by “the empire of military bases” (Chalmers Johnson’s words quoted in Shu & Pease 17) bolstered by the postwar collaboration between U.S. Cold-War neocolonialism, Japanese colonialism marked by its project of “shedding Asia,” and Taiwan’s refusal to be associated with the Third World (Chen 20). Cold War geopolitics painted, from 1945–1975, East Asia red with China, North Korea, and North Vietnam as threats. The region was redefined as a point of conflict between democracy and totalitarianism. Postwar anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism were thus transformed into the confrontation between totalitarian communism and free democratic capitalism (Cumings 2010 discussed in Shu & Pease 11). American-led Cold War neocolonialism, according to Sakai, was responsible for postponing “the process of decolonization, the process in which individuals gradually learn how to form new social relations that are not premised on the legacies and vanities of colonialism” (quoted in Shu & Pease 16).3 Though overshadowed by U.S. Cold-War politics, Asia witnessed several concerted decolonial efforts after WWII, including Nehru’s pan-Asian non-alignment in India and Mao’s Asian-African-Latin American “Third-­ Worldism” (Kang Liu 20–27). The Bandung Conference in 1955 featured, among the first, unified global anti-colonialist and anti-neocolonialist efforts of Third World countries. In attendance, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai stated that “if we seek common ground in doing away with the 3  For Latin America, Cold War politics, regarding imperialist domination, may be seen in the Monroe doctrine of “America for Americans” that viewed Latin America as the U.S.’ backyard. In the sixties, this situation was exacerbated with the Cuban Missile crisis and the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the first elected socialist president in the Western Hemisphere. This experiment with communism was promptly suppressed by a U.S.-backed military intervention to prevent its further spread in the Americas.

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sufferings and calamities under colonialism, it will be very easy for us to have mutual understanding and respect, mutual sympathy and support, instead of mutual suspicion and fear, mutual exclusion and antagonism” (quoted in Yoon 235). This statement strategically put China’s semi-­ colonial history into the late history of colonialism suffered by many Asian and African countries, and demonstrated China’s interest in a Third-World leadership role particularly one against colonialism and neocolonialism. For many formerly colonized or semi-colonized Asian countries, such as China, Koreas, and India, the colonial/neocolonial experiences have largely constituted and shaped their nationalism, national struggles, and modern identities. 4 Along with the U.S.-Soviet superpower competition, the postcolonial discourse also laid a foundation for the anti-imperialist front among Third-­ World countries, including socialist China (Wilcox 787). However, postcolonial movements of national independence and revolution in Asia, when incompatible with the dominant Cold War politics and ideology, were either ignored or rewritten as a struggle between authoritarian communism and democratic capitalism. For instance, the view of China’s socialist revolution as a post-colonial struggle was avoided in the Anglophone representation of Mao’s China and its culture (Wilcox 787). In addition to their representation in the Third-World’s anti-colonial front, Asian anti-colonial and postcolonial movements were active in the formation of the Third-World literary alliances, including the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau (AAWB) (Yoon 240–245, Vanhove) and the call for constructing national cultures (Wilcox 785). While promoting Third World literature and developing a national culture that reflected anti-colonial assumptions, the AAWB provided an alternative literary history rooted in colonial and decolonial experiences. Crucial to achieving the Third-World “cultural cooperation” was “translation to and from the languages of member countries, and the establishment in every member country of a planning body to coordinate the translation movement” (Yoon, 240–245). In the spirit of the Bandung Conference and along the AAWB’s literary objectives, China was actively engaged in the introduction of Third-World literature and poetry. Latin America’s anti-colonial and anti-postcolonial literature as well as their revolutionary leaders figured highly in these cultural endeavors. For instance, the series of Documents of Communist 4  For the Bandung Conference in the context of the Global South, see Yoon’s “Bandung Nostalgia and the Global South.”

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Parties in Various Countries, published by the Foreign Ministry’s World Affairs Press, included The Courageously Struggling Latin American Communist Parties of eight Latin American countries. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 received popular attention and support in China and led to publications on the Cuban economy, policies, history, and agriculture as well as to the publication of all the poems and essays on the Cuban Revolution written by Pablo Neruda in People’s Daily, the official Chinese newspaper (Teng, 184). A Chinese official journal also published an article to voice China’s support for Panama’s struggle against the USA (Mao & Shi 142–143). In 1974, Mao reformulated the “three worlds theory” to call for an international united front of diverse people and countries of different social systems against the hegemony of superpowers of the U.S. and USSR (Mao, 1994, Mao & Shi, 144). His revolutionary theory should be regarded as “a Third World, anti-imperialist and counter-­ hegemonic ideology” (Liu 23). In the broad anti-imperialist struggle, China regarded Latin America as an important player. It saw Latin American efforts to initiate the regional economic integration—such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO)—as part of the anti-imperialist and nationalist movements (Zhang & Wang, 129). In this political environment, China focused its translation of Latin American literature on anti-imperialist works represented by Pablo Neruda (Chile), Nicolás Guillén (Cuba), Jorge Amado (Brazil), José Martí (nineteenth-century Cuban revolutionary poet), Che Guevara (Argentina/Cuba), José Mancisidor and Mariano Azuela (Mexico), and others.5 The introduction of revolutionary works from Latin America, as well as from Africa and Asia, though limited in numbers at the time, formed the translation tradition in early socialist China. It also demonstrated its endeavor to break out of the Cold-War opposition between China and the West via its alliance with Third World countries. This tradition continues today as demonstrated by a Latin American Film Month held in July 2009 titled “The Open Veins: Latin American Images,”6 which featured themes of postcolonial experiences, aftermath, and struggles.7 5  For more Latin American writers and titles published in China from 1950s–1970s, see Gao, Wen, Wu & Xia; for Neruda, see Teng. 6  The title of the film series is based on the major work by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America. 7  The four films featured in the Latin American Film Series were: Machuca, Chile; El violín [The Violin], Mexico; Memoria del saqueo [Recalling the Pillage ] and El viaje [The Voyage] Argentina (Li, 77–78).

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Latin America’s cultural/literary influence in Asian countries has intensified since the 1970s with the massive and extensive translation and introduction of Latin American literature across the board, especially “Boom literature.” Its broad and profound impact is, in many ways, still reflected along the lines of “Third-world consciousness” (Rushdie quoted in Muller 163) and with the sense of uniqueness captured by the magical-realist world of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Interestingly, a working-class Dalit writer from India’s untouchable class identified more with García Márquez’s works in translation than with the works of Salman Rushdie (Wray, 70). This response represents the experiential and emotional resonation caused by García Márquez’s works among Third World readers. In general, the magical-realist imaginings and its stylistic devices provide ways to understand contemporary Asia’s as well as Latin America’s national histories and cultural traditions in postcolonial conditions. This style also points the way to grasp the reality of mixed temporalities and spatialities, and how to make sense of the local/regional at a time when these were already perceived as the Other in modernity. Magical Realism is certainly not limited to Third-World thinking and writing, but informs thoughts and reflections on a variety of issues such as modernity/postmodernity across the globe. This is particularly shown, in our Latin American-Asian connections, by contemporary Japanese films that engage with their cultural and sociopolitical conditions via Magical Realism’s aesthetics and modes of representation.8 Latin American literary/cultural influences have now gone beyond “El Boom” represented by Magical Realism. In the context of continued insurgency and national liberation movements, Post-Boom Latin American literature turned its attention more to social reality. Testimonio, among other trends, came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s as a new kind of narrative—a cross-disciplinary genre that includes the novel, autobiography, ethnography, and historiography. This new narrative allowed authors to depict the individual and collective experiences of socially marginalized

8  For contemporary Japanese magical realist films, see the chapter, “Postmodernism and Magic Realism in Contemporary Japanese Cinema” in Bingham. See also “Animated World of Magical Realism: An Exploration of Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Acress and Paprika,” by Manisha Mishra and Maitreyee Mishra, in Animation, An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 9(3), 2014, pp. 299–316.

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and oppressed people.9 The testimonio has exerted significant influence in Asia, for example, on Indian Dalit writings. It has provided a genre that gives voice to traumatic experiences resulting from postcolonial atrocities and social oppression (casteism). It also allows for the powerful articulation of resistance, protest, and demands for social change.10 Both Latin American testimonio and Indian Dalit writings have further contributed to subaltern studies. Our goal in this anthology is not to dislocate the West or to build a Latin America-Asia or Global South centrism, but to highlight evolving and emerging methods by utilizing multiple frames of reference and by expanding perspectives from different and diversified locations of knowledge production. We aim for a better understanding of local as well as global social experiences and cultural productions. We also hope to give voice to hitherto unstudied connections to incorporate Latin America into Asian Studies. In sum, we are trying to join this counter-hegemonic “movement of movements,” to borrow Van Gosse’s term (used in a different context; quoted in Zolov 350), along with the concerted efforts of different disciplines and studies that aim toward a broader intellectual and cultural paradigm change.

Literary And Cultural Texts The nine essays in this anthology examine how literature, film, and art in contemporary Asian countries have interacted with Latin American aesthetics, including early modernist movements, queer theory, postcolonial discourse, magical realism, and postmodernist praxes. Latin American exemplars have forced Asia to reexamine, reconsider, and re-explore issues related to their historical traumas, anti-colonial experiences, cultural identities, indigenous/vernacular traditions, and peripheral global-ness. The essays analyze selected writings set in the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Korean peninsula, and China—writings that demonstrate important and defining characteristics of Latin American literary and cultural influence. Together they present a general picture of how Asian writers, as well as 9  The most famous testimonio would be I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983) by Rigoberta Menchú and Elizabeth Burgos-Debray in Latin America. Also Biografía de un Cimarrón [Biography of a Runaway Slave] (1966) by Miguel Barnet is equally influential. 10  For more discussion on Indian Dalit literature, see Beverley, Nayar & Yúdice.

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their Latin American counterparts, have come up with innovative approaches and imageries to account for greater diversity, hybridity, marginality, and distinctiveness in their societies. These critical studies not only make an invisible relationship visible but, more importantly, refine models relevant to Latin American and Asian cultural conditions. As such, they contribute to an understanding of the cultural globalization that takes place outside Western centrism. The collection is divided into three parts with an introduction. The first part focuses on Filipino writers and poets’ literary/poetic connections with Latin America; the second analyzes Asian artistic and literary endeavors influenced by Latin America in historical and theoretical perspectives; and the third highlights literary works and films influenced by Latin American Magical Realism from “El Boom.” Spanish colonization in the Philippines started with trade and commerce thus becoming part of the early encounter between Asia and Latin America that began the story of globalization (Jörn Dosch, 1). Because of this colonial process, the Philippines shares a deeply rooted cultural affinity with Latin America’s similar Spanish colonial past that, ironically, brought it Latin American ideas and beliefs. As shown by the three essays in this section, the Philippines has been a crucial archipelago of Spanish American and Asian cultural interactions and negotiations. Modernismo was an important early literary movement originating in Latin America and later disseminated to the remainder of the Spanish-speaking world, reaching Spanish-language Filipino writers during the country’s revolutionary phase at the turn of the twentieth century. Exploring the Modernismo’s influence, Ignacio López-Calvo’s “A Peripheral, South-­ South Literary Exchange: Balmori and the Reception of Latin American Modernismo in the Philippines,” focuses on Spanish-language Filipino writer, Balmori. The study first traces the early influences from Latin American Modernismo aesthetics in Balmori’s poetry. While revealing his admiration for Japanese culture, these poems also betray his orientalist position in their Modernismo vocabulary and sensibility. Then the study turns to Balmori’s novels that initially tend to be concerned with the nation’s moral issues. But his last novel turns abruptly away from Modernismo aesthetics at the end of the story that describes Japanese invasion to the Philippines. While examining Modernismo aesthetic influence on Balmori, this study is also a critical reevaluation of literary Modernismo and its limits in addressing extreme reality such as that of the Pacific War.

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Axel Gasquet, in “Filipino Poet Jesús Balmori: Chronicles of His Travel to Mexico Passing through Japan (1932–1934),” continues the study of Jesús Balmori but focuses on his Filipino-type of lyricism that was influenced by Latin American Modernismo, and on his poetic jousting or Balagtasan developed by him and Manuel Bernabé in the 1920s. Balmori’s literary work was produced during the golden age of Spanish-Filipino literature and the neo-colonial period of the U.S. administration (1898–1942 and 1945–1946). Gasquet offers a detailed analysis of Balmori’s chronicles and poems inspired by his journey to Mexico in the early 1930s. Mexican testimonies and Modernist poetic influences exemplify the link between Latin America and the Philippines, the outcome of a shared past and a common language. However, his biased views of Mexico should be understood to reflect the early cross-cultural perspectives limited by the historical time and context where he was situated. Spanish American and Filipino ties continue in the arena of sexual politics and influences of transversality. Spanish Catholicism in the Americas and the Philippines, with its particular features such as missionary zeal and the cult of the Virgin Mary, did much to shape the characteristics of masculine/feminine social identities and hetero/homosexual differentiation in both regions. Eugenio Matibag’s “Transpacific: The Queering of Philippine and Hispanic American Literatures” studies, within the framework of “epistemology of the closet” and from a comparative perspective, the queer cultural productions of Spanish America and the Philippines and traces the lines of influence and affinity between the two regions. It argues, via close examination of Bino Realuyo and Jessica Hagedorn’s literary works as well as those of Latin American writers such as José Donoso and Manuel Puig that, politically, both cultural fields evidence the expanding globalization of the gay liberation movement, while the literary narratives project “mappings of secrecy and disclosure, and of the private and the public”—of “the closet” and of “coming out.” The experiences of homosexual characters in these narratives serve as touchstones for describing the Filipino and Spanish American fictions that, since the 1970s, have examined the performance of queer identity both inside and outside the closet, with special concern for the survival, well-being, and liberation of homosexuals in repressively patriarchal or authoritarian societies. The second part turns to how specific Latin American artistic and literary styles impact Asian artists and writers in their negotiations with issues such as identity, trauma, and migrant experiences. Martín Camps’ “Disrupted Nationalisms in Times of War: Young Ha-Kim and José

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Revueltas” uses the concept of “contact zones” as the framework to study Young Ha-Kim, a South Korean novelist, and José Revueltas, a Mexican novelist. While representing major conflicts in their respective countries— the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the Korean War (1950–1953), the novels also focus on diasporic experiences of exploitation, trauma, and war crimes that challenge their identities and confound their senses of nationality. In exploring the cultural interaction and influence between two regions, the essay also studies how Latin American Magical Realism’s aesthetic modes benefit the Korean novel in representating their own cross-cultural experiences within the context of global conflicts. The next two essays in this section turn to contemporary Latin America-­ Asia’s cultural connections in audiovisual, literary, visual art, and media works. Miguel Rojas Sotelo in “Common Ground: Shared Textuality and Visuality in China and Latin America” adopts a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to study recent cultural creations in China, Colombia, and Mexico by focusing on the most pressing issues confronted by these countries. The essay traces commonalities among apparently different nations with diverse traditions and different languages while identifying common ground for their sociopolitical visions and creative practices. Moreover, common problems such as the ecological devastation, displacement, and migration encountered by these countries resulted from economic growth, neoliberalism, and global exploitation connected to the Global South. This study reinforces the urgent need to explore the cultural affinities, shared artistic imageries, and cultural imaginings with which Latin American and Asian artists and filmmakers handle their respective but common issues. Min Suk Kim’s study of contemporary South Korean representation of Latin America in “Korean Reality Television-Travel Shows in Constructing Latin American Cultural Identities (2010-Present)” is a pioneer study of cultural interaction between the two regions and provides a fresh look at popular culture in South Korea in its construction of Latin American identity and image, Mexico and Peru in this case. In researching mass-media representations of images and cultural identities of Latin America(ns), the essay also examines such complexities as foreign perspectives, internal misunderstanding, and cultural limitations involved in imagining and constructing the identity of Latin America. Despite of their limitations however, these TV programs, argues the author, have helped South Korea to expand their conception of the Transpacific beyond North America, to

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bring Latin America to their cultural consciousness, and remap itself in the broader global geopolitics and power. The third part explores Magical Realism, which represents perhaps the biggest Latin American literary influence in Asia since the 1970s. Marco Ramírez Rojas’ essay, “Beauty is a Wound: Retelling Modern Indonesian History through Magical Realism,” examines how Eka Kurniawan, its author, uses Latin American magical realist narrative devices and rhetorical techniques to retell and reinterpret the history of a modern Indonesia marked by traumatic events, violence, and political terror throughout the twentieth century. Ramírez Rojas argues that the intertwining of historical facts with folk tales, supernatural interventions, local legends, and ghostly characters offers an alternative narrative that problematizes the dynamics of colonization, postcoloniality, and the conflictive articulations of multiple competing cultural discourses. Echoing Doris Sommer’s theorization about “national romance novels,” Ramírez Rojas proposes to read Kurniawan’s novel as a multigenerational family romance that mirrors and fictionalizes Indonesia’s historical trajectory of constructing a modern nation. Jie Lu’s “Representing History, Trauma and Marginality in Contemporary Chinese Magical Realist Films” analyzes how two contemporary Chinese films, The Sun Also Rises and Hello and Mr. Tree!, represent experiences of history, trauma, and marginality via magical realist aesthetics. While in line with Chinese literary magical realist tradition (inspired by Latin American Magical Realism and pioneered by Mo Yan who reinvestigates Chinese history and traditional culture in the context of modernity and modernization) these films also highlight an innovative use of magical realist style and aesthetics in cinematic language. Informed by theories of Magical Realism in literature and cinema, the essay focuses on the complicated representational issues embedded in magical realist cinematic code; it argues that, in spite of the limited number of films that highlight magical realism, these aesthetics continue to inform Chinese engagement with its post-socialist/post-revolutionary conditions and global modernity. Both films should be considered a contribution to expanding and globalizing cinematic magical realism. The influence of Latin American literature from “El Boom” on India became a turning point for Indian vernacular literatures. Vibha Maurya’s “Transcontinental Journey of Magical Realism: Study of Indian Literatures’ Response” studies Indian vernacular literatures that were influenced by the Indian epistemological and ontological understanding of Magical

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Realism. Inspired by it, Indian fictions bring forward their specific historicities, their rationality/irrationality, which in turn questions and subverts European realism and presents an alternative reality. An important outcome of this inspiration has been that the magical realist mode allows Indian writers to give stronger voices to the subaltern and to represent their abject conditions. Maurya also discusses this political focus in the context of the Global South and argues that the concerns with the subaltern represent one of the key critiques and evaluations of modernity in the Global South in general and in India in particular.

Works Cited Armony, Ariel C. Setting the Agenda: Asia and Latin American in the 21st Century. Ed. Center for Latin American Studies Publications Center for Latin American Studies, University of Miami Scholarly Repository, 2012. https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Setting_the_Agenda-_Asia_and_Latin_America_in_ the_21st_Century.pdf. Accessed April 2019. Armony, Ariel & Aníbal Pérez-Liñan. “Introduction to the Special Issue—China and Latin American Political Economy: How China Became Part of Latin American Studies.” Issues & Studies: A Social Science Quarterly on China, Taiwan, and East Asian Affairs, vol. 53, no. 1, March 2017, pp. 1–12. Armony, Ariel C., & Julia C. Strauss. “From Going Out (zou chuqu) to Arriving In (desembarco): Constructing a New Field of Inquiry in China–Latin America Interactions.” The China Quarterly, 209, March 2012, pp. 1–17. Bachner, Andrea, & Pedro Erber. Editors’ Introduction: “Remapping the Transpacific: Critical Approaches between Asia and Latin America.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias, volume 3, issue 2, 10/2017, pp. vi–viii. Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative).” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 11–28. Bingham, Adam. Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi. Edinburgh UP, 2015. Carreras, Miguel. “Public Attitudes toward an Emerging China in Latin America.” Issues & Studies: A Social Science Quarterly on China, Taiwan, and East Asian Affairs, vol. 53, Nov. 1, March 2017, pp. 1–28. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Duke UP, 2010. Dosch, Jörn, & Olaf Jacob. Asia and Latin American: Political, Economic and Multilateral Relations. Routledge, 2010. Gao, Junqian, & Wang Yangle. “Brief Introduction of Asian, African and Latin American Literature.” Front (Qianxian), Nov. 12, 1962, pp. 8–11.

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Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” Formations of Modernity, edited by Stuart Hall & Bram Gieben, Polity Press, 1992, pp. 275–320. Kim, Junyoung Veronica. “Asia-Latin America as Method: The Global South Project and the Dislocation of the West.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias, volume 3, Issue 2, 10/2017, pp. 97–117. Klengel, Susanne, & Alexandra Ortiz Wallner. “A New Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America/ India. SUR / SOUTH and a Different Orientalism.” SUR/SOUTH: Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America—India, edited by Klengel & Wallner, Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 2016. Kloß, Sinah Theres. “The Global South as Subversive Practice: Challenges and Potentials of a Heuristic Concept.” The Global South, volume 11, no. 2, Fall 2017, pp. 1–17. Li, Han. “The Chinese Society’s Attention to Latin American Culture via Latin American Film Month.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 31, no. 5, 2009, pp. 77–78. Liu, Kang. “Maoism: Revolutionary Globalism for the Third World Revisited.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2015, pp. 12–28. López-Calvo, Ignacio. “Worlding and decolonizing the literary world-system: Asian-Latin American literature as an alternative type of Weltliteratur.” Re-mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South, edited by Gesine Müller, Jorge J Locane, & Benjamin Loy, De Gruyter, 2018. Nayar, Pramod K. “The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity: Dalit Life Writing, Testimonio, and Human Rights.” Ariel: A review of International English Literature, vol. 42, no. 3–4, 2012, pp. 237–264. Mao, Xianglin, & Shi Huiye. “Latin American Studies in China during the Cold War.” Latin American Perspectives, issue 221, vol. 45, no. 4, July 2018, pp. 141–147. Mezzadra, Sandro, & Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke UP, 2013. Moon, Duncan M. “‘Our Forces Have Redoubled:’ World Literature, Postcolonialism, and Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2(2), September 2015, pp. 233–252. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke UP, 2011. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. Müller, Gesine, Jorge J Locane, & Benjamin Loy. “Introduction.” Re-mapping World Literature Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South, edited by Gensine Müller, Jorge J Locane, & Benjamin Loy, De Gruyter, 2018.

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San Mao. Travelling Thousands of Miles in Mountains and Rivers. Beijing October Art & Literature Publishing House, 2011. Shu, Yuan, Donald E. Pease, editors. American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacfic. UP of New England. 2015. Teng, Wei. “Pablo Neruda in contemporary China: Translation between national and international politics (1949–1979).” Re-mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South, edited by Gesine Müller, Jorge J Locane, & Benjamin Loy, De Gruyter, 2018. Vanhove, Pieter. “‘A world to win:’ China, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, and the Reinvention of World Literature.” Journal of Critical Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1544499. Wen, Gao. “Latin American Literary Works Translated in the Recent Two Years.” Reader Digest (Dushu), no. 7, 1960, pp. 39–40. Wray, Grady C. “Latin American Writing in India” (a letter). World Literature Today, vol. 78, no. 1, 2004, p. 71. Wu, Jianheng. “Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literatures in China.” Foreign Literatures, no. 5, 1989, pp. 79–85. Xia, Dingguan. “Latin American Literature in China.” Journal of Xinjiang University, Section of Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 22, no. 1, 1994, pp. 93–100. Yoon, Duncan M. “‘Our Forces Have Redoubled:’ World Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau.” Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2(2), 2015, pp. 233–252. ———. “Bandung Nostalgia and the Global South.” The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge UP, 2018. Yudice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspective, vol. 18, no 3, Voices of the Voiceless in Testimonial Literature (Part I), Summer 1991, pp. 15–31. Zhang, Sen-gen, & Ning-kun Wang. “Latin American Studies in the People’s Republic of China.” Latin American Research Review, January 1, 1988, pp. 123–132. Zheng, Yangwen, Hong’an Liu, & Michael Szonyi. The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds. Brill, 2010. Zolov, Eric. “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties.” The Americas, vol. 70, no. 7, 2014, pp. 349–362.

PART I

Latin America and the Philippines in the Transpacific Connections

CHAPTER 2

A Peripheral, South-South Literary Exchange: Balmori and the Reception of Latin American Modernismo in the Philippines Ignacio López-Calvo

If, according to Jorge Mojarro, Jesús Balmori (1886–1948; a.k.a. Batikuling) inaugurates literary Modernismo in the Philippines with his 1904 poetry collection Rimas malayas (Malay Rhymes) (Mojarro, 2019 “Teodoro” 234), he also tries to put an end to its influence in his posthumous novel Los pájaros de fuego (Firebirds, 2010). However, Miguel Ángel Feria points ot that one can find Modernista poems in Filipino newspapers as early as the end of the nineteenth century (247). Feria adds that one can notice Modernista influences, soon after the publication of Balmori’s Rimas Malayas, in José Palma’s Melancólicas (Melancholic, 1912) and Fernando María Guerrero’s Crisálidas… (Chrysalis…, 1914), but also later works, such as Cecilio Apóstol’s Pentélicas, published posthumously

I. López-Calvo (*) University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_2

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in 1950, or Guerrero’s posthumous Aves y flores (Birds and Flowers, 1971) (Feria 249). According to Mojarro, these influences are also present in Hilario Zialcita y Legarda’s poetry collection La Nao de Manila (The Manila Galleon, 1913).1 In this essay, I explore how Latin American Modernismo influenced Spanish-language Filipino writers, and Balmori in particular, as well as how this influence came to an abrupt end. More specifically, I focus on the limits of literary Modernismo in Los pájaros de fuego, a novel that openly rejects the Japonaiserie popularized by Latin American modernistas, including the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, whom Balmori deeply admired. The novel also closes the door on the Orientalist affinities of modernistas as a direct result of the advent of the Pacific War and the brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942–1945).2 Balmori, who had previously declared his profound admiration for Japanese culture and civilization in his literature and speeches, eventually ran into the wall of reality upon observing the unspeakable brutality of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. As Beatriz Álvarez-Tardío, Beatriz Barrera, Reynaldo D.  Coronel Jr., Isaac Donoso, Miguel Ángel Feria, Jorge Mojarro, and other critics have demonstrated, the influence of Latin American Modernismo on Spanish-­ language Filipino literature is unquestionable. It is a case of peripheral, South-South cross-cultural exchange, even though it may very well have taken place via Spain, which at the time was still casting a hegemonic cultural shadow over its former colonies. Just like Filipino writers had previously been trying to catch up with European Romanticism (Balmori, for example, never hides his admiration for Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer), they saw the influence of Rubén Darío, José Martí, and other modernistas as a way to update their own emerging Spanish-language literary tradition.3 In fact, (self-)Orientalization and Japonism in Filipino letters was, in part, evidence of the influence of Latin American Modernismo. Yet, it eventually took a different turn from the original escapism and exoticism sought out 1  I am indebted to Jorge Mojarro for his feedback on this chapter and, in particular, for pointing out the protracted influence of Modernismo in Apóstols and Zialcita’s writing. 2  Before Balmori’s death, the Philippine government purchased the novel’s unpublished manuscript, which was completed in 1945 and kept at the Special Collections section of Filipiniana division of the National Library. 3  As it happened in Latin America, the influence of some of these literary movements was, at times, simultaneous: Realism was also beginning to influence Filipino literature by the time Modernismo became popular.

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by Latin American modernistas acquiring instead nationalist overtones, as Donoso has pointed out; after all, not only were Filipino writers a real-life part of this so-called mysterious “Orient” imagined by Darío and his followers, but some, like Balmori, also had personal experience and knowledge of countries like Japan (Fig. 2.1). Born in Manila, Balmori began to read his poetry in public at the age of fifteen. Two years later, he published Rimas malayas (Malay Rhymes, 1904), the first modernista Filipino text. Initially inspired by Spanish Romantic poets such as José de Espronceda and Bécquer, he was later

Fig. 2.1  Jesús Balmori, on the left. (Excelsior Magazine. Gus Vibal Private Collection. Courtesy of Jorge Mojarro)

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even more impressed with Darío’s Modernista poetry. The emulation of the Nicaraguan’s style and vocabulary is noticeable, for instance, in the second section of his poem “Tríptico real” (Royal Triptych), titled “Victoria de Battemberg:” Strawberry and snow and velvet woman As smooth as breeze kisses In whose eyes the blue of the sky Is a flower of light broken in smiles; Fairy asleep in pale and resounding Ideal dream of love and discretion, Whose fragrant gold hair Scented a king among its threads; Gentle queen of aroma and wonders Whom a people kneeling As the custody of its faith venerates. Not from Isabel the splendorous blood Runs in your veins. But you are a rose That has Spain open in its flag! (My translation)4

The poem’s exuberant chromatism (“Strawberry and snow and velvet woman;” “the blue of the sky”) and its references to precious minerals and stones (“fragrant gold hair”) are reminiscent of French Parnassians’ influences in Latin American Modernista writing. Likewise, the appeal to human senses like that of smell (“scented a king among its threads;” “Gentle queen of aroma and wonders;” “you are a rose”); the vocabulary (“Fairy,” “ideal”); and the musicality typical of the influence of French symbolism (“los besos de las brisas” [“the breeze kisses”]), all evoke modernista aesthetics. At other times Balmori finds inspiration in Darío’s lyrical lines by Darío, such as the famous “There are a thousand cubs loosed from the Spanish lion” in his poem “A Roosevelt” (“To Roosevelt”), which is echoed in Balmori’s lines “Old and noble Castilian Lioness … the cubs rumble,” included in his poem “Canto a España” (Song to Spain). Similarly, the rhythm, tone, topics, and vocabulary of his “Ingratitud” (Ingratitude) is redolent of Darío’s “Sonatina,” included in Prosas profanas y otros poemas (Profane Hymns and Other Poems, 1896): 4  In all cases where the text’s English version does not appear in the bibliography and no page numbers are included after the quotation, the translation is mine. Otherwise, the English version is quoted from printed sources.

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I Sitting on a throne Made of pearls and roses A thousand beautiful fairies Preluding songs made her sleep, Silent the night; The moonlight Plated one by one The giant towers of the gentile palace. II Below, the poet Moaning a lament, The wind was taking Far away his love echoes The girl listened The loving lament, Her pink lips Murmured telling to the fairies: Sorry! III The fairies did not hear His sad prayer; Mute and lonely The slender sleeping princess stayed, And the poet trembling, Confused and gloomy Felt so cold That the golden lyre in the mud threw. IV How indecisive this story You barely understand? I know you understand The legend that sad forged my illusion, Your love is the group Of fairies, restless; My soul the poet, The slender princess my unhappy heart.

Tellingly, copying part of the first line of Darío’s “Sonatina,” Balmori published a dramatic short story titled “La princesa está triste” (The Princess Is Sad), in Revista Filipina/The Philippine Review in March 1919 (Fig. 2.2).

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Fig. 2.2  Photo of the publication of Jesús Balmori’s short story “La princesa está triste” (The Princess Is Sad), in Revista Filipina/The Philippine Review in March 1919

As for Balmori’s Orientalist tendencies, we find a prime example in his “La gueisha” (The Geisha), included in the collection Mi casa de Nipa (My House in Nipa, 1941):

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It’s night, it’s a hall, and it’s eleven. A gong sounds like an old bronze violin. A gold and burgundy curtain is drawn, And in the scene that simulates a new Orient Advances quietly, slowly, The enameled porcelain doll. One would think of a great aroma of mignonettes All wrapped in her golds and her silks Under a musical rhythm that goes up and up. It is a bird? Is it a flower? It is not flower or bird, It’s the languorous, sweet, soft geisha, Like the trembling passage of a cloud. She is going to dance. It is a mysterious dance, It’s a flight, it’s the rose bud That in the lantern light becomes a flower. One can’t see her feet under her finery. She only moves her two hands, white wings, White oars of a dream about rowing. Under the triumph of the rhyming music, The entire dance is a grave pantomime, And the geisha, sovereign sunflower, To the sounds of the flutes, smiling, rises in snake-like spirals, Or bends like a lotus under the sun. What is she telling us with her solemn movements? What are her small, slow steps telling us? What oriental story is this one in the dance That while opening the crescent of her eyes One would think her hope is pierced With thistles like a poor butterfly? Is it sadness? Is it joy that she feels? What scented mystery of the East, What divine, magical, religious rite Unwraps as in the waves of an aroma This flower, this woman, this dove, With the rhythm of her graceful body? The tan-tan will tell you. Her fiancé, The one who knows about her kisses, has left And the poor geisha does not know where he is;

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He left in search of glory and fortune In the night without stars and without moon; Will he return? Will he not return? She asks shivering stars. breezes, cedars, flowers, The lace that breaks over the sea; And since no one knows where her beloved went, This geisha of the unfortunate love, What will she do but crying? She asks the hurricane of broken clouds, auras, pale seagulls, hills of emerald and sapphire; And since no one knows anything about her beloved, This geisha of the sore love, What will she do but die? Yes. The flutes and the geisha are dying They are sighs and they are pearls that, falling, Form sounds, form divine tears, While the sound of the gong resonates again, The rose and gold vision dissipates. And the curtains close slowly. (127–29)

Balmori, as Donoso indicates, had already praised the virtues of Japanese women in his 1932 speech in verse “Nippón,” and particularly in its section “Madame Crisantemo.” In “La geisha,” we find the usual Modernista vocabulary (“divine” [128]) as well as references to precious stones and metals or other luxury items, such as bronze, gold, silk, emerald, sapphire, and pearls. From the very title—focusing on an image of Japanese women fetishized for decades by Western travelers and writers—, the poetic voice displays a seemingly Western male gaze at an objectivized and exoticized Asian woman: “The enameled porcelain doll” (127); “It is a bird? Is it a flower? It is not flower or bird, / It’s the languorous, sweet, soft geisha” (127). We then hear a stereotypical gong sound (129) and are invited to imagine “a new Orient” as an inscrutable space full of mystery: “What scented mystery of the East” (128) and “It is a mysterious dance” (128). But it is the passive, smiling geisha that elicits the biggest aura of mystery: her solemn movements, her slow, her small steps inspire this sort of Westernized voyeur-poet. Balmori’s geisha is sad, like Darío’s princess in “La sonatina,” and wonders about the whereabouts of her beloved (he left

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in search of glory and fortune) and whether he will ever return. Eventually, in a melodramatic and romantic image, the suffering Japanese woman, an example of faithfulness to her husband, has no alternative but to die of love. All in all, the geisha, as representative of the Japanese woman, is the ideal loyal and subservient wife imagined by the fantasizing poet. Simultaneously, she embodies all the refinement and sophistication of Japanese culture (as will be seen, this view will be somewhat contradicted at the end of his novel Los pájaros de fuego). Geishas continue to be a source of inspiration in Balmori’s poem “El cuento de la Geisha” (The Geisha’s Story), written in Tokyo in May 1912, according to the author5: A rare music of flutes and cymbals, Rumbles under the metallic noise of a gong; A curtain of birds and yellow suns rises And under a huge wave of polychromatic shinning She arises in a slow, gentle genuflection. She is pale. Her flesh of unknown nacres Or was perhaps made of gold of the moon; One would think it fell from reveries Because her body is a glass of scented lotuses And her badly shod feet are like two pearls. She advances. All her lines and fineries triumph In diaphanous glories of rhinestones and tulle, And while the applause is heard through the rooms Her arms rise slowly, as if they were wings And silks of purple and blue are flying. She will tell us a story, you will see; one of those stories That someone told her in her paternal home While blossoms woke up in the cherry trees, When she still did not know about kisses Or about another divine thing, loving. She will tell us about it, singing. Listen. Pause. Another pause The rose of her mouth begins:

5  This poem is included in the appendix to Donoso’s article “Los pájaros de fuego. Japón y el holocausto filipino en la obra de Jesús Balmori” (234–35).

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The Mandarin Old and libidinous and ugly, was the cause For the pretty girl from Nishitausa Island To shade her jasmine leaves with mud. The crazy grandfather gave her away in exchange for some gold To calm his burning thirst with sake, While she drank the wine of her weeping And the Mandarin loved her while drooling on her: I adore you! Oh little goldfish that captivated my thirst! Oh, what disgust for gems, golds, and flowers, The roses and ties of his royal pagoda. How scary his eyes of lyrical glares! What horror the warm chamber of incense in shinning Where is an altar of silk and coral bed? On a night full of stars, the captive Loaded the old Mandarin’s pipe with opium, And fled without even knowing where she was going. She ran away from that flame where they were throwing her alive And got lost in the floating shadows of the garden. And she was never found. Never her uncertain step Guided her unknown route, her tremulous passing, That, in vain, they believed to be a broken flower in the orchard And in vain, on suspicion that she had died They beat the loud foams of the sea. What happened to the girl from Nishitausa Island?… (His voice in the question trembles. The gong is crying) What happened because of the Mandarin’s girl? What happened to the girl?… (There is a long pause. The gong keeps crying). She, meanwhile, leaves. She leaves. All their lines and fineries have trembled Like a lotus that a kiss got confused, And while the applause is heard through the rooms Her hands rise slowly as if they were waves And kisses fly under the shaking of the gong! (234–35)

Following the poem’s last line, Balmori makes it clear that he wrote it while in Tokyo, perhaps for the verisimilitude or authenticity effect. However, he seems to confuse Japanese topics with typically Chinese ones,

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such as opium consumption and Mandarins. This poem, like the previous one, displays the usual modernista vocabulary (“A rare music”) and Parnassian overtones in its appeal to human senses: multiple colors—especially blue—and sounds; smells of cherry flowers, lotuses, roses, and jasmines; precious metals, stones and coveted fabrics (gold, gems, pearls, rhinestones, coral, tulle, silk). And coinciding with “La geisha,” Balmori refers to worn-out Orientalist clichés, like the gong. The geisha is again objectified and exoticized by being described as having a pale complexion, slow movements, and a mysterious nature: “Her flesh of unknown nacres” (234). The poetic voice describes her almost immaterial nature as having fallen off a dream and then fetishizes her feet as pearls and her arms as wings. Unlike the passive object of desire in “La geisha,” the Japanese woman in “El cuento de la Geisha” has more agency, as she sings the story of a young virgin who is sold by her alcoholic grandfather. The man who purchases her denotes another orientalist motif: an old, ugly, lascivious, drooling mandarin in a room full of incense and horror: “How scary his eyes of lyrical glares!” (235). Eventually, the sad and scared young woman manages to escape by adding a large dose of opium to the old man’s pipe and manages to flee once he falls asleep. As seen, both of these poems resort to Orientalist and modernista aesthetics to evoke a world of mystery and exotic sensuality that is more enticing to Western males than to Asians. For many years, Balmori was considered an accomplished poet. However, his first published novels, Bancarrota de almas [“Bankruptcy of Souls”] (1911) and Se deshojó la flor [“The Flower’s Petals Have Fallen”] (1915), would change that perception. These novels remain, for the most part, exempt from national and international politics, though the former includes a heated dialogue about the pros and cons of Filipino political independence. Both instead harshly criticize the nation’s bourgeois conservative morals and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. The plot of Bancarrota de almas is quite simple: it describes a love triangle between the seventeen-year-old Ángela Limo, her cousin and boyfriend Ventura, and a smooth-talking poet, Augusto Valdivia (Balmori). After defeating Ventura through in fisticuffs, Augusto wins Ángela’s heart and leaves her with child before suddenly succumbing to tuberculosis. She then marries Ventura who is unaware of her condition; after the wedding, she informs him of her pregnancy. In the following passage, we find a sharp criticism of traditional social mores through Augusto’s justification for becoming inebriated and visiting brothels:

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A man gets drunk, as I have done, to ease the pain of his dire poverty, of his weaknesses, of being cowardly unable to withstand life’s blows outright; a man goes to buy an hour of love when he has no one in the world who loves him, when he is alone and terrified by his loneliness, when he is so hungry and thirsty for a kiss that he does not care whether the mouth that is about to kiss him is that of a saint or devil. This is not understood by those who have full stomachs, those self-righteous ones who go around pompously shouting “Morals! … Pooh to morals! I know much about these big shots, things that, if published, would even disgust dogs. (140)

Augusto, defending Epicurean philosophy, assures Ángela that there is “nothing dirtier, nothing more ridiculous that the morals of men” (141). He insists that many women who claim to be saints are, in reality, Messalina (Emperor Claudius’s promiscuous wife), and many self-righteous men are, deep inside, depraved. Balmori also resorts to eroticism to épater les bourgeois: “They were arguing over the shower. Margarita’s shirt slightly opened revealing a round, erect breast resembling a billiard ball, tanned under its red nipple, like a strawberry. Angela placed her hand over it, squeezing it; she jumped, unable to open her eyes filled with soap foam” (58). Likewise, perhaps, the author includes in these novels anticlerical passages that reveal the excessive puritanism and hypocrisy of the Catholic clergy and his negative views on the institution of marriage: “Speaking ill of the Jesuits, he engaged his aunt in a heated discussion. ‘They are lazy, believe me, hypocrites; up to now, all they is cause all the damage they can’,” Ventura argues. And later, “Were there no donkeys?” “No ma’am, friars only date back to the middle ages only” (275). And neither does the author make any attempt to hide his modernista influences: “Ventura, under an electric lamp, was casually reading Darío’s ‘Azul’; its charming verses seemed passionate, passionate like Angela’s kisses” (20). A few pages later the narrator describes Augusto reading the poetry collection Alma América by the Peruvian Modernista José Santos Chocano. In his second novel, Se deshojó la flor. Novela filipina (1915), Balmori distances himself even more from political matters. As in his first novel, he resorts to the same romantic and modernista aesthetics, with a Modernista vocabulary (numerous references to silk and precious stones) and an erotic-filled tone: “And Rafael, finding himself before a modest, sweetly breathless Leonarda, wondered if what had happened in that room was all

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a dream, whether it was he who caressed and kissed the godly body of that lovely girl” (42). Sporadic, anticlerical attacks reappear in this novel as well. The plot describes the immoral and melodramatic adventures of an older Don Juan-type, Rafael Lozano, who decides to ignore what he considers Filipino puritanical morals. Married to a woman named Dolores, with whom he cannot have children, he has an affair with her sister, Leonarda, who has a boyfriend named Crisóstomo Cristóbal. Characters become jealous of each other throughout to such an extreme that Rafael’s wife, Dolores, aware of her husband’s many infidelities, dies of a broken heart. But this is what, for some time, Rafael had been hoping, so that he could then marry Leonarda. Later, after Rafael falls in love with a younger woman, Rosario “Charing” Silva (“Charing” is her nickname based on the name Charo, which is how women called Rosario are called), he suddenly begins to bemoan Dolores’s death and to recognize that she was his only true love. The widower searches for solace in the company of his sisters who live in the countryside but, of course, he once again falls in love with yet another young woman who lives there, Margarita, for no other reason that she reminds him of Dolores. Meanwhile, Leonarda invites him to her wedding and, before the ceremony, the suffering widower blackmails her into having sex with him for the last time or he will publicly reveal the location of one of her moles. In yet another inconsistent plot twist, Leonarda suddenly starts to miss him as he is walking out the door. He, on the other hand, while in this shaky love affair, begins to so miss his late wife that he commits suicide, as a good romantic protagonist would do. Balmori’s third and last novel, Pájaros de fuego, is quite different from the others in that Modernista aesthetics are predominant at the plot’s beginning only to disappear once the harsh reality of World War II sets in. Initially an avowed admirer of all things Japanese, Balmori visited Yokohama in 1902, at the age of sixteen, and later participated in the dissemination of the Meiji political propaganda. Thus, in his 1932 poetic address “Nippón,” delivered at the headquarters of the Japanese Association of the Philippines, Balmori praises Japanese civilization, its achievements, and even acknowledging the divine origins of the Japanese emperor. According to Donoso this “constitutes the recognition by a Filipino citizen of the superiority of Japan’s emperors and, consequently, of the power of the Japanese Empire in Asia” (Introducción XXXV). In this novel, perhaps his best, Don Lino Robles, Balmori’s alter ego and protagonist, reiterates the same belief in imperial divinity as he explains:

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All Japanese gods are included in the strange mythology of the Empire, its golden legend, its first milestone in assuming the throne. Because Izanami, passionate and in love, continued to give birth after her great geographical birth. Eventually, Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, emerged, along with her brother Susanoo, god of courage, who married her. It is from those delirious nights of passion that the Emperors of Japan descend. (Los pájaros 15)

A few pages later, Don Lino vehemently insists: “Japan was the spirit of gods who embodied ‘shoguns,’ ‘samurai’ and ‘daimios’. Why did they not allow it to move forward without a white power impeding its course?” (43). Having lived in Japan for three years, the protagonist seems to have bought into the imperial concept of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, promulgated by Foreign Minister Hachirō Arita on 29 June 1940. This aspiration included an alleged Asian cultural and economic unity under the understood leadership of the Empire of Japan that would be self-sufficient and free from Western imperialist domination. However, the notion of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a pretext for Japanese imperial control and manipulation over eventually occupied countries. The idea was to benefit the Empire’s economy through its military might and extractivism. Don Lino, in his arguments with his brother Don Ramón, firmly supports Japan’s right to be the sovereign leader of the new Pacific Asia: The Japanese are a people who love children, flowers, deer, water, and birds; who hold honor as the only and true religion, and believe their homeland to be the only and true altar; who do not mind sacrificing their lives and finances for the survival and glory of the empire whose calling is, by its extraordinary strength and indomitable spirit, to reign over the Pacific, the master of the East, the ruler of the new Asia…. (42)

He even justifies China’s brutal occupation by the Japanese: “China must be treated thus! China is being civilized, as it deserves and wants, with bullets” (21). From the onset of the narrative, Don Lino fails to see the ominous signs of an imminent occupation when Kenjiro, one of his two Japanese gardeners (imperial spies), foreshadowing the tragedy, declares: “There is no Japanese who does not see it (the Philippines) as his own land. What difference does it make? A day will come, sir, when the entire East, all of Asia, will become one people, one great Empire…” (16).

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Before Los pájaros de fuego, Balmori seemed to be content, in certain writings, with his nation being viewed by the Japanese government as its backyard, as a land in need of the paternal guidance of a more economically and technologically advanced Asian nation like Japan. After all, in his view, Japan was also an Asian country, unlike the previous and current colonial powers in the Philippines, Spain and the United States. Initially, to this proud Nipponophile, the prosperous Land of the Rising Sun represents “the principal nation of the world” and, as such, a model for other Asian countries to emulate. Balmori and his semiautobiographical protagonist’s veneration of Japanese culture and political leadership, however, will come to a halt with the ensuing invasion of the islands and the destruction of Manila, with its entire (material and immaterial) Spanish colonial heritage. This drastic change of mind is—despite the subtitle of the novel, Novela filipina de la guerra [“Filipino War Novel”]—the true leitmotif of a novel that Balmori wrote mostly during the Japanese occupation, with its fourth part handwritten a few months after the end of the World War II, as the author explains in his foreword. Whereas the first chapters introduce a Filipino protagonist still impassioned with Japanese culture and society, the ultra-violent invasion of his country leaves him no alternative but to admit his misconceptions about Japanese chivalry, genteelness, and kindness. At one point, Japanese imperial soldiers take over his house, steal all they find, including his cars, rape his housemaids, rape and murder his pregnant daughter, and abuse him physically. As a result, Don Lino loses his mind and dies alone, in utter sorrow and regret, at a riverbed in one of his haciendas. Along the way, the novel, now devoid of modernista influence, portrays, from a polyphonic perspective, the growing seed of Filipino nationalism in the face of Japanese oppression. On the one hand, Don Lino nostalgically expresses his gratitude to the previous Spanish colonialists and, though he is not very fond of the United States, he opposes their intention of giving the Philippines its independence: Don Lino, like several Filipino rich men, did not like Americans, nor was he satisfied with their desire to grant the country independence…. Independence would ruin Filipinos. Only four empowered puppets who could benefit from it would want it. The people would not benefit from it. They were not, nor would they be for a long time, ready to take on such a great responsibility. (134)

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By contrast, his son Fernando, who has become a guerilla captain in charge of more than one thousand men fighting the Japanese, rejects all types of colonialism, both Spanish and American. Somehow, it seems as if the old Nipponophile protagonist and the new, awakened protagonist along with his militant son Fernando were the three stages of Balmori’s lifelong political development. Fernando (the last stage) represents a decolonial view of Filipino identity, ready for any type of sacrifice to achieve political and intellectual independence from all foreigners. Thus, he is reminiscent of Lapu-Lapu, who fought against the Spanish invaders, and José Rizal, the father of Filipino independence: And as powerful as they were [Spanish colonizers], pretending that their gold chains were garlands of flowers, they tied our hands. Gold chains but, nonetheless chains! Then we lost the best thing that God had given us, our freedom! And ever since then, we await day and night for the right moment to unfasten our shackles. That is why the poet fell, singing as he faced death and Bonifacio loudly proclaimed our independence. (56)

Eventually, however, Fernando Robles ends up wounded, mistreated, and emaciated in a Japanese concentration camp, as did many other Filipino officers. In turn, his uncle Don Ramón is the most politically astute character; he constantly mocks his brother’s Nipponophilia and warns him, to no avail, about the impending Japanese danger. In his dialogues, readers can more easily notice the end of a Romantic or Modernista approach to fiction. For instance, at one point he tells his nephew Fernando: “Hey, Fernando, is that you? May God and the Philippines bless you! And when you find yourself in front of them, don’t forgive even one, kill as many as you can! Mercy was not made for them! God did not give us a heart to waste on those animals… !” (145). This language is much removed from that in Se deshojó la flor! Overall, Los pájaros de fuego is a key work, not because it is one of the last Spanish-language Filipino novels and the only one to relate the Japanese invasion in Spanish, but because, perhaps unconsciously, it depicts the evolution and maturity of an original and defiant nationalist thought that is turning Filipino national identity into a resistance weapon

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against invaders.6 While Balmori’s novel denotes literature’s power to convey the collective cry of a people undergoing an unspeakable genocide, it also presages the end of Spanish-language Filipino writing and the Spanish cultural heritage in the archipelago. It reveals the misperceptions and disillusionments of a rapidly disappearing social class. In addition, Los pájaros de fuego marks the end of modernista, Orientalist, and Japonist influences on Filipino writing—as stated, the influence of an aestheticizing and (self-)exoticizing Modernismo yields to a new realist, politically committed literature. In fact, the graphic horror portrayed in the fourth part of Los pájaros de fuego is closer to the Spanish Tremendismo of the 1940s7 (even though he never read these authors) than to Modernismo in its harsher language and crude descriptions of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines. The old-fashioned, overly romantic, and at times sappy (from today’s perspective) language of Balmori’s first novels and in the initial chapters of Los pájaros de fuego is now gone, as the sarcastic tone of the following passage shows: “Then, they row called the housemaids and every Japanese soldier took one into a room. Through the stylish bedrooms, the wails of the maids being raped resounded, mixed with the shattering noise of glasses and bottles along with the soldiers’ shouted comments and laughter as they carried out their evil deeds. Banzai Nippon” (150); further on, “with all sorts of citizens being savagely ­tortured and then shot under the slightest pretext” (154). Romantic or Modernista influence has all but disappeared; instead, these horrifying scenes brings this work closer to European Naturalism:

6  As José Donoso and Rocío Ortuño explain, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines is also addressed in several other Spanish-language, Philippine, testimonial works, including Manuel del Val’s (Madval) Las estrellas vencen al sol (finished in 1946); Mariano L. de la Rosa’s novel Fíame (Filipinas-América) (1946); Antonio López de Olaguer’s El terror amarillo en Filipinas (1947); José G. Reyes’s Terrorismo y redención. Casos concretos de atrocidades cometidas por los japoneses en Filipinas (1947); Alfredo Roa’s De aquella tragedia: episodios de la última guerra en Filipinas (1947); José María Cuenco’s Memorias de un refugiado (1947); Raymundo Kagahastian’s Idealismo o patriotismo (1950); Benigno del Río’s Siete días en el infierno: en manos de la Gestapo nipona (1950); María Paz-Zamora-Mascuñana’s “Nuestros cinco últimos días bajo el yugo nipón,” included in Cuentos cortos 1919–1923 y recuerdos de la Liberación 1945 (1960); and Juan Labrador’s A Diary of the Japanese Occupation, written in Spanish but only published in English translation in 1989 (Ortuño 294). 7  Unlike Tremendist authors, however, Balmori does not focus on people with disabilities or on marginal characters such as prostitutes, criminals.

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Allies? Men from the same race? Never! Filipinos did not descend from Asian pirates. They did not have as their ancestors wild warriors with slave women who hypocritically worshipped the shadows of the dead, death’s image. The blood that ran through our veins was not yellow, like pus and bile, but red, red human blood a people’s blood, God’s blood. (167)

Its closing pages relate the massacres and rapes carried out by blood-thirsty Japanese soldiers as they retreated from the islands: “And Fernando, horrified, could see, before closing the balcony’s doors, how a pitiful woman, falling to her knees before a Japanese soldier, held up her baby son and begged for mercy. The soldier impaled the boy with his bayonet, threw his body against the rocks, then shot the unfortunate woman” (208). These passages reveal the author’s and the protagonist’s rejection of their initial Nipponophilia. Therefore, as was the case for the tremendistas in post-civil war Spain, whose writing reflected their personal involvement in the conflict, Balmori’s tragic experience during the Japanese invasion (he lost all his possessions in the bombings) no longer allowed him to embellish his writing with self-exoticizing Orientalism. Once and for all, reality had replaced literary influence. As Donoso points out, Modernismo had been a useful tool in the articulation of a Filipino national(ist) identity: “in the case of the Philippines, the aesthetics of Modernism will be the fundamental vehicle in the creation of its own aesthetics, one that contains a political ideology based on the idea of nation building” (Introducción XVIII). This at times included the creation of an Orientalism from the East, to which even Rizal resorted.8 But now, a new language and tone needed to be deployed to denounce the archipelago’s tragic circumstances; the harsh reality of the nation now demanded new tools for denunciation. Donoso points out how Modernismo led to a literary idealization: “Precisely for reasons of political commitment and search for a national identity, Modernismo in the Philippines will acquire its own personality, one that will result in the idealization of the Philippines” (Introducción XIII). Eventually, however, Balmori will reverse this move in which he himself had participated by resorting, in Los pájaros de fuego, to a harsh (self-) criticism of the Filipino upper classes, together with the shameless collaboration of some sectors of Filipino society with the Japanese 8   See my article “From Self-Orientalization to Revolutionary Patriotism: Paterno’s Subversive Discourse hidden in Romances.”

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invaders. With its subtitle, Philippine War Novel, Los pájaros de fuego underscores its author’s patriotism, perhaps in a desperate attempt to fend off accusations of collaborationism, given his former praise of Japanese achievements. But Filipinoness is no longer idealized in pursuit of a nationalist ideology; it is now time to look in the mirror and explore what exactly went wrong with people like himself who were deceived by Japanese culture and political propaganda only to realize too late their mistake. In Los pájaros de fuego’s conclusion, all that Don Lino believed about Japan is belied. Even his vehement praise of Japanese women’s loyalty to their partners is contradicted once his beloved Japanese lover and muse, Haruko, writes to tell him that she is pregnant and about to marry another man. Even though Balmori visited Japan and experienced first-hand Japanese culture and society, it would not be wrong to assume that he was also influenced by the then trendy chinoiseries and Japanism of European writers and imitated by their Latin American peers. In this regard, the novel’s message openly recognizes that there is no point in imitating the imported Orientalist worldviews of European and Latin American writers who admired Asian cultures, like that of the Japanese, with their personal lack of knowledge about them. Such imitation became even more ludicrous as, in the real-life “Orient,” Filipinos were suffering the atrocities of the Japanese who, in turn, were following the cruel and unhinged model of European colonialism.9 In sum, Los pájaros de fuego portrays the downfall of a wealthy and distinguished family in Manila, the Robles, after the advent of the Japanese invasion. In his avowed Nipponophilia, Don Lino Robles, the head of the family, seems to be the Orientalist Balmori’s alter ego. Conceiving of the Japanese empire as a liberator of the European colonies in Asia and as a cultural referent, he mocks, particularly in the first part of the novel, his brother Don Ramón about his warning of an impending Japanese military attack. The latter is a key character in the polyphonic nature of the novel because only he dares to contradict the protagonist’s obsession: not only is he convinced that Japan will invade the Philippines, but he also denies the divine origins of the emperor, decries geisha prostitution with 9  Regarding the Orientalism displayed among many influential Latin American writers, it must be said that they often just felt curiosity and attraction for Asian countries, seeing them as a source of a new, alternative knowledge; usually, they did not advocate for hegemonic domination in that continent.

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foreigners, is shocked by humans pulling carts and by seppuku ritual suicide, and that many join the imperial army to massacre citizens of weaker nations. By the time that Don Lino finally witnesses the realization of some of his brother’s fears, it is too late: his pregnant daughter Natalia is raped and killed by those Japanese soldiers who were supposed to be liberating the islands from Western imperialism. As if that were not bad enough, Don Lino must now see his own son-in-law, Sandoval, become a shameless collaborator of the Japanese. In this national allegory, each character metonymically represents a larger societal group or a nation. Natalia Robles, the Philippine dalaga (unmarried woman) raped by Japanese soldiers, embodies the Philippines usurped by an immoral invader. The character Sandoval, who only marries Natalia because of her family’s wealth and social position, personifies the dark side of a decadent Filipino society, a self-criticism that goes along with the open condemnation of Japanese imperialism in the Philippines. In turn, the hypocritical character of Andrade serves the same purpose: he is another social climber who, aware of the national psychology of the Filipino, cynically uses his newspaper to fawn all those in power. During the Japanese occupation, Andrade will turn his newspaper, La linterna, into a servile, Japanese propaganda rag and he even tries to adopt Japanese manners and customs, like the sycophant that he is. But Andrade is not the only traitor; Don Lino bemoans how many Filipino intellectuals, moved by hunger, have become subservient collaborators of the Japanese and how many Filipinas now view themselves as geishas. In turn, Don Lino Robles, a colonized mind that keeps thanking the two countries that colonized the archipelago, Spain and the United States, represents the affluent, but blind and self-absorbed, Filipino oligarchy that has failed to prevent the destruction of the country: Spain could not ignore our fate…. [It] merged us, after three centuries, with a civilization that it imported from their America, turning us into a people like no other in the East, thereby creating a race of strong, fit, worthy men. Spain laid the formidable groundwork of our national structure and the United States later capped that structure with modern pomp and practical ornaments. The Philippines owed both nations its proud past and its victorious present. (27)

Therefore, Don Lino seems to contradict himself by celebrating Japanese war advances and claiming not to trust white men because they are crazy

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bullies who even kill each other for insignificant reasons; all the while, he is grateful to Western colonizers and feels protected by the American presence in the Philippines. Incidentally, according to Donoso, many in the Filipino intelligentsia then supported Japanese imperialism to offset U.S. colonialism in the region. His son, Fernando, who before the war had been in charge of one of his father’s haciendas in Luzon, is still not entirely devoid of the snares of a colonized mind, as he surprisingly claims that the Philippines is free under U.S. occupation: “No, the Japanese did not come to give us our freedom, of which we had plenty, or to bring us anything other than hunger, destruction, and death.” Similarly, Fernando later tells a Japanese soldier, whom he holds captive, that the Philippines could never be freer than under U.S. occupation: “And what freedom that Japan could have possibly given us are you talking about? The Philippines was, when you attacked it, freer than it ever and freer than Japan could ever be” (195). And yet, he stands for hope and bravery, for Filipino nationalist pride, and is ready to fight for the nation’s right to trace its own destiny. Concerning the allegorical significance of other characters, the two extremely polite and highly accomplished Japanese in the novel, who turn out to be spies, represent a shrewd Japanese empire that is not to be trusted: “Don Lino took the sheets and, in turn, began to examine them. He had previously employed, as gardeners, a couple of remarkable men: Otta turned out to be a captain in the Japanese navy; Kenjiro, a commander in its imperial armed forces” (58). Finally, the ridiculously Eurocentric Italian Anselmi (Natalia’s music teacher who claims to be Mussolini’s nephew) and the pro-Nazi German Doctor Kauffman, Don Lino’s physician, represent the many Westerners residing in the archipelago who, though unknown in their countries, claim to be nobility to have access to local wealthy families and marry into them. These social climbers, an extension of their colonialist nations, often accomplish their aims; as Natalia laments, there are wealthy naïve Filipinas who are more than willing to marry any light-skin foreigners. In conclusion, this type of social realism exempts Los pájaros de fuego from the modernista tone and the melodramatic adventures of the protagonists of Balmori’s first two novels. If in his youth Balmori was the first Filipino to publish poetry in the modernista tradition now, as a more mature author, he is compelled to discard this aesthetics to provide testimony of the atrocities that the Japanese empire, which he once admired, are committing in the Philippines. He, in this novel, regards his writing

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not as “art for art’s sake,” but rather as a means to deliver an urgent political message and to voice his patriotism and his regret for his earlier Japanese views, perhaps in an attempt to fend off accusations of collaborationism with the invaders. If Filipino Modernismo was used as a tool to articulate a nationalist ideology, it is this new literary approach, a testimonial of social realism, that will attempt to shape a literary form to express the Filipino nationalist discourse.

Works Cited Apóstol, Cecilio. Pentélicas. Hispano-Filipina, 1950. Álvarez-Tardío, Beatriz. “‘Un bizarro poema de granito al infinito:’ Modernismo and Nation-building in Philippine Poetry in Spanish.” Transpacific Connections of Philippine Literature in Spanish. UNITAS, vol. 92, no. 1, May 2019, pp. 167–99. Balmori, Jesús. Bancarrota de almas. Novela filipina. Librería Manila, 1911. “La gueisha”. Mi casa de Nipa. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2014. ———. “Nippón. La primera Conferencia en verso que se celebra en el mundo: Por el laureado poeta de Filipinas Jesús Balmori, con la colaboración lírica de las notabilísimas sopranos Srta. Nieves Tan, y Mercedes Osorio y la orquesta Ylaya dirigida por el Maestro Bonifacio Abdón. Discursos en castellano y japonés por los Honorables Francisco Varona y Hon. S. S. Miyazaki, Presidente de la Asociación Japonesa de Filipinas.” Manila, n.p., 1932. ———. Los pájaros de fuego. Novela filipina de la guerra, edited by Isaac Donoso Jiménez, Instituto Cervantes de Manila, 2010. ———. Rimas malayas. N.p., 1904. ———. Se deshojó la flor. Novela filipina. N.p., 1915. Barrera Beatriz. “Razones del modernismo hispanoamericano en Bancarrota de almas de Jesús Balmori: (“Ventura bajo la lámpara eléctrica leía vagamente el Azul de Darío”).” Transpacific Connections of Philippine Literature in Spanish. UNITAS, vol. 92 no. 1, May 2019, pp. 200–28. Coronel, Reynaldo D., Jr. Los elementos del Modernismo en la lírica de Jesús Balmori. M.A. thesis, Quezon City, University of the Philippines, 1986. Cuenco, José María. Memorias de un refugiado. Catholic Publishing House, 1947. De la Rosa, Mariano L. Fíame (Filipinas-América). N.p. 1946. Del Río, Benigno. Siete días en el infierno: en manos de la Gestapo nipona. Nueva Era Press, 1950. Del Val, Manuel (Madval). Las estrellas vencen al sol (Unpublished. Finished in 1946). Donoso Jiménez, Isaac. “Introducción.” Los pájaros de fuego. Jesús Balmori, edited by Isaac Donoso Jiménez, ix–xciii.

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———. “Los pájaros de fuego. Japón y el holocausto filipino en la obra de Jesús Balmori.” Studi Ispanici, Roma and Pisa, Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafía Internazionali, vol. XXXIII, 2008, pp. 217–35. Feria, Miguel Ángel. “El modernismo hispanofilipino ante la crítica española.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, edited by Jorge Mojarro, vol. XLIV, no 88, 2018, pp. 241–66. Guerrero, Fernando María. Aves y flores. N.p. 1971. ———. Crisálidas… Imprenta de J. Fajardo, 1914. Kagahastian, Raymundo. Idealismo o patriotismo. Nueva Era Press, 1950. Labrador, Juan. A Diary of the Japanese Occupation. Santo Tomas University Press, 1989. López de Olaguer, Antonio. El terror amarillo en Filipinas. Juventud, 1947. López-Calvo, Ignacio. “From Self-Orientalization to Revolutionary Patriotism: Paterno’s Subversive Discourse hidden in Romances.” Transpacific Connections of Philippine Literature in Spanish. UNITAS, vol. 92 no. 1, May 2019, pp. 143–66. Martín de la Cámara, Eduardo. Parnaso filipino. Antología de poetas del archipiélago magellánico. Hardpress, 2016. Mojarro, Jorge. “Prólogo. Teodoro Kalaw o el curioso observador burgués.” Hacia la tierra del Zar, Teodoro M.  Kalaw, edited by Jorge Mojarro, Renacimiento, 2014. ———. “Teodoro Kalaw lee a Gómez Carrillo: Hacia la tierra del Zar (1908), un ejemplo de crónica modernista filipina.” Transpacific Connections of Philippine Literature in Spanish. UNITAS, vol. 92, no. 1, May 2019, pp. 229–55. Ortuño Casanova, Rocío. “Los sonidos de la II Guerra Mundial en Manila: ruido y autorrepresentación en Nuestros cinco últimos días bajo el yugo nipón, de María Paz Zamora-Mascuñana.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, edited by Jorge Mojarro, vol. XLIV, no 88, 2018, pp. 291–314. Palma, José. Melancólicas. Librería Manila Filatélica, 1912. Reyes, José G. Terrorismo y redención. Casos concretos de atrocidades cometidas por los japoneses en Filipinas. Cacho Hermanos, 1947. Roa, Alfredo. De aquella tragedia: episodios de la última guerra en Filipinas (1947); José María Cuenco’s Memorias de un refugiado. A.T. O, 1947. Zamora Mascuñana, María Paz. “Nuestros cinco últimos días bajo el yugo nipón.” Cuentos cortos 1919–1923 y recuerdos de la Liberación 1945. n.p. 1960. Zialcita y Legarda, Hilario. La Nao de Manila. Caridad Sevilla, [1913] 2004.

CHAPTER 3

Filipino Poet Jesús Balmori: Testimonials of His Mexican Journey Passing Through Japan (1932–1934) Axel Gasquet

Jesús Balmori (1886–1948) was one of the outstanding Filipino writers in Spanish. He often signed his urban chronicles under his nickname, “Batikuling.” In the 1920s, he created, along with his friend Manuel Bernabé, the poetry competition known as Balagtasan. In addition to being a writer, he also worked as a journalist, dramatist, and editor in numerous newspapers throughout Manila. His literary work corresponded to the golden age of Hispanic-Filipino literature, which coincided with the time of the U.S. neo-colonial administration (1898–1942 and 1945–1946). He was a prolific writer.1 Besides his major works, many other critical and  His major works include: Rimas Malayas [Malayan Rhymes] (poetry, 1904), Bancarrota de Almas [Bankruptcy of Souls] (novel, 1911), Se deshojó la flor [Defoliated flower] (novel, 1915), Balagtasan (poetry in collaboration with Manuel Bernabé, 1927), El libro de mis vidas manileñas [The Book of My Manilian Lives] (chronicles, 1928), Mi casa de nipa [My 1

A. Gasquet (*) Clermont Auvergne University, Clermont-Ferrand, France French National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS), France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_3

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poetic works are found in media publications and several of his plays remain unpublished. The multifaceted work of Jesús Balmori exemplifies Filipino lyricism and has ties to the Spanish-speaking Modernist movement and to local nationalism. This chapter analyzes in detail the chronicles and poetry that were inspired by his 1931 trip to Mexico and that were published in two sequences by the magazine Excélsior (1932–1934)—an article also appeared in Philippine Free Press (1933). These testimonials are a clear example of the powerful cultural links that existed between the Philippines and Latin America, based on a common colonial past and the Spanish language. The corpus consists of sixteen pieces, published between June 1932 and February 1934, in which two groups are clearly distinguished: seven Mexican-travel chronicles, published in Excélsior (10 June to 10 December 1932), and eight Mexican-themed poems, also published in this magazine from 30 October 1933 to 15 February1934. Between the time of these two sets, a separate chronicle (an addendum) was published in Philippine Free Press, 15 April 1933. The chronicle group,2 however, deals with Japan (Chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4), Honolulu (Chap. 5), daily life aboard the Heiyo Maru (Chap. 6), and Los Angeles (Chap. 6). The poetry group, as mentioned, specifically treats Mexico through a series of popular clichés.

Nipa House] (poetry, 1941). Posthumously published works include Cuentos de Balmori [Tales of Balmori] (1987) and Pájaros de fuego, novela filipina de la guerra [Birds of Fire: A Philippine War Novel] (2010), a terrible portrait of the Japanese occupation secretly written between 1943 and 1945. 2  A note that appeared in Excélsior states: “On account of our colleague Jesús Balmori’s health and his recent mourning (due to his mother death), we were forced to suspend the series of his very interesting articles on his last trip to Mexico. Today we are pleased to announce to our readers that, starting with the December 10 issue, we will resume this series with Chap. 8 … “(Excelsior s.p.)—the chronicles series was interrupted with Chap. 6 on 30 July 1932. However, the series’ resumption was short-lived because, without providing a reason, it was concluded after Chap. 7’s publication in the December 10 issue. Consequently, his travel chronicles remained inconclusive with the exclusion of the Mexican stage of the journey. These testimonials on Mexico are the reason for the second poetry group that was begun on 30 October 1933 and concluded on 15 February 1934  in seven different installments.

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Vicissitudes and Conjectures of the Mexican Journey Jesús Balmori traveled to Mexico in July 1931 and returned to Manila in May 1932. It was one of his three trips abroad—he traveled to Japan in 1902 at the age of sixteen. His Mexican trip weighed on him because of financial concerns and heart disease. In fact, the trip resulted from his inability to afford going to Buenos Aires, a more expensive destination. In a brief interview made with his friend Manuel Bernabé, a poet and journalist, shortly after his return to Manila, he, when asked why did he not go to Buenos Aires or some other point in South America, bluntly answered: “For two very powerful reasons. The first, the lack of money. Also, because of my heart condition that had already left me bedridden for three months” (Bernabé: 54). Though this interview’s purpose was to celebrate his return to Manila and to preface his articles on Mexico, the outcome was extremely grim. Balmori openly concluded that “what is my general impression of Mexico? Sad, empty. No wonder that Hernán Cortéz wept at the foot of a tree in Mexico. I cried at the foot of my lyre. I thank with all my heart the Mexican people whose attention, courtesy, and applause that they heaped on me, but I would never return to Mexico” (Bernabé: 55). His uneasiness and sorrow were profound and not at all overactive. Bernabé’s brief interview contains, between the lines, invaluable clues: his nuanced and paradoxical success, his comparison of the Hispano-Filipino culture with that of Mexico and, finally, his belief in a national project that would be suited to the local Hispanic culture. His poetic notoriety in Mexico has been exaggerated. Balmori said that “the two times I appeared before the Mexican public, I was acclaimed beyond expectation…. The press described me with full honors” (Bernabé: 54). But these high-sounding statements, verifiable only in a few press releases, were made by Balmori not to avoid besmirching his title of “great Filipino poet”; we feel, however, that his impact in Mexico was relatively modest and that his disagreement with Mexican culture was partly a reaction to this reception. The distinct reality and its reasons (injustices) may be read, between the lines, in these statements: “when I gave my lecture on Japan [see “Wonderful Japan”], the first given poetically in Mexico and that, besides awakening a huge interest, was sponsored by the Japanese Embassy and applauded by the city’s high society….” (Bernabé: 54). Questions arise, therefore, regarding his lectures in Mexico. First, the situation itself was quite surprising and curious: what was a Filipino poet doing in Mexico giving a lecture, in verse form, about Japan? Why did he

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not lecture about his own country that was just as unknown to the Mexican public? Second, the Japanese Embassy in Mexico City previously denied, in the Mexican press (El Nacional, Dec. 2, 1931: 8), to have sponsored any such lecture. After listing these praises, Balmori added that, with that talk, “I put a few hundred pesos in my pocket” (Bernabé: 54)—we must speculate that financial exigencies drove him to deliver this lecture. We do not know the facts regarding this talk delivered on 4 December 1931 and its impact on Mexico (Balmori 1931: 41).3 We only know that it was attended by the capital’s “high society,” the only group who could afford admission. The overall situation was quite curious, even absurd: a Filipino reading his poetic lecture about Japan in Mexico City. Two explanations (one reliable, the other hypothetical) may explain this odd event. All these stem from the fact that Jesus Balmori was a great admirer of Japanese culture and civilization from his adolescent years, after his first trip in 1902 to Japan. His numerous writings attest to this constant passion, one that was shattered after the imperial Japanese Army invaded the Philippines and took Manila on 2 January 1942. His novel Los pájaros de fuego [Birds of Fire] (posthumously published in 2010), written in secret during that dark time, is an eloquent testimony of the cruelty and crimes committed by the Japanese during their occupation of the Philippines. Before the war, Balmori believed that it was legitimate for the Japanese to exercise some political, cultural, and economic leadership over other Asian peoples, especially that this “Asian” leadership served to counterbalance the American presence in the region, particularly in the Philippines where the United States had stymied, since 1901, its people’s aspiration to independence.4 After his return to the country on 26 August 1932, Balmori 3  The lecture’s results, published in Mexico under the title “Wonderful Japan,” included the following: “about Balmori’s brief but brilliant performance in Mexico, his lecture in verse form speaks for itself by being the first of its kind given anywhere outside and about Japan, which he delivered on the night of December 4 and was warmly received by socialites and the press” (Balmori 1931: 41). The “measure” of its success was only known by Balmori statements himself. 4  Other Filipino figures held a similar position: the independence leader Manuel Luis Quezón (2nd president of the Philippine Commonwealth between 1935 and 1942), who sought secret support for the Nippon Empire in 1933, and the third de facto president of the Philippines, José P. Laurel, who ruled (1943–1945) during the Japanese occupation. He had graduated with a law degree from the University of Tokyo. We also know the favorable impression that Japan left on the father of Philippine nationalism, José Rizal, at the end of the nineteenth century (the situation then was quite different). Even the Argentinean diplomat and reporter Ramón Muñiz Lavalle, who resided twice in Manila between 1932 and

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repeated in Manila, in a lavish show, the same lecture on Japan delivered in Mexico, which was afterwards published in a pamphlet titled Nippón.5 As we shall see, his chronicles on Mexico followed the sea route of the time and began with the description of his itinerary through Japan, Hawaii, and California, before arriving in Mexico. The second plausible conjecture about his poetic talk in Mexico might be based on the demands of the period. Japan, as a cultural subject, was undoubtedly attractive and exotic to the Mexican (and Hispano-American) audiences, perhaps raising more interest than in the Philippines as a lyrical social gathering. Although in “Wonderful Japan” [cf. Nippón] Balmori challenges the abstract, frivolous, and stereotyped vision of Japan provided by the works of Pierre Loti and the Modernist Enrique Gómez Carrillo [cf. “Madame Chrysanthemum”] (Balmori 1931: 49; 1932: 24), his “marvelous” evocation of the Japanese empire incurs a sort of “oriental orientalism,” giving the Mexican public an exotic picture by means of exalted verses or “Japanism,” in accordance with what was culturally in vogue at that time.6 The six poems that constitute “Wonderful Japan” (Balmori 1931: 39–56)7 are, in all probability, the only pages Balmori published during his trip through Mexico, included in a modest booklet signed by three authors (Rea 1931).8 The goal of this publication, whose origin is unknown (publisher and purpose)9 alludes and confirms the Mexican interest in the Sino-Japanese conflict of those years—the Japanese 1933, had a favorable view of the Japanese “protective” role in Asia against a neocolonial American dominance. In 1933, Muñiz Lavalle published a book in Manial entitled Japan before the World [El Japón ante el mundo], where he argued and defended this thesis. His travel through the Philippines had a strong impact on the Filipino Hispanic press. 5  See the preliminary study of Isaac Donoso on Jesús Balmori, Birds of Fire (xxxiii–xxxvi). 6  Because of space constraints, we cannot develop this point. 7  The six poems are titled: “Porch”, “Genesis”, “Madame Chrysanthemum”, “Poetry”, “Geisha” and “Nara”. 8  It is a triptych: “The validity of a treaty” by the American George Bronson Rea, “The Anarchy of China and the Pacific Problem”, by the French doctor André Legendre, and the poems of “Wonderful Japan” by Jesús Balmori. 9  A plausible (or at least not improbable) conjecture is that the fascicle was published as part of the “unofficially” propaganda campaign of the Japanese embassy in Mexico shortly after the conflict in Manchuria began. But we do not have evidence to corroborate this hypothesis. The Japanese embassy in Mexico issued a statement denying its official support to the public event in which Balmori participated (El Nacional, December 2, 1931: 8). But, of course, this denial can be also interpreted as a “real” support for this initiative, in the complex context of the time. The brochure was published without an editorial, the compiler is anonymous and no explanatory news introduces the brochure. Only two brief notes of the

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occupation of Manchuria and its legitimacy. It is nevertheless clear that the inclusion of Balmori’s laudatory verses in this work is episodic and marginal.10 Balmori’s comparison regarding the Mexican literary world provides substantive affirmations. Bernabé asked him: “Could a Filipino poet rub elbows with a Mexican one?” Balmori responded without hesitation, “Not rub elbows because, since Mexican authors write following the great Spanish masters, they lack originality (writers with no personality), which is what typifies our men of letters.” He concludes that “in addition, our Spanish is purer, cleaner, more Castilian” (Bernabé: 54–55). It would be useless to try to determine the veracity of such affirmations; what is important is the impressions that Balmori had after his trip that led him to affirm Hispano-Filipino literature’s high quality and the deep uneasiness that the small Mexican literary world caused him. Unaware of almost the entire political and social situation in Mexico after the 1910 revolution, Balmori shows his untimeliness with the then literary era: “the caste of the Nervos and the Acuñas is over, because I, with lighted torch, looked for ‘the poet’ and I did not find him” (Bernabé: 54). He sees a decayed literary environment, one that does not correspond with his sought-after glories: “the excellent lineage of the Nervos, the Diaz Miróns and the Juan de Dios Pezas in Mexico is over” (Bernabé: 55). As a personal tribute, he visits Amado Nervo’s gravesite in Mexico, sets down a bouquet of flowers, and prays for him. The only thing that arouses his enthusiasm is Mexican women. He openly states: “Mexican women are, in my view, what is best in Mexico. Besides being attractive, they are affectionate, self-sacrificing, and greatly courageous as they accompany men into battle, unconcerned

translators appear: Guillermo Moreno for the essay by George Bronson Rea, and Ignacio Medina Jr. for the essay by André Legendre. 10  George Bronson Rea, the main author of this booklet, was a former American railroad engineer turned expert journalist in East Asia and director of The Far Eastern Review. Rea worked as an advisor to the Foreign Ministry of the Manchukuo Government, a puppet government during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and was a great propagandist of Japanese legitimacy in the area (Rea 1933). This suggests that the pamphlet in which Balmori participates is an explicit defense of Japan’s expansionist policy in Manchuria; the poetic evocation of “The Wonderful Japan” was a kind of poetic support to the core argument provided by the Rea essay, and the anarchic and dislocated China described by Legendre. Rea is an example of the validity, even among the Americans, and before the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, of the theses by which the “natural hegemony” (read expansionism) of Japan in the Asian-Pacific region should be admitted.

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about fatigue or incoming bullets”(Bernabé: 55). He was impressed with Lupita Tovar, an actress who had had success in Hollywood. His disenchantment with the Mexican literary environment goes hand in hand with another fact: his disinterest in local politics and social reality (a Modernist trait). Bernabé, in the introduction to his interview, as an excuse, said: “the poet [Balmori] does not speak of the Mexican revolution, perhaps because he has not had time to study that nation’s unrest and does not even take the time to explain the causes of that tremendous intellectual and cultural bankruptcy that he has discovered” (54). We presume that, more than lack of time (ten months is enough time to take an interest in the local situation), it is his disinterest that prevails and explains his silence. Finally, as pointed out by another critic, we infer that Balmori thinks that Filipino literature in Spanish, emancipated from European (Romanticism) and Spanish American (Modernism) influences, is “aware of having created an autonomous, patrimonial Asian literary paradigm” (Donoso: xxiii, n.27).

Japanese Deviation of the Mexican Chronicles We now turn to Balmori’s chronicles and poems on Mexico. As we pointed, the Mexican chronicles address in seven chapters his travels through Japan, Hawaii, and Los Angeles, all stopovers on his way Mexico. He devoted the first four chronicles to Japan’s Moji, Kobe (Osaka port), and Yokohama (Tokyo port). From his first trip in 1902, Balmori highlights the fabulous economic changes produced by industrialization, urban development, but also changes brought about by fundamental changes in customs; he was especially interested in the latter, as evidenced in his portrayal of the transformation of Japanese women. In Moji, he confirms that what was once a country of musmés [“young girls”], Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemum, Japanese women have now become modern women whose fashion and refinement were on a par with those of Paris, London or Los Angeles. The change has been so radical that they have become unrecognizable to Filipinos: “Miss Butterfly … has had her wings burnt by West’s sun and all that remains is the golden dust of their history” (1932a: I, 12). He no longer considers girls who speak high school English or smoke Chesterfields to be Japanese: “No, they are not Japanese, and if they are, they have forgotten that they belong to a divine lineage, that they are daughters of the gods” (1932a: I, 12).

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Balmori yearns for the Japan of yesteryear, that traditional country that has diffused Japanese legends throughout the West. He belongs to those who long for the past and reject the present—he longs for the former Japan as well as for the Spanish-ruled Philippines. He intensely misses the Modernist portrayal of a Japan with its imaginary stereotypes. With dismay, he notices how the government’s wishful-thinking expectations about women’s progress “has turned you [woman] from a humble fisherwoman into an attractive and charming lady who turns travelers’ heads” (1932a: I, 13). The Yoshiwaras (brothels) have been transformed into modern dance halls; hairstyles, traditional costumes and customs have been Westernized. Western modernization has disrupted the harmony and tenderness of traditional. His stopover in Kobe leads him to praise a traditional dinner in which he can witness how it used to be: “seven musmés appear sitting on their knees like the Sun’s seven colors, seven relaxed and beautiful artists who could well be the seven capital sins”(1932b: II, 13). In these chronicles, Balmori once again Orientalizes Japan by employing Western aesthetic criteria, evoking the sensuality of musmés and geishas [“courtesans”]. But like Moji, Kobe is primarily an immense industrial city that evokes a mixture of attraction with repulsion. While in Kobe, Balmori visited the most admired Japanese poet of that time, Yoshida Tokutomi (son of novelist Kenjiro). Turning to politics, Tokutomi asked him about Rizal: “When will they grant you independence? … It seems that whenever the topic comes up, that of your freedom, they refer to Japan as the bogeyman; they try to naively make us believe that you are children and that Japan is the Ogre that will eat you alive as soon as Uncle Sam leaves you on your own” (Balmori 1932c: III, 13). Americans bring up. as disastrous examples of imperialism, Japanese actions in Korea and Manchuria. Tokutomi tried to reassure him by means of the official discourse: “you who know us so well, and many Filipinos like you, know very well that if Japan were ever to intervene in the politics of your country, it would be to provide you support, protection…. And it will never happen, no matter how imperialists we may be, that Japan’s imperialism commit such abuses of confidence and strength” (Balmori 1932c: III, 13). Back in the steamer, Balmori was asked by Mr. Hamilton about his Osaka visit. He answered that he had visited the poet Tokutomi, to which the American responded, with no knowledge of the political dialogue that had taken place between the two: “These Japanese! These Japanese! If the United States has not yet given you independence, it is because the day they do, the Japanese will eat you alive” (Balmori 1932c:

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III, 14). The irony of the situation lead to silence by Balmori, who only replied with laughter, recalling what was shared between Tokutomi and him. A few year later, however, history would belie Tokutomi’s sophistry in his comments. Balmori would learn the Japanese lesson the hard way, as did the people from Manila and the rest of the Philippines. His last Japanese stopover, before crossing the Pacific, was Yokohama. There he visited the home of Artemio Ricarte (aka “Víbora”),11 a former Filipino general during the war of independence, who he lived in exile with his family and granddaughters. Along with another war hero, Apolinario Mabini, Ricarte had refused to recognize the legality of the Yankee occupation of his country. Released for good behavior in 1910, after six years of imprisonment, he fled to Hong Kong, then to Japan in 1915, where he remained until 1942. After the Japanese occupied the Philippines, returned to his homeland where, at war’s end, he still sided with the Japanese. The fifth installment describes the stopover in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he visited the famous city aquarium and celebrated the memory of the former queen Lilinu-Kalami, protector of the arts and an enemy of all that was foreign (Balmori 1932e: V, 13), particularly the United States. The sixth installment deals with daily life aboard the steamer Heiyo Maru, with its cohort of Asian and American notables and diplomats; he also told jokes and anecdotes to the ship’s idle women (Balmori 1932f: VI, 13–14). The seventh chapter deals with his arrival to the port of San Pedro in Los Angeles, California. It briefly describes its reality and social issues, like the unemployed men who swarm the streets. But frivolity soon returns to his story and he ends his day by talking to his readers about Hollywood and its women, whose ostentations are superlative when compared to that of the great capitals of the world. His sleeplessness before the brightness and panache of the city that does not sleep leads him to an insomniac trance: “doubting if what we see and feel is a dream, a daydream, or a reality” (1932h: VII, 13). Adding the final stroke to this Californian portrait, a hotel waitress asks him, at breakfast (after a feverish and sleepless night) his opinion on the city of Los Angeles; he responds with a laconic and poetic sentence, “Too many wings” (1932h: VII, 13).

11  Years before Balmori devoted an humoristic and critical poem to Artemio Ricarte, titled “El General Artemio Ricarte se equivoca” [“The General Artemio Ricarte is wrong”] (Balmori 1928: 211).

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Verse Stamps of Mexican Popular Culture The eight-poem series on Mexico is the only authentic text about his American trip. It was published between 1933 and 1934, as a new undertaking, after he was forced to abandon his traveling essays in 1932 for health reasons. After a ten-month hiatus, the old series was not renewed. Although we do not have data to place their composition, it seems clear that these poems were written either during his trip or shortly thereafter12; he at last decided to publish them as poetic notes to complete his previously uncompleted chronicles. The only relation between the first chronicles and these poems is that each is published under the same heading, “From Manila to Mexico.”13 “Atrio” [“Atrium”] is kind of a foreword to the series and recounts his first impressions upon arrival at the port of Manzanillo (Colima), Mexico. The poem conveys the cultural shock of his Mesoamerican arrival. The port of Manzanillo welcomes him rudely: he stays at a bug-infected, seedy hotel and must deal with an immigration officer who put him through hell to attain an entering visa. Balmori spent two days dealing with these hassles. At last, he arrived in Mexico City by train, where linguistic, social, and lodging surprises overcame him. Indeed, there he was called “Chucho,” a nickname “Jesús,” which gets him off on the wrong foot. Oh, sweet name Jesus! Holy Name that I guard As a treasure while all puput [“fancy”] girls bless you, Forgive the evil words that treat you like a dog,14 Since they do not know what they are doing, much less what they say! (1933a: 7)

The great city welcomes him with all its exposed contradictions: dire poverty and opulence, a multicolored blend of white and indigenous races,

12  “Mexico Aristocrat” (a poem) suggests that he wrote them after returning to the Philippines, as well as when he writes about women: “And today, far from you, by sea, by sky” (Balmori 1933a: 34). 13  It is useful to note that the series of chronicles is titled “De Manila a México” [“From Manila to Mexico”]; the poetic series title is “De Manila a Méjico” [“From Manila to Mexico”]; in English is the same translation, but in Spanish the use of the jota (J) denotes the most purely Hispanic variant of the term, while the X is the most common use in Mexico. 14  “Chucho” is a popularly used word to designate dogs; the Mexican use of it as a nickname for Jesus angers Balmori because he cannot resign himself to being called thus.

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a perplexed mosaic of appearances and realities. Mexico is a city full of contrasts: Before my eyes Mexico rises under its ebb and flow Like a mysterious ocean that had cracked in full hysteria: On the one hand all flowers; all palaces, all luxury; On the other all stench, all shacks and poverty! (1933a: 7)

The key term of this impressionist stanza of this great city is “hysteria,” because it is a condensation of all the ambiguities of the old Aztec capital. The city’s dual character is the essential quality that he notices, a fact that breaks down and degrades in these verses: On the one hand blue eyes, blond hair; white skin! On the other slanted eyes and black braids; dark skin ………………………………………… On the one hand, the great-grandchildren of Hernán Cortés speaking Spanish! On the other, the great-grandsons of Moctezuma speaking Aztec! (1933a: 8)

This preliminary poem ends with a new invocation that serves as a desideratum to highlight the country’s positive values that go beyond its contradictions: Hail Mexico! I offer you the blue flower of my eagerness ……………………………………… Because contrary to your thieves, your drunks and ruffians, You have your skies, your women, your poets, and your flowers! (1933a, 8)

The series follows the poem “China poblana” [“Chinese Woman from Puebla”] published in the same issue as “Atrio.” It is an ode to Mexican women but, for Balmori, it is the most obvious link between his Eastern country with Mesoamerica. In fact, the beginning of the poem highlights its Asian origins, which history and traditions later confuse with Mexicanness. There was a Chinese princess That felt she was a swallow Looking for a sun in the mist, And in a Spanish ship

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She left for Mexico alone, Perching her flight in Puebla. (1933b: 8)

But in these poems, Balmori abstains (consciously or unconsciously?) from including the word miscegenation. That this Asian Indian woman becomes Mexican, after arriving in New Spain via Manila, is the outcome of a fusion with the local reality, rather than evidence of cultural or racial miscegenation. With Modernist-style versification, this portrayal of the “China Woman from Puebla” includes all the topics of Mexican folklore: clothing, dance, courage, and love. The assimilated Asian woman who embodies Mexicanness represents a kind of primitive or wild love in a pastoral lifestyle, and a syncretism of life and death. The sonnet to her memory ends thus: To look at you is to love you With a crazed soul Because in your flowery flesh Life and death are found Because in loving you give life And in loving you kill with love! (1933b: 8)

The third poem speaks of the rudeness with which Balmori observes local linguistic usage. Titled “Barbarismos idiomáticos” [“Idiomatic Barbarisms”], these verses give an account of the amazement that Mexicanisms caused him. Like all Filipino literati of his generation, Balmori always used, except for some typical uses of Filipino Insular Spanish (peppered by Tagalog terms), an extremely pure, rich, and flowery Castilian Spanish. And, like many Modernist poets, he seems to have written his poetry with a dictionary at hand; such is his wealth of vocabulary. The entire poem is a complete dictionary of Mexicanisms, to the point that, at times, it appears as a genuine catalog. This type of Spanish, stained by local usage, produces shock and awe in Balmori who uses it without reservation but with great uneasiness: Listen. In Mexico there are words that in my poet’s ears Were the same as a shower of pellets and bricks. ……………………………………… Poor Castilian prosody imprisoned in the depths of their aitches! Poor Spanish syntax wounded in the heart! (Balmori 1933c: 25)

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The list of local terms is copious and exact (“huera” [blondie], “lépero” [vulgar], “gachupín” [Spaniard], “gringuito” [little gringo], “chiwawa” [sic] [Chihuahua], “pendejo” [stupid], “chamaco” [young man], and many more uses). These idioms are unequivocally “barbarisms” for Filipinos who employ and shape Castilian as goldsmiths detached from time and space (Yankee Philippines lost in the Asian Pacific, disconnected from Spain and Latin America). Balmori ponders this phenomenon and finds a backup answer that justifies his trip to Spanish America (“to show the extent to which Castilian Spanish has been degraded”): the powerful chasm between Mexican popular Spanish and the learned Spanish of its writers. He thus concludes his exploration of idiomatic barbarisms: And yet, there is no country where the Spanish language Shines with more glorious light than in this Mexican land: Huge bards like Pesa, like Mirón, and like Nervo They are the three highest-flying eagles of Spanish poetry! I have lost myself through the temples and palaces of their Press, Where their machines serve the intellect that surrounds them, And I fully assure you that their work is so intense As in the most famous American European presses! Why those bad habits in language? Why such serious disarray           in its idiomatic structure? They speak Spanish very badly, but writing, even the children Can give us a lesson on the best literature! …………………………………………… And every newspaper is a source of artful knowledge and refined speech! (1933c: 25)

This insurmountable gap between popular Mexican speech and cultured literature or journalism was not only a local phenomenon, but also one similar to what was occurring in the Philippines of the time, especially after its annexation by the U.S. administration. Many of Balmori texts and poems include this distance between the popular and the cultured use of the islands’ Spanish language. Balmori understood this Mexican reality, because it was like that of his own country. The fourth poetic installment, titled “Mexico bucolic,” deals with an excursion through the floating gardens of Xochimilco, southeast of Coyoacán. It is a colorful and festive note of a traditional Mexico, a

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picturesque concession, almost a folkloric temptation to foreign tourists. The Xochimilco canals remind Balmori of his native land; Xochimilco is a kind of a tropical island that takes him back to his old Manila. Tamales, jicamas, peanuts, fruit candy, corn … And we eat, and we dream that we are wandering around our native country (1933d: 31).

The songs, the swaying hustle and bustle amid the waters, all raise him above the local color and return him to his distant land. All this is Xochimilco with its carved arks From Aztec times in its sleeping waters; Where Love floats on light boats With their sails as wings stretched to the skies (1933d: 31).

Balmori’s musings continue; only a gruff voice tears him away from this nostalgic lethargy: And I loosen my dream like a golden Hypsipyle, And I cry to myself as I stand up: “Don Chucho, stop thinking about Manila! Come on, Don Chucho! Ándele! Ándele!” (1933d: 31)

The following poem, “Tragic Mexico,” describes Mexicans’ concerns with death through their popular customs. It addresses the social issue of unhealthy products as a symptom of a death drive: the popular consumption of marijuana and domestic spirits (tequila, pulque, mezcal), is at the root of social ills and criminal behavior among the lower classes: Irreligious, fanatical, haughty masses That nobility tarnishes, And does not conceal its hatred of foreigners Neither its fear of the United State, nor its contempt of Spain! Masses that believe in Christ and persecute the clergy, That violates her purity and yet prays before Mary, And await in bars, drunk and quarrelsome That the holy lottery gets them out of trouble! (1933e: 21)

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Balmori is thereby perplexed by the familiarity with death in Mexican culture (common place among foreigners), but lacks the answers to those social analyses required to delve into the matter. The sixth poem, “Aristocratic Mexico,” changes the topic completely. It is about a typical visit to the palace of Chapultepec where the country’s presidents then resided. The extensive poem is divided into two thematic parts. The first evokes the evanescence of Mexican presidents, praised and undermined by the ubiquitous power of unstable domestic politics; the second focuses on the ladies of the capital’s high society, emphasizing their natural beauty, elegance, and “sophisticated” manners. Balmori lets us understand that he has been introduced to the president, but we assume that this meeting was imaginary. Balmori was not a noted foreign political figure and there is no reason why the president should receive him. President Don Pascual Ortiz Rubio, who governed between 1930 and 1932, is mentioned. Had he interviewed him, there would be a record of the meeting and this is not the case. We believe that this imaginary encounter is rather a poetic justification or license that allows Balmori to describe the palace’s splendors. He then mentions a “General Amaro,”15 who became War Secretary, and declares with great irony: And to other Ministers. And to another hundred Generals Dressed in blue and gold, friendly, military, Heroes of a thousand battles in a thousand revolutions (1934a: 34).

The ironic tone actually denotes a certain contempt for the local political life (Latin American as a whole) characterized by its opera-like leaders who are brutal and arrogant, mostly uneducated, and who know that they are always at risk of a military coup, or an uprising of a rival faction. Balmori describes this political volatility by comparing the president with “a one-day rose” that, after having blossomed, immediately withers. Thus, the guards at the palace are: Like fierce dragons that guard the habitat of this one-day rose.

15  Perhaps it was Joaquín Amaro Domínguez, military chief who was then director of the Military School.

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Because this is the great Mexican boss, and it is this What sometimes lasts in his conspicuous position: How roses, clouds, and sunups last! He falls asleep in his palace, in his golden bed, And awakens in jail, if he hasn’t been shot In a twenty-four-hour uprising! (1934a: 34)

Mexican high society stands in contrast with its political personnel, as though both were not linked through a secret pact. Oh, Mexican high society! The encouragement Of regal manners and the great refinement Of customs worthy of three fleurs-de-lis! (1934a: 34)

In contrast to the extreme rudeness of the politicians and the military, all arrogant, conceited, and male chauvinists, who arrived at power through the back door and ejected through a window, he highlights the female figures who pass through power as decorative statues, unmistakably more cultured than their lethally brutal and ignorant masters. Balmori identifies with them, and flatters their natural beauty (“the Mexican ladies do not wear makeup / their great beauty doesn’t need cosmetics”), their refinement (“they flee from the bizarre and what’s American”), and their culture: They love music, verse, painting and sculpture; And, just like the men, have so much culture That their talk becomes charm, illusion, clarity, They do not eat saints, nor have friars for dinner, They do not suck candles and, if they go to dances It is dreamlike to observe them in their serenity! (1934a: 34)

It is the women who best embody the qualities of the Mexican aristocracy. Does Balmori correlate them with the Hispano-Filipino aristocracy? We believe so. Aztec aristocracy, illustrious aristocracy where luxury, ingenuity, and grace triumph, Under a simplicity worthy of all praise; To deal with it is to admire it with a renounced soul, Because above all in life,

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It has as a shield the virtue of honor! (1934a: 34)

We know very well that, in the Mexican and Filipino cultural and political contexts, honor is a Spanish quality, a legacy and a virtue in this former colonial world, which the poet Balmori raises against the lowly materialistic culture of the United States (the threat of Mexican Hispanidad16 and the pressing reality of the Philippine Hispanidad). The refined high-society women are complemented by the cultural and literary aristocracy of Mexico: Sweet friends of mine, from Nájera and Landero, From Ortelia, from Nebrija, from Altón and Castrofiero, It still seems to me that I see you in my mind … … … … … … … … … … … …. And today, far from you, because of the sea, the sky That separates us, in crazy despair flies My last verse, shriek of the dying swan: Mexico is in the world a throne of beauty, And on top of that throne, Indian, sweet princess, The Mexican woman is the rose of the world! (1934a: 34)

The seventh poem “Acapulco” is much more than a simple tourist subject in Balmori’s Mexican pilgrimage. It is in a way a complement to the “China poblana,” the Asian figure who arrived in Mexico through Manila, because these verses recall the Manila galleon that brought from Mexico the Virgin of Antipolo, one of the most venerated virgins in the Philippines. We have in the islands a seductive Indian, a sweet princess of Mexican origin, a divine Aztec of daring worship; The Acapulco galleon Juan Niño de Tabora brought us through the green pathways of the ocean The Virgin of Antipolo, María de la Paz! (1934b: 15)

Acapulco not only refers to the transpacific voyages that lasted two and a half centuries, but to everything that Mexico also contributed to the Philippines in the colonial period.  Spanish heritage.

16

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When the Mexican people were still from Spain, From Acapulco the Spanish galleons departed They flooded Manila with seeds and silver. ……………………………… In the first years of the Iberian conquest Acapulco was the barn, the store, and the treasure           Of the Filipino people. Hence our identity in the fauna and flora, In the flower and spike that our fields grow, In music and dances, in all from the outside; They linked us to Mexico, and to Mexico we owe In great proportions a thousand things that we have In art and science, in sound and color. (1934b: 15)

“Acapulco” represents a just tribute to universal Spanishness and to the Hispano-Filipino culture that Balmori claims and justifies; his Philippines is the product of New Spain’s constant labor. Towards the end of the poem, Balmori declares that the immense Pacific Ocean does not separate the two countries, but unites and binds them in an indissoluble common past: Acapulco! Acapulco! Before your waves, ………………………………… How my soul longs for your Spanish galleons, Those that served as an exciting bridge between your beautiful people and my beloved country! (1934b: 15)

“Artes y letras,” [“Arts and Letters”] the last installment that brings to and end the poetic cycle of his Latin American experience, addresses the bullfighting (artes) culture inherited by Mexico from Spain (“In Mexico bullfighting / It is a coat of arms, it is a trophy, / It is love, it is desire, / It is the blood of Spain “[Balmori 1934c: 15]), and it pays homage to the great poet Amado Nervo (letras), an unavoidable figure of Mexican Modernism. Balmori’s heartfelt homage to Nervo is the ultimate reason for his poetic pilgrimage to Mexico, the light that justifies all the anxieties experienced in this extensive route. Nervo, teacher and guide, Divine nightingale

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Of divine harmony Who became sick of poetry And died of love. Brother of Darío And also of Mirón, A summer gold leaf that a cold, impious wind, Folded in its heart. (1934c: 15)

Conclusion The study of Balmori’s texts on Mexico shows a contrasting result. Balmori was disappointed with this country from a social and political point of view, as well as from the unexceptional local impact of his visit. His high expectations for a grand reception in Mexico were lost in promises and false illusions. These expectations were undoubtedly the result of the eminent and central place that he occupied in the Hispano-Philippine cultural scene. An air of general disappointment characterizes his trip, as it is evident in the interview conducted by Manuel Bernabé on his return; his uneasiness finds a single refuge: a longing for the great Modernist glories of Mexican poetry that, by 1931, had been eclipsed or extinguished. We have seen how much space his fleeting journey through Japan occupies in his journey to Mexico. Although the untimely interruption of the first-series chronicles somewhat explains the weakness of his descriptive texts on Mexico, we believe that this textual dearth is more the result of his disillusionment with Mexico and that his sole positive experience was his reception by Mexico City’s high society. Therefore, his disappointment with that country is the reason why a prolific author like him did not write more on his Mexican experience. We assume that the outcome would have been different had he been better received in Mexico. Among the documents that we have, one puzzles us: the only pages Balmori published in Mexico were the poems that he had dedicated to Japan, not to the Philippines. We have tried to explain the historical determinants of this fact, by showing the strong attraction that Balmori felt for the Japanese culture. This lure stemmed from his expectation that, for Filipinos, Japan stood as an Asian counterbalance to American imperialism. Yet, this fact served as another reason for his critical stance toward Mexico.

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Balmori’s poetic sensibilities stood at the opposite end of his headstrong social and political one. He found social and political phenomena elusive in his country, yet more so in Mexico. During his stay in the latter, he was uninterested in these facts that were, however, essential to his understanding of that country’s turbulent reality. Balmori’s poetry rejected almost all Mexican popular manifestations. To him, outside of high society and the city’s small literary world, Mexican society was a homogenous chaos, an archaic mess, brutal and ignorant, where vociferous joy found its parallel in a popular violence fatally led by opportunist and arrogant caudillos. He failed to give a historical and social explanation on the widespread Mexican hatred towards gringos, gachupines, and foreigners as a whole. This popular nationalism clashed with Balmori’s genuine cosmopolitan configuration as the chosen representative of the Filipino cultural elite. He carried out the same despicable behavior that he criticizes in Mexican nationalists, when he rejected, with aristocratic contempt, the uncultured underdogs’ dubious morality and, instead only recognized their corruptibility and degradation. Thus, Mexico reflected his own social condition that would soon show its limits. The New World reversed everything, perverted it and upset it to the point of ridicule: the distinguished poet Jesús Balmori, glory of the Philippines, became in Mexico a “Chucho,” that is, a little dog. His status in Mexico was diminished. “Artes y letras,” after its praiseworthy homage to Mexican Hispanicism (its bullfighting passion and great Modernist poets), ends curiously with a stanza that synthesizes his stubborn incomprehension of the Mexican reality: While on a carpet Of reproach and blemish That amazes the same crow, The black shadow emerges Of the black Pancho Villa! (1934c: 15)

These verses as well as others not only denote his incredulity in the Mexican Revolution, but also demonstrate his class-based aversion to it, and his tacit solidarity (never explicit) with the elitism of the Diaz’s dictatorship (the rise of modernization). His personal disenchantment with Mexico resulted from another major misfortune: the gap between the Philippines and the Spanish-speaking world since the beginning of the twentieth century. The real tragedy, for Balmori and the intellectuals of his

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generation, was their insistence in keeping Hispanic culture alive and fruitful in the Philippines, at a time when history, during the neocolonial American period, tied them mostly to the past and projected them less towards into the future.

Works Cited Balmori, Jesús. Rimas malayas. Manila: s.e, 1904. ———. Bancarrota de almas. Novela filipina. Manila: Librería Manila Filatélica, 1911. ———. Se deshojó la flor. Novela filipina. Manila: s.e., 1915. ———. Balagtasan (Justa poética). Manila: Gráfica, 1927. ———. El libro de mi Vida Manileña. Manila: Gráfica, 1928. ———. “El Japón maravilloso.” Charles Bronson Rea, El Japón y China: su problema actual… México: s.e., 1931, pp. 39–56. ———. “De Manila a México” (cap. I). Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 938, Manila, 10 de junio, 1932a, pp. 12–13. ———. “De Manila a México” (cap. II). Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 939, Manila, 20 de junio, 1932b, pp. 12–13. ———. “De Manila a México” (cap. III). Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 940, Manila, 30 de junio: 1932c, pp. 12–14. ———. “De Manila a México” (cap. IV). Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 941, Manila, 10 de julio, 1932d, pp. 10–12. ———. “De Manila a México” (cap. V). Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 942, Manila, 20 de julio, 1932e, pp. 11–13. ———. “De Manila a México” (cap. VI). Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 943, Manila, 30 de julio. 1932f, pp. 13–14. ———. “De Manila a México” (cap. VII). Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 956, Manila, 10 de diciembre, 1932h, pp. 12–13. ———. Nippón. La primera conferencia en verso que se celebra en el mundo: por el laureado poeta de Filipinas Jesús Balmori, con la colaboración lírica de las notabilísimas sopranos Srta. Nieves Tan, y Mercedes Osorio y la orquesta Ylaya dirigida por el Maestro Bonifacio Abdón. Discursos en castellano y japonés por los Honorables Francisco Varona y Hon. S. S. Mizayaki, Presidente de la Asociación Japonesa de Filipinas. [The first conference in verse celebrated in the world: by the award-­ winning Philippine poet Jesús Balmori, with the lyrical collaboration of the notable sopranos Miss Nieves Tan, and Mercedes Osorio and the Ylaya orchestra conducted by Maestro Bonifacio Abdón. Speeches in Spanish and Japanese by the Honorable Francisco Varona and Honorable S. S. Mizayaki, President of the Japanese Association of the Philippines.] Manila: s/n, 1932g.

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———. “Atrio.” Excelsior, Año XXX, N° 981, Manila, 30 de octubre, 1933a, pp. 7–8. ———. “China poblana.” Excelsior, Año XXX, N° 981, Manila, 30 de octubre, 1933b, p. 8. ———. “Barbarismos Idiomáticos.” Excelsior, Año XXX, N° 982, Manila, 15 de noviembre, 1933c, p. 25. ———. “México Bucólico.” Excelsior, Año XXX, N° 983, Manila, 30 de noviembre, 1933d, p. 31. ———. “México Trágico.” Excelsior, Año XXX, N° 985, Manila, 31 de diciembre, 1933e, p. 21. ———. “México Aristócrata.” Excelsior, Año XXXI, N° 986, Manila, 15 de enero, 1934a, p. 34. ———. “Acapulco.” Excelsior, Año XXXI, N° 987, Manila, 31 de enero, 1934b, p. 15. ———. “Artes y Letras.” Excelsior, N° 988, Manila, 15 de febrero, 1934c, p. 15. ———. Mi casa de nipa. Manila: Gráfica, 1941. ———. Cuentos de Balmori (1887–1948). Manila: National Book Store. Editado por Pilar E. Mariño y Edgardo Tiamson Mendoza, 1987. ———. Los pájaros de fuego. Novela filipina de la guerra. Manila: Instituto Cervantes. Edición de Isaac Donoso, 2010. Bernabé, Manuel. “Nos dice… D. Jesús Balmori.” Excelsior, Año XXIX, N° 937, Manila, 30 de mayo 1932, pp. 54–55. Donoso, Isaac. “Introducción.” Jesús Balmori, Los pájaros de fuego, Novela filipina de la guerra. Manila: Instituto Cervantes, 2010, pp. VII–VCIV. El Nacional, Mexico, December 2: 8, 1931. [Journal]. Muñiz Lavalle, Ramón. Japón ante el mundo. Manila: s/n. Ilustrado por Billiken,1933. Rea, George Bronson. El Japón y China: su problema actual; La validez de un tratado. México, s.e., 56 p. Incluye el ensayo homónimo de Bronson Rea, ­traducido del inglés por Guillermo Moreno, seguido de “La anarquía de China y el problema del Pacífico” de Aimé François Legendre, traducido del francés por Ignacio Medina, y de “El Japón maravilloso” de Jesús Balmori. [Includes the homonymous essay by Bronson Rea, translated from English by Guillermo Moreno, followed by “The Anarchy of China and the Pacific Problem” by Aimé François Legendre, translated from French by Ignacio Medina, and from “Marvelous Japan” by Jesús Balmori.], 1931. Rea, George Bronson. The Independence of Manchoukuo. The Georges Washington Law School, 1933.

CHAPTER 4

Transpacific: The Queering of Philippine and Hispanic American Literatures Eugenio Matibag

Beauty Pageant in Manila In Bino A. Realuyo’s The Umbrella Country (1999), a novel whose action is set in an impoverished neighborhood of Metro Manila, ten-year-old Gringo participates in a reenactment of a Miss Universe pageant with his eleven-year-old brother Pipo and friends. What Gringo, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, calls “our game of the season” consists of the boys dressing up as contestants in a make-shift local  version of the international  event, complete with evening gown competition, talent portion, and interview questions (30–33).1 It is Pipo who will, for the third time, be crowned. Gringo provides a telling description:

1  Gringo’s real name is Gregorio, suggesting reference to nationalist heroes such as Gregorio del Pilar and Gregorio Malvar; Pipo is Felipe, as in the sixteenth-century Spanish king after whom the Philippines was named.

E. Matibag (*) Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_4

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The winner stood there, towering over all of us. Unlike me, he hardly had a spot of sweat on his face. His costume was an island spice, flavored with candle-wax fruits on his head and a very, very tight nightgown, the one Mommy had been looking for for over a long time … I wasn’t surprised to see Mommy’s nightgown appear again as a gown with heart-shaped pieces of velvet fabric pasted all over it, shoulder straps replaced by a plastic vine of sequined multicolored leaves, a lace table runner on his back like a cape. (32–33)

The game of the season amounts really  to a juvenile version of the Philippine version of the spectacle that, as reported by Whitam and Mathy (1986), features the competition of transvestic homosexuals in what is called a “fashion show,” the common name for what is also considered to be “a drag beauty contest.” Gay theatrical productions and “female impersonation beauty contest[s]” in which performing gays take the stage, are often organized in working class neighborhoods of Cebu (79, 96–97). We can compare such practices of crossing-dressing with those of another region of the global south, also referenced by Whitman and Mathy. Latin American societies have shown tolerance and even a kind of acceptance of transvestic homosexuals, generally not considered as objects of contempt nor as targets of excessive surveillance and policing. “Rather than being regarded with shock and moral repugnance, they are treated as part of ordinary social reality.” Notable exceptions are Argentina and Cuba, however (73). The above-summarized scene of cross-dressing is drawn from a novel regarding a teenaged Filipino boy’s growing up and coming out gay in the Philippines, whereby it makes a powerful association between transvestitism and homosexuality. The two, however, are not equivalent; heterosexual men have also engaged in wearing women’s clothing with varied motivations. But precedents for this association are to be found in Hispanic American literary texts, implying that the common equation of cross-­ dressing and male same-sex eroticism in both the Latin American and the Asian regions seems to run against the grain of Euro-American theories of gay and lesbian identity, whose seminal statement may be Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the “homo/heterosexual identity definition.” In her Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick argues for the central importance of “the closet” to all issues of Western culture insofar as this symbolic shorthand names the dynamics of the homo/heterosexual definition (1). The closet is the metaphor for the disjuncture between the

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inside and the outside, between what is regarded as acceptable and what is unacceptable, and the division informs all the social, cultural, and political forces attendant upon its monitoring and regulation. Writes Sedgwick in the “axiomatic” introduction to Epistemology of the Closet: this book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory. (1)

Here is where Sedgwick introduces her classification of two perspectives on “the homo/heterosexual definition”: to wit, they are the minoritizing view and the universalizing view. The minoritizing view of homosexuality pertains only to a “minority” of gays or lesbians considered as individual members belonging to a minority group. The universalizing view, on the other hand, takes in the constructivist implications of the homo/heterosexual definition in emphasizing that it is acts, and not persons, that are to be identified as homosexual or heterosexual, “an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities” (1). In the expanded context of intercontinental connections, this central idea organizing Sedgwick’s theory deserves  a revisiting, insofar as the global reframing of the issue brings Sedgwick’s theory to bear upon those cultures in which colonial and neocolonial forms of domination have had a profound and determinative impact on the production of knowledge in the so-called periphery. The seeming universality of the homosexual and heterosexual distinction in gay and lesbian studies has the potential of obscuring our understanding of how specific cultures have systematized sex and gender according to their own experiences (see Halperin, How to Do 3). Injecting qualifications into Sedgwick’s “universalizing” view according to which homosexuality occupies, along with heterosexuality, a continuum of acts and relations, Filipino author and critic J. Neil C. Garcia argues for a more local approach to the particular gay cultures of the Philippines, one that takes into account the dominant mode of feminine affectation and gender-crossing, both aspects of “gender transitivity,” that characterizes gay culture in the Philippines. Taking a quasi-essentialist and identarian approach that hews closely to what Sedgwick calls the

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“minoritizing” view, Garcia argues that the Philippine mode of same-sex intimate relations is not characteristic of “homosexuality” writ large. Sedgwick’s homo/hetero distinction has “no native counterparts” (11). In the introduction to his Filipino Gay Culture, Garcia defends this version of the “minoritizing” view in stating his intention to treat the Filipino gay as the bakla, known specifically for his cross-gender, transvestic appearance and behavior, given that the Tagalog term bakla is “basically identity-­ denotative” and that the bakla can be thought to belong to “a kind of ethnic group” (16, 48). Speaking again of the Philippines, writes Garcia, “hereabout at least inversion is still the dominant pattern” (349n5) and it is inversion that accounts for the cultural specificity of Filipino male kabaklaan, a term translatable as “gayness” or “being-gay.” Kabaklaan belongs to a different epistemology whose “dominant pattern,” at least in the Philippine metropolitan gay culture of the last three decades of the twentieth century, is that of “a psychosexual inversion (males turning into inward females because of their homosexuality)” (xviii, 3). The salience of inversion in the Philippines suggests that the research on homosexuality could do more to specify the texts and contexts by which the “indigenous” meanings of same-sex erotic relations shine forth and by which the concept of “homosexuality,” as a universal category, may be seen, through the constructionist lens, as a modern invention (Halperin, How to Do 4).

A Translocal Homoerotics Hispanic America and the Philippines have long sustained ties of affinity forged by their Spanish colonial pasts, their Iberian customs, and their economic and political relations to the United States. In the arena of sexual politics as well, the two regions share a common history of what could be called “transverse” influences across the Pacific. To the implantation of Spanish Catholicism in the Americas and in the Asian archipelago, for instance, can be attributed much of the stigmatization and ostracization of homosexuality in these regions. Since the transpacific commerce of the Manila-Acapulco galleons brought, along with silver and spices from the Americas, missionaries and Mexican culture to the islands from 1585 to 1815, the institutional might of the Church cultivated and enforced a common ethos of masculine superiority in the Asian colony, consecrated in exclusively masculine priesthood and papacy, the cult of the Holy Family and the adoration of the Virgin Mary. Erected as patriarchal prototypes, alongside the missionary friar, were the figures of the conquistador, the

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encomendero and the cacique, and they found sanction in the pastoral power that invested the Spanish peninsular and Philippine criollo with hierarchical dominance over the Filipino native, called indio, and women in general. Recent decades have nonetheless seen the emergence of forms of resistance to religious and sexual orthodoxy in these regions, as manifested in the discernible increase in the production of what may be called gay cultures and literatures. Lines of literary influence and affinity between the continents can tell us much about the development of what amounts to a global phenomenon having to do with the affirmation of homosexuality as a legitimate, if “alternative,” mode of sexuality along with the increasing global vindication of gay and lesbian rights. A refusal in recent literature of the marginalization and criminalization to which homosexuality has been subject in Philippine and Hispanic societies goes hand-in-hand with the attempt to explore and examine gay and lesbian psychology, behavior, and culture with readers of hetero or homo self-identifications as well as all degrees between and beyond the distinction. David William Foster asserts that the “examination of the homoerotic” carried out by the authors referenced in Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing (1991), “rather than being a circumscribed area of research in itself—is fundamentally a part of a larger view of cultural production” that rejects and transgresses the institutional and canonical limitations imposed on literary scholarship. Foster’s author classification can be summarized as follows: . Writers with gay identities such as Manuel Puig 1 2. Writers on gay themes such as José Donoso and Adolfo Caminha (negative); and Luis Zapata and Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal (positive) 3. Writers identified with a gay sensitivity such as René Marqués, Jorge Luis Borges (“homosocial universe”) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (“same-sex erotic poetry”) (Foster, Latin American Writers x–xi) Works on the gay experience on both sides of the Pacific have emerged from social matrices that share key patterns and characteristics among their predominantly Catholic populations, which have experienced the implantation of powerfully machista or male-dominant social and familial relations as well as their extension in authoritarian regimes. Both the Philippines and Spanish America (particularly in Chile, Argentina, and

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Cuba) are deeply embedded in the patriarchal traditionalism and hierarchization that mark the Spanish colonial legacy. It is important to note that the “queering” of Filipino literature as well as that of Hispanic America occurs not only through the impact of western-­ dominated globalization, but also through the labor of diasporas, especially through their authors’ displacement to the United States. That Filipina American novelist Jessica Hagedorn and Realuyo have lived and worked in the United States and have interpreted their native land through the lenses of North American culture does not exclude the possibility of drawing connections between the Philippines and Latin America in this subaltern cultural field and even of elaborating another dimension of cultural globalization. Chilean novelist José Donoso lived many years in the United States where he taught in various universities; Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas wrote much of his autobiographical Antes que anochezca (1992) [“Before Night Falls”] after his 1980 arrival in the United States (see Bernal 142 and Soto 25). The paradigms of Anglo-American and European queer theory have an applicability to the Latino/a and Filipino American gay cultures, but to the extent that these cultures have always been subjected to transcontinental influences through colonial and neocolonial impositions—English became an official language of the Philippines  and the predominant literary language after the 1902 U.S. occupation—and by transnational media productions. A common denominator to both bodies of “expatriate” narrative is indeed the reference to media productions coming out of the U.S. culture industry that, in both literatures, are viewed as mediators of desires, shapers of identity, and conveyors of an alienating culture of dependency. A thorough study has yet to be made concerning the direct influence of Spanish American literature on Filipino writers. What is known is that Jessica Hagedorn has expressed in numerous interviews her admiration for Manuel Puig, José Donoso, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. Just as the works of these boom authors, her novels explore the themes of changing identity and the representation of diverse social classes and spaces (see Schalbe, Guyotte, and Hsieh). In Latin American narratives of the 1960s and in the Philippine literature published after the lifting of martial law (1986), the appearance of “sexually nonnormative characters” (the phrase is Martin Joseph Ponce’s, 153) illustrates the visible emergence of homoerotic themes and issues. Ponce has noted, in his study of Philippine martial law literature, the centrality of queerness in the recollections of this period and its oblique and

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complex relationship to political resistance (154–155). Queerness here attains its power as a locus of intransigence to state power as well as a challenge to epistemic and heterosexist regimes of truth. Gay writing in Latin America joins a tidal wave of resistance to authoritarian military dictatorship in Latin America (Foster, “Agenda” 2); a similar observation may be drawn from the study of Philippine gay literature emerging in the Marcosian decades of the twentieth century. What is elaborated in Philippine and Hispanic American gay narratives does not however conform to the models presented in Western theories premised on the homo/ hetero binarism and the concept of “homosexual” definition. These narratives invalidate the idea of a single general category of intermasculine homosexuality, one in which sexuality itself holds primacy over gender. Diverse “traditions” of “male sexual and gender deviance” can be identified in these depictions, as can their separate histories, but they also represent the adjacency and palimpsestic accretion of diverse homoerotic practices in a field altogether, in their non-unified and “unrationalized coexistence.”2 The “deviation” from Western models of homosexual psychology and comportment becomes all the more salient as we make a comparatist study of how homoeroticism is illustrated and analyzed in Philippine and Hispanic American narratives since the years of the Latin American “boom” and in the last decade of the twentieth century. Both Dogeaters (1990) and The Umbrella Country fall into the category of diasporic Filipino literature, or that of a world literature written by Filipinos inclusive of those working inside or outside the Philippines. The views of homosexuality expressed in those two novels not only show something about the nature of same-sex erotic relations in the Philippines, but also the influence of internationalist and universalizing tendencies in the interpretation of homosexuality, especially in their questioning and overcoming of the inversion model assumed under the concept of the kabaklaan. This shift or evolution is part of a Foucauldian narrative that reveals the “historicity of desire itself and of human beings as subjects of desire” (Halperin, How to Do 9), and it is in these novels that this historicity is elaborated in more specific and locally-focused terms. Commonalities between the two bodies of work raise a question: Do Hispanic  American gay narratives offer models for similar treatments of the gay experience in subsequent Philippine literature? The answer may 2

 Sedgwick 47; cited by Halperin, How to Do 109.

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serve as a prolegomenon for research addressing the question of transpacific influences and interactions in the domain of gay literatures and cultures.

A Place Without Limits The hero of Chilean novelist José Donoso’s El lugar sin límites [“The Place Without Limits,” 1965] is a “heroine” too: she calls herself “la Manuela,” although her daughter reminds her that her former name was Manuel. La Manuela is a transvestite, a flamenco-dancer and a part-owner of a brothel that serves as the gathering-place and eccentric “center” of the dying town called La Estación El Olivo, set in a remote and semi-­ feudal region with no electricity and unreachable by train. In her brothel, la Manuela performs for the clientele, becoming the star and vedette of the show on nights of riotous debauchery. La Manuela’s partner in business is “la Japonesita,” who is la Manuela’s daughter, engendered when her mother, “la Japonesa,” seduced the transvestite la Manuela on a wager with the region’s largest landowner, the encomendero Don Alejandro, who bet the land where the brothel was built. La Manuela’s paternity and la Japonesita’s act of calling her “Papá” fills la Manuela with shame. But acting as who she is, (as) a woman, fills her with a sense of excitement and even exaltation in a place where she feels truly and deeply feminine. By dancing flamenco, la Manuela acknowledges her abject objectification under the masculine gaze, yet she embraces it and so masters it, thereby effectively reversing the contempt of her audience and exciting her onlookers. In her free indirect monologue, she utters, Leave me alone. I’m nobody’s “papa.” Just la Manuela, she who can dance until dawn and make a room full of drunks laugh, which makes them forget their snotty wives, while she, an artist, gets applause, and the lights explode in endless stars. She had no reason to think about the contempt and the laughter that she knew so well because they were a part of the men’s amusement, that’s what it came to, to look down on her but, on the dance floor, with a flower behind her ear, old and bow-legged as she was, she was more woman than all the Lucys and Clotys and Japonesitas on earth … bending backwards, puckering her lips, and stomping more furiously, they would laugh more and the wave of laughter would carry upward, toward the lights.3 (149) 3

 All translations from the Spanish are mine.

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La Manuela’s performance as a woman makes her more of a woman than all women of the godforsaken outpost of La Estación El Olivo. Her act has stoked the desire of Pancho Vega, a virile truck driver and the godson of Don Alejandro, whom both la Japonesita and la Manuela desire. They eagerly await his return after a year’s absence, with la Manuela mending her faded red flamenco dress in preparation to perform for him. Pancho arrives, he and la Manuela kiss, she dances for him, they dance together, and then Octavio, Pancho’s brother-in-law, appears and discovers their secret. Pancho cannot stand to be “outed” and, to conceal his desire for la Manuela, he turns against her, pummels her, and chases after her. Fearfully anxious to conceal his secret desire and feeling mortified by the taunts of his homophobic brother-in-law, he is driven to beat her to death. Metaphorically, the brothel of La Estacion El Olivo is a clandestine site of sexual desire unbounded by geography, as suggested by the novel’s title: it is ubiquitous, “universalizable” in Sedgwick’s sense of the closet, and so it is “the place without limits” in Donoso’s vision of an open secret and accepted taboo. Yet, la Manuela’s brothel is simultaneously a specific social space set apart from the typicality of the mainstream, where clients can find the wherewithal to unbutton their libidos in an orgy of drinking, dancing, and whoring. Alejandro Bernal observes that the townswomen “consider her [la Manuela] one of them” (145), fulfilling therewith la Manuela’s desire for a complete inversion of her sexual identity. Significantly, the designation of the brothel’s original co-owner as “la Japonesa” and of her daughter as “la Japonesita” suggests a peculiar cultural dislocation, one that imprints an Asianizing exoticization and Othering on this specific marginal site in a dying town. The narrative of la Manuela’s transvestic inversion, including her performance of gender mimicry, brings to the fore the very artificiality and performativity of the feminine. Insofar as she can rouse the party with her gypsy dance, she proves to be more woman than la Nelly and la Cloty and all the rest: “Those are not women,” la Manuela tells herself. “She is going to show them who is a woman and how to be [se es] a woman” (150). In El lugar sin límites as well as in Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña [“The Kiss of the Spider Woman,” 1976], the gay protagonist self-­ identifies as a “woman” and seeks their place in a world that would relegate them, seen as abnormal and the Other, to the social margins. Both novels foreground the experiences of genitally male characters who struggle to assert their right to live and be who they are in a system dominated

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by homophobic oppression and the threat of anti-gay violence.4 Here is where Sedgwick’s “epistemology of the closet” may shed light on the notion of gay concealment, which is a fundamental characteristic of gay social life, as in the act of “coming out.” Theoretically and in practice, however, the act of outing oneself does not foreclose the possibility of reentering the closet, and reentry will always lead to going into yet another and yet another closet (68). Donoso’s and Puig’s novels nonetheless trouble the paradigm of the homo/hetero binary by their insistence on their protagonists’ gender identities as feminine.

Where Inversion Is the Dominant Pattern Michel Foucault stated in 1978 that male homosexuality was not equatable to femininity or to cross-dressing, viewing both attributes as holdovers from the past that a modern homosexual culture could discard.5 But transpacific comparisons among queer literatures help bring to light significant differences between Euro-American conceptions of homosexual eroticism and those of Hispanic American and Hispanic Asian settings. The private/public distinction and forms of homosociality in the Philippines and throughout  Latin America have produced spaces where femininity and cross-dressing indeed are closely recognized as signs of homosexuality, where same-sex relations do not require the formation or attribution of homosexual identity. In this regard, homoerotic practices depicted in Filipino American and Latin American literatures do not tend to follow the Euro-American model. Such a difference may be attributed to the mentioned assignment of feminine roles by the Church and religious culture as, for example, in the cult of Marianism: the Virgin of Guadalupe and Nuestra Señora de Antipolo offer archetypical models for a queer hyperfemininity. Robert Richmond Ellis has identified the basis of the Anglo-American theory in “an ontology of individual identity,” whereas sexual self-affirmation among Latino and Hispanic gays and lesbians goes back to what is called “el ambiente”—the environment regarded 4  Manzor-Coats has singled out in the writings of Donoso, Vargas Llosa, and “even Manuel Puig” the treatment of the homosexual as “scapegoat” (xxix). Such seems to be the function of the male homosexual in Philippine writing, insofar as in both bodies of texts the homosexual is a figure of exploitation and abjection. I wish, however, to also bring out the subjective dimension of the homosexual experience as depicted in the novels discussed here. 5  Jean Le Bitou, “Le Gai Savoir: Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” La revue h, 2 (Autumn 1996): 42–54, particularly p. 50. Cited in Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality 18.

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as “a common space arising through a reciprocity of praxes” (3). The material situation gives the contextual setting for what is enacted according to same-sex desire, and practice will usually entail unequal sexual roleplay. In Arenas’s Arturo, la estrella más brillante [“Arturo, the Brightest Star,” 1984], the Cuban gay male is identified, by his standing in a social hierarchy, as the passive partner, the labor camp inmate forced to harvest sugarcane, and the feminized sexual victim of hypermasculinized prison guards (Ellis 5–6). A man who copulates with men and women, as Foster explains with regard to the Latin American context, can retain his masculine aura as long as he assumes the role of macho insertor, whereas it is the insertee who is considered the maricón [“queer”]. Here, inversion in a sexual relation consists of taking a “passive” and thus “womanly” role that requires the maricón to be penetrated by the sexual organ of a male considered the “active” partner. In this schema of active/passive roles, the binarism of homo/heterosexual identification is bypassed (Foster, “Agenda” 3). Whitam and Mathy write, with reference to same-sex relations in Guatemala between police and queers, that “[t]he sexual use of the queen enhances rather than threatens the Latin male’s masculinity. The more sexual objects over which the Latin male holds sway, the more macho he is considered” (74). Affectations of feminine dress can reinforce this role-playing by again manifesting inversion, viewed and experienced at some level as a gender deviation (Halperin, How to Do 122). This alternative view of homoerotic behavior valorizes the collective sense of inclusion within a community, regardless of one’s situatedness “in or out of the closet.” In the words of Ellis, it “turns subsequently to the queerness or difference within all sexualities” (4) so that “the overdetermining sexual binary,” amply demonstrated in numerous Latino and Hispanic texts,” is not gay/straight but feminine/masculine” (5). Lillian Manzor-Coats also stresses the inadequacy of Euro-American theories for explaining the forms of Latin American same-sex relations. According to her, homosexuality in the latter region is not, generally speaking, simply to be equated with same-sex erotic behavior, but rather with deviation from the prescribed gender construct. The man who enters into sexual relations with other men is not consider “homosexual” as long as he maintains the macho role, that is, the role of the virile insertor, the strong active. It is his partner who is considered the maricón—playing the “passive” role of “the woman,” the joto, the roto, or rajado for opening up, for being inserted (Manzor-Coats xxi). Whitam and Mathy find that masculinity in Latin America in general does not exclude a man from

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sexual encounters with homosexual locas [“flagrant fags”], as long as these are regarded as objects of macho desire. “The more sexual objects over which the Latin males holds sway, the more macho he is considered” (74); they address the wider context as well: “[t]he use of homosexuals by heterosexuals for secondary sexual outlets is quite common in Latin American countries, North Africa and many parts of Asia” (3). Consonant with Ellis’s characterization of the Latin American inversion model of homosexualities, Arenas repeatedly identifies the gay male as feminine, as adopting the “female” role in the sexual encounter or relationship—the pasivo who receives the thrusting intrusion of the masculine activo—with the concomitant relinquishment of power, a pattern that Ellis finds in many Latino and Hispanic writings (5, 6). (It should be noted that this ranking persists in hetero and same-sex relations.) Judith Butler has elucidated how the assumption of such a binary has served to naturalize a hierarchical superiority of culture over nature, of signification imposed upon an unruly Other, and thus to legitimize “strategies of domination” (37). With relevance to the theme of sexual domination, David Halperin illuminates the historicity of “homosexuality” as a modern concept by contrasting it with the older categories of “sodomy” and “inversion”: the active partner was considered a sodomite; the passive partner, the invert. The modern category of “homosexuality” is different in that it considers both partners, regardless of their activity or passivity, as belonging indifferently to the category of “homosexual” notwithstanding dominant or subordinate role-playing (Halperin, How to Do 132). “With the arrival of homosexuality,” writes Halperin: the systems of difference that were internal to the structure of the earlier four categories [i.e., effeminacy, friendship/love, paederasty/sodomy, and passivity/inversion] find themselves externalized and reconstituted at the border between homosexuality and heterosexuality, categories that now represent in and of themselves new strategies of social differentiation and regulation and new ways of regulating and enforcing gender norms. (ibid., 136)

That such so-called “pre-homosexual” categories remain recognizable today is indicative of the heterogeneity of persistent multiple homosexualities and their intransigence to definition under the “homosexual rubric.”

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In the Philippines, the male homosexual commonly called bakla or binabae is almost always described in terms of possessing a female identity, as “feminine” or “effeminate,” embodying an inversion of gendered behavior and attitude. J. Neil C. Garcia singles out the term bakla to show its difference from homosexual because, whereas “homosexual” refers to sexual-object choice, bakla stands for an effeminate or cross-dressing male; the bakla, as a feminized male, will tend to prefer and seek out masculine partners for same-sex acts. Conversely, for many in the culture, “maleness precludes femininity but not necessarily homosexual activity” (45). There is a cultural archetype entailed in this identification. Unlike the assumedly transhistorical homosexual of the West, the Filipino bakla belongs to a genealogy that traces back to tribal antecedents in the babaylan of pre-Hispanic times. Also called asog, bayok, or catalonan, the babaylan were the sexually ambiguous and oftentimes cross-dressing shamans of the community (the barangay). The babaylan were respected for their powers of healing, divination and mediumship, which were derived at least in part from their ambiguous sexual transitivity and transvestitism (xviii– xix, 28, 134–135).6 Whereas homosexuality in the Philippines is tied to the cultural archetype of the babaylan, transsexualism and transvestitism are regarded as manifestations of one’s essence and interiority, a concept that is conveyed by the Tagalog word loob, meaning “inside” or one’s “inner being.” In the bakla, it is the loob that undergoes the transition, in the genital male, from male to female, from one pole to the other, essentializing desire in accordance with what appears as a reversal of traditional gender norms. With the bakla and babaylan in mind, Garcia asserts with emphasis, “inversion is the dominant pattern of homosexuality in our culture” (213).

The Game of “Genderfucking” Inversion coexists with other patterns of homosexuality, contrary to the schemas that organize these patterns in uniform temporal blocks or in an evolutionary continuum of successive periods. Sedgwick questions the notion of a serial development of models of sexuality overtaking and 6  The babaylan also received the names of agi-ngin and binabae, among others (Garcia 162–163, 166, 170–173, 191, 404). Comparable to the transgendered muxe of Zapotec communities in Mexico, babaylan were often males who dressed in traditional female garb and whose demeanor and manner of speaking were recognized as typically feminine.

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replacing one another, arguing instead that diverse models emerging in different periods may coexist synchronically and that historical practices considered “pre-modern” may hold over in adjacency with the dominant model of a categorical and idealized form of homosexuality (Sedgwick 14–15). The traversing postmodern and telquelian text of Severo Sarduy’s De donde son los cantantes [“Where Are Singers From,” 1967], with its inversions of gender and with its playful reinscription of Chinese, Hispano-­ Catholic and Afro-Cuban religious motifs interspersed with popular culture icons, can be said to illuminate this co-temporality of homosexualities as it exceeds the master narrative of Cuban nationhood. In an illustration of the novel’s sexual-cultural syncretism, Socorro dons not only make-up and a wig (?), but also the Yoruba eleke necklaces of Santería. Such ludic meaning eludes the grim binary of inside/outside the Revolution, and it also serves up a particular queering of the patriarchal, heterosexist ideology of Castroist officialdom and Marxist totalization by hosting a free play of signification that affirms the viability of alternative sexualities and dynamics of identity formation. The twin transvestite protagonists, Auxilio and Socorro, run the gamut of what Miranda calls “pseudomiracles” as they make their way westward across the island, from Santiago to Havana, in a procession that resembles a Caribbean carnival by its display of masks and costumes; their trek across the island is also reminiscent of the traditional processions in the Kongo and among the Yoruba people (see Matibag 44, 89, 251–252). Selfhood, inclusive of the gender definition of identity, is clearly a mutable matter of artifice and performance, a mobile palimpsestic layering and a “self-service,” as the cross-­ dressing twins play the roles of prickteasers with the libidinous General. The twins are reflections of one another and of the “inessential” images of femininity implicit in nightclub culture as well as in Orisha worship. Useful for clarifying Sarduy’s queer narrative is Butler’s anti-essentialist interpretation of gender. Gender, in Butler’s view, is at bottom artifice: it is ultimately performative, constructed, and processual. In a sense, it is a work of self-definition that engenders a self and attaches it to a subject or, in other words, produces an “accident” that is taken for substance. Butler writes that “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time” (33). In this view of gender as one feature of repetitive identity performance and self-fashioning, the assumed naturalness of male and female heterosexism is problematized by gay and lesbian desire and by the transvestic mimicry

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of cisgender style. This is where “camp” comes into the picture: a spectacle of dissembling impersonation, it is a show of exaggerated feminine mannerism, or “drag.” Here we may recall the flamenco shows of Donoso’s la Manuela. So, the style and sensibility that is camp, according to Garcia’s formula that echoes Butler, “ironizes maleness and femaleness, and exposes their phantasmatic ‘natures’ in the process of repeating them within the context of parodic play” (Garcia 216). As suggested in Pipo and Gringo’s beauty pageant reenactment, gender identity is entertained as an originary affectation and second-nature pretense that, set up by such posing, takes on a certain quality that may be called “spectral,” and which Garcia explains: Instead of dwelling on what is inside (their interiority), gays may now begin to talk about and perform the acts and actuations that they, on second thought, are already doing. A gay beauty pageant may no longer be viewed as a personal fulfilment for being inwardly a woman by the gays who join it. Instead, a gay beauty pageant may be taken more as a game of “genderfucking” or poking fun at the whole helplessly split binary to which the whole of humanity has been subjected…. There is no woman inside the man wearing three-inch heels and belting Whitney Houston out of a karaoke machine. There is only the specter of Whitney Houston, the texture and suggestion and scent of her, as tomorrow she will put on a habit and officiate in mass, or smoke a pipe while reading the morning paper. (Garcia 213)

Genderfucking indeed is the game of “on second thought” inversions in El lugar sin límites, inasmuch as the psychology of its leading characters follows what Severo Sarduy called “the mythic tradition of the ‘world turned around’ [al revés].” Donoso’s novel likewise textualizes sexual inversion as transvestitism: on this account, the novel is “inversion in itself” because its narrative unfolds as “a metonymic chain of ‘overturnings’ [vuelcos], of transposed outcomes” (Sarduy 259; quoted in Aguilar 2). In this “turned around” world, Pancho Vega is the man who wants desperately to disguise his latent homosexuality or “womanliness”; la Manuela is the transvestic man who would disguise his manhood to become the woman that Pancho desperately wants (Aguilar 5).

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Sexual and Political Revolution José Amícola has revealed that Puig is the author who drafted an adaptation of El lugar sin límites as a script for the Mexican director Arturo Ripstein, although Puig received no acknowledgment for this work in the film’s credits. In his screenplay, Puig “conflated” the characteristics of la Manuela with his Molina, and the “stolen kiss” between la Manuela and Pancho becomes transmuted, through a more rationally dialogic interaction between the cellmates, into the very “kiss of the Spiderwoman.” Such transmutation constitutes proof of an intimacy that surpasses the active-­ passive binary previously embraced by Molina, in favor of a more liberated passion between equal and mutually respecting partners. The heterosexual  Valentín overcomes what Pancho could not, that is, “the masculine horror before the perverse” (Amícola 24, 26–27). Both Spanish American novels emphasize how sexual-object choice is not a matter of essential orientation but one subject to situational and specific psychological dynamics, those of the surroundings. Moreover, by depicting changes in their characters’ sexual desire and performance, the novels conjointly anticipate a similar pattern of evolution of same-sex eroticism in the Philippine diasporic works.7 Readers of Puig’s novel know that it belongs as much to the dramatic as to the narrative genre, insofar as much of the text consists of words spoken by its two central characters who dialog in a Buenos Aires prison cell. These central characters are Molina, the gay man sentenced for “corruption of a minor,” and Valentín, the Marxist revolutionary condemned for subversion.8 Much of the “speaking” in the novel consists of Molina’s retelling the plots of various movies that have captured his fancy and imagination. The plots of these movies, mostly produced in Hollywood, revolve around romantic heterosexual relationships. The retelling of those plots by Molina creates what is in effect a queering of social reality and, especially, of intimate relations, by laying bare the constructedness of that reality and the mediatic modeling of  heteronormativity. By incorporating a 7  Foster rightly asserts that Puig “demonstrates how camp, both as a parody of cultural norms and as a bricolage of multiple cultural forms and genres, is an important site for the critical evaluation of sexual ideologies” (“Agenda” 16). 8  It is significant that the action of El beso takes place before the beginning of the terror campaign called the “guerra sucia” of 1976–1983. Waged by the military dictatorship through death squads against those identified as communist subversives, the “dirty war” led to the disappearance of some 30,000 “opponents” of the regime.

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series of synopses of movie plots into Molina’s narration, El beso exposes not only how psychosocial reality is confounded by and contaminated with cinematic representations, but also how heterosexual desire is shaped by cultural fictions of identity.9 Although the cinematic love stories retold by Molina would seem to reaffirm and reinforce the assumed naturalness of heterosexual relations in real life, the implicit reader of El beso can appreciate the effect of an almost Brechtian estrangement that the telling of such romance narratives by a flamboyantly gay narrator can produce. In those retellings, we read of the architect’s desire for the cat woman, the racecar revolutionary’s obsession with the nightclub singer, and singer Leni’s powerful attraction to the Nazi officer—all of them participating in a subversion of desire that we “hear” epitomized in Molina’s version of I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Representing the representation of cultural heteronormativity, this narrative reframing demonstrates  a form of hegemonic conditioning—social zombification—but exposes  heteronormativity, via  narrative refunctioning, as the flip side of gay.10 One could say that Molina’s gender-based sense of same-sex relations is dominated by the binary code of marianismo/machismo: the former manifested in Spanish Catholic symbology by the self-abnegation and sacrifice of the Virgen Mary as mater dolorosa or pietá; the latter, machismo, grounded on the accepted equivalency of masculinity with male dominance and aggression (see Manzor-Coats xviii-xix). Molina for his part tells Valentín, “I want to be a woman,” having recalled his fond attachment to his mother and declares that “what suits me is to be a woman, because a woman is the best there is” (25). Molina goes on to elaborate the inversion theory of his own homosexuality: he and other gays regarded as “big whores” [putazos] are mutually suspicious of one another, each waiting to find a real man. But this is hopeless, says Molina, because what a man wants is a woman, and “I and my friends are wo-man” [mu-jer]. The gay scene of men loving other men as men is just “little games,” and “we don’t like them, these are things of homosexuals.” As for Molina’s group, “We are normal women who go to bed with men” (207). 9  Ellis, however, sees in the representation of Molina’s feminized submission to masculine power a veritable “subversion of power”: the norms of gendered identity are distinguished from those of sexual identity and, in the process, critiqued (6). 10  Valentín nonetheless remains masculine to the end of El beso; although his view of sexuality is amplified to admit of the legitimacy of intimate same-sex relations, he is, as David William Foster observes, never ‘”gayified’” (“Agenda” 3–4).

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Yet through interacting with Valentín, Molina’s view of his own sexual identity as gender-based undergoes a broadening transformation. In their dialogic exchange of viewpoints, Molina and Valentín come closer to understand each other’s worldview, to the point of accepting one another not in hierarchical terms, not as in the relation of dominant macho and submissive hembra [“female”], but rather out of respect and affection for each other in mutual regard. Their relationship will therefore prove mutually transformative as each overcomes his sexual prejudices and gender preconceptions. Like Sancho Panza who became “quixotized” and Quixote who became “sanchized,” Molina will eventually identify himself with the other’s cause, agreeing to contact Valentín’s revolutionary comrades once he is released from prison. Valentín, on the other hand, learns to validate Molina’s same-sex desire and engages in an intimate physical encounter with his cellmate. The partial convergence of their value systems will queerly call readers’ attention to alternate perspectives and possibly encourage empathy with those who sustain them. This convergence also invites readers to infer, dialectically, the complementary strains of emancipatory thinking espoused by each character.11 Muñoz notes Puig’s debt to Herbert Marcuse’s Freudian-Marxist critique, elaborated in Eros and Civilization (1962), in underscoring the novel’s “passionate defense of a polymorphous, perverse and total form of sexuality.” For in addition to “being a celebration of gay themes,” the novel “proposes a new sexual order and underlines the homosexual’s role in anticipating this order. It presents, as well, the utopian vision of a world without sexual barriers and oppressive gender fictions” (“Puig, Manuel” 342).

Power, Desire and Resistance In the autobiographical Antes que anochezca, Arenas tells the comical and, simultaneously, terrifying tale of his coming of age and becoming a writer under Castro’s homophobic regime. Emilio Bejel calls it an “autobiography in which homosexual desire and political power are furiously interwoven,” one that also addresses the struggle “between dissidence and 11  The popular adoration of movie actresses among Latin American homosexuals is a recognized phenomenon, as is the case with Mexican Mercedes Carreño and Argentine Isabel Sarli, both considered sex symbols. Also revered were the 1950s Spanish actress Sara Montiel and, especially in Guatemala in the 1970s, Liza Minelli, the star of Cabaret (Whitam and Mathy 94–95).

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transgression” (299). This story of a life and its writing as bio-graphia stands as an act of Byronic defiance before a political system that smothers a writer’s sexuality and silences their voice. Cast in a picaresque mode of episodic narratives, the memoir inserts episodes of sexual adventure as it describes a struggle for survival; the whole of the narrative is structured along a series of crises of authority. The protagonist grows up in a family whose absent father had deceived the mother with a promise of marriage, only to abandon her soon thereafter. As Bejel observes, the familial environment of abject poverty, where young Reinaldo is scorned as a “child of sin,” produces his tremendous urge to escape, to create, and to resist the forces of the macho authoritarianism—a desire that would find expression in his writings and sexual activities (Bejel 300). Antes que anochezca was authored by a Cuban exile, a marielito, living in the United States who, like the Filipino writers to be discussed here, belongs to a diasporic population, a fact that doubles his marginalization but also underscores his crossing of geographical and national borders. His memoir of sexual adventures before Castro’s revolution illustrates the idea that “alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality” existed in Cuba before Castro (Foster, “Agenda” 19). After the revolution, a nightmare landscape of sexual repression and political oppression unfolds in Cuba. Recalling the “superstalinization” of the Castro regime, Arenas felt compelled to describe his twenty years of persecution as well as his self-­affirming sexual rebellion: “I say my truth,” he writes; and “I scream, therefore I exist” (322). Foster finds in the memoir “a triumphant and joyous celebration of unfettered homoeroticism”; “an element of sexual utopianism” in the midst of the rampant homophobia of the official discourse and subsequent state-sponsored terrorism against gays. As Arenas’s narrative illustrates how the unbearable repression that followed the outset of the AIDS crisis added to the gay community’s already justifiable anxiety over the disease (Foster, “Agenda” 19).12 The struggle depicted in the novel’s plot begins in the island nation, where the UNEAC (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba) can brand writers like Arenas as a “contrarrevolucionarios homosexuales” and prohibit the domestic publication of their books as part of a generalized program of exclusion and humiliation of gay intellectuals (182). In Castro’s macho society, an outed homosexual is ostracized as a “pájaro” 12  For Foster, in 1997, Antes que anochezca would become no less than “a master narrative of homoeroticism in Latin America” (“Agenda” 19).

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[“bird”]; young Reinaldo comes to realize that “to be ‘a bird’ in Cuba was one of the greatest calamities that could befall a human being” (72). As a result, by 1963, the Cuban government had instituted concentration camps where many homosexuals were sent for internment—the so-called UMAPs, or Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (94) [“Military Units of Production Assistance”]. Risking arrest, Arenas nonetheless defended the individual right to speak the truth and to act on his sexual desire. Arenas recalls his string of multiple homoerotic adventures in anecdotes depicting such extravagant lust that readers have to suspect that an element of fictional exaggeration is mixed with the autobiographical narrative. The author’s self-affirmative approach suggests an individual who not only defiantly speaks out to a homophobic system, but of one unconcerned with offending bourgeois sensibilities outside of Cuba as well. Inside Arenas’s Cuba, a  machos-y-hembras dualism is reproduced in male-to-male sexual encounters. Arenas believes “… that in the country there are few men who have not had relations with other men; among them, bodily desires come before [están por encima de] any macho emotion that our parents tried to instill in us” (40). When Arenas is sent to La Pantoja, a polytechnical school and the site of a former military camp, he is exposed to the regular discrimination and persecution endured by homosexuals. He recalls that, despite the “military manliness” that dominated student life, “nonetheless, these young men indulged in all types of homosexual acts, though most discreetly” (71). Such  references in the novel to same-sex erotic behaviors, and there are many, run counter to the modern “universaling” understanding of “homosexuality”; these may be currently viewed as outmoded or unliberated. Halperin alludes to Arenas’s recollection of his 1980 encounter with the New York sex scene, only to soon become disappointed with a predictable routine of mutual regard and role reversal between partners—as when, for example, partners would alternatively fellate each other (Halperin, How to Do 18–19). Back in Cuba, under the gaze and in defiance of state surveillance, certain clandestine places are host to illicit intercourse. Arenas relates, in one of the racier Rabelaisian vignettes of the memoir, the lascivious gaiety of the festivities that took place after the failed 1960s’ “ten million-ton harvest.” Occurring toward the end of the compulsory-labor phase, these revelries offered a huge release for all; for some, they presented the opportunity for drunkenness and sexual exuberance. During these bacchanalias, portable toilets became, in Arenas’s words, “enormous centers for fornicating.” And, when the police overturned one of these wooden structures

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of the urinals, they revealed “hundreds of naked men possessing one another in the midst of carnival, in the midst of thousands and thousands of people who were seeing, suddenly, plenty of astonished, eroticized men” (159).13 Although the narrator-protagonist of Arenas’s memoir seeks to free himself from the disciplinary canons regulating sexual activity, homosexual desire remains modeled on the masculine/feminine binary and on the masculinist structure fixating attraction for the “real man,” the macho. Bejel notes that the desire for relations with the macho replicates the ambivalent attraction to no less than the charisma of Fidel Castro: This is an obvious case of the internalization of power in desire, the interdependence of the roles that power plays in regard to desire: it oppresses desire and at the same time is an integral part of the object of desire. Needless to say, Arenas’s internalization of power corresponds to the specific social conditions under which he grew up. (307)

Arenas shows how the powers of family, society, and state will strive to block desire and stymie creativity while they elicit alternative sexual response and stimulate creative resistance. That is, the system of sexual marginalization paradoxically provokes dissidence and produces the transgressive sexual conduct that it prohibits. Foreshadowing the assessment of nationalism in Philippine diasporic writing, what is contravened by such transgression is revealed as the master-narrative of the nation in its complicity with the authority of patriarchal heteronormativity; what is recovered through counter-narrative is the lost history and a semi-closeted testimony of the “other life” (see Bejel 311).

Hermaphrodites and mga baklá Turning their attention to the Phillipine case, Whitam and Mathy account for how attitudes toward transvestic homosexuals have been shaped by traditions that recognize the social role of the bakla in Luzon and the bayot in Cebu. As the coauthors adduce, the latter term designates homosexuals in general or those of a lower socioeconomic standing; among 13  See also an earlier reference to the sexual activity taking place in the latrines during Havana’s carnival. As witnessed by a friend of Arenas, “there were dozens of men standing, while others sucked cock, and others were being fucked [templados] right there. At first one couldn’t see anything, then one could begin to see shiny cocks and mouths sucking” (122).

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Cebu’s middle and upper-classes, the sward (gay males), characterized by social refinement and cultural knowledge, are included  in this category. These enjoy high visibility and some, even celebrity status because of their impact on the fashion world. Customs throughout the islands allow for tolerance and even the acceptance of bakla, bayot and swards. And it is a generally accepted as “natural” that hairdressers and clothing designers, along with interior designers, professional dancers, actors and other workers in the movie industry, are gay (77, 81, 92, 96). The gay hairdresser in the Philippines is commonly “regarded as endowed with a special gift, or at the very least, as someone who is doing his best to earn an honest living” (ibid. 72). Garcia, it should be noted, takes issue with this notion of general tolerance toward gays in Philippine society. He points out the ambivalence of Filipinos toward gays and the pejorative connotations of the indigenous term bakla, not to mention the verbal abuse and physical beatings to which they are frequently subjected (56). The bakla enjoys acceptance or at least certain accommodation within the society described by the Filipina American Jessica Hagedorn in her 1990 novel Dogeaters. In Dogeaters, queerness is performed against the background of sociopolitical and economic unrest during the Marcos presidency. Set in the 1950s, but actually referring to events of the 1960s through the 1980s, the novel searches for a diasporic meaning of Philippine identity as it grapples with issues of colonial dependency and exploitation, inequalities of class and gender, and questions of homo/heterosexual definition, all emerging in a third-world metropolitan setting under the authoritarian Marcos government and its policy of state-sponsored terror. Implicit in the novel’s background is the popular trope of the “conjugal dictatorship” imposed by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, who portrayed themselves, as in their portrait displayed in the Malacañang Palace, as the mythical pair of Malakas and Maganda (Adam and Eve of the nation’s origins) and thus the heterosexual progenitors of the Filipino people (Ponce 155–156).14 Dogeaters also references the generalized poverty produced as a consequence of government corruption and the austerity plan imposed by the International Monetary Fund (Ponce 155). The novel’s narrative unfolds as a series of interrelated and overlapping stories, their characters drawn from contemporary Phillipine social classes and heterogeneous  spaces. Along with the profiles of its gay characters, portrayals of the wealthy and privileged Gonzaga and Alacran families are  Vicente Rafael, White Love, 122. Cited in Ponce, 155.

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included—the powerful and despotic General Nicasio V. Ledesma with his mistress, movie star and sometime bomba (soft-porn) actress Lolita Luna, and ill-fated would-be actor Romeo Rosales and Trinidad Gamboa,  his shopgirl nobya [“bride”]. As in Puig’s El beso, characters are avid viewers of Hollywood movies; their reactions before movie screens explain why Hollywood icons figure preeminently in the Filipino popular erotic imaginary. Indeed, the fact that Rio, another narrator of the novel, expresses adoration of Rock Hudson’s masculinity in All that Heaven Allows, further queers the cinematic consecration of heteronormative romance. The subtext of Rock Hudson’s own 1985 admission to undergoing treatment for AIDS, released with the revelation of his own homosexual orientation (see Griffin), contradicts the Hollywood image and interrupts the narrative of a Philippine nation under the spell of American culture. Indicating how this contradiction exposes the difference between cinematic fiction and biographical reality and subverts the Americano-centric ideology, Mendoza reasons, “Dogeaters thus offers an indictment of U.S. neoimperialism rooted not in the imagined community of the heterosexist nation but in the imaginative associations assembled according to something altogether exterior” (836). Something altogether exterior figures in how a boom in the Philippine sex tourism is represented in Dogeaters. The novel makes references to shower dancing and sex-trafficking of minors, and their connections to a gay subculture. The global dimensions of gay tourism are furthermore unveiled in the tale of Joey Sands, the celebrity nightclub disk jockey at Manila’s Studio 54 and a character who provides one of the narrative voices heard in the novel. A transnational queerness is already inborn in Joey, one of Hagedorn’s protagonists. His mother was a Filipina prostitute who worked in the vicinity of Subic Bay Naval Base, and his father was an African American serviceman stationed at the base. Savitri Ashok sees “[t]he layered nature of postcolonial Philippine identity” embodied both in the gay Joey Sands and in Rio, with Joey “emblematiz[ing] the fluidity and instability of the Philippine national identity” (10). Outside the club, Joey leads a hustler’s life in Metro Manila while searching for the “sugar daddy” or “mommy” who can rescue him from Manila’s dystopian sprawl and take him to his fantasized Las Vegas, Nevada. The German director “Rainer” (probably referring to Rainer Fassbinder), who is visiting Manila to attend the International Film Festival, becomes enamored of Joey and secures his company for a week-long stay in the Philippines.

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Another character attracted to Joey is Andres Alacran, the owner of Studio 54 and a mestizo gay who wears his dyed black hair tied in a ponytail and sports a Basque beret. We are told that Andres danced so brilliantly once that he was called “El Profesor de Tango,” the Fred Astaire of the Philippines, and that he devoted novenas to Tina Turner and Donna Summer: “’Divine putas with juicy lips,’ he calls them. ‘Immortal women the way I like them’” (34–35). Introduced into the episode that focuses on Andres is an ambiguous trans or intergender figure, a true hermaphrodite named Eugenio/Eugenia, said to be a former star of a “traveling freak show” and, after that, Andres’s dance partner and “one true love.” Joey sees Andres with Eugenio/Eugenia in a sepia 1938 photograph, with the latter wearing a “beaded flapper dress” and bright red lipstick. Gifted with beauty and talent, Eugenio/Eugenia aimed to star in a Mabuhay Studios musical. Joey refers to the two lovers thus: They were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, winning first prize in all the dance contests. It’s all true. I’ve seen pictures of Andres grinning like a fool next to a deadpan Eugenio/Eugenia, now dressed as a woman, both of them holding up trophies and awards. Their stormy love affair lasted on and off for two years. When Andres failed to land him a movie contract, Eugenio/Eugenia left the apartment they shared without warning. It happened right after the Japs occupied Manila. Eugenio/Eugenia disappeared without a trace and was never heard from again. (36)

After Eugenio/Eugenia’s disappearance, Andres heard only rumors, tsismis, about him: that he spied for British Intelligence and lived in Macao as a woman. In Andres’s presence, Joey attempts to make a toast to Eugenio/ Eugenia, “’[t]o the love of your life’”; but Andres cuts him off: “‘To love, period’—he adds, grimly” (37). Andres and Eugenio/Eugenia’s love affair looks to be just another “marginal” same-sex relationship, but the sex of Eugenio/Eugenia is not “the same” as Andres’s, and constitutes perhaps a third sex.15 He is Sarduy’s Socorro and Auxilio all over again, putting on

15  Garcia disregards the colloquial confusion of hermaphroditism with kabaklaan, attributing the equivalence to a mistaken notion of an individual’s exhibiting both male and female sex organs with a psychological condition of gender confusion and thus with “semantic transposition” (62). The attention that Hagedorn pays to Eugenio/Eugenia hints at a subversively symbolic significance in this hermaphrodite’s double genderness as well as his or her amorous volatility.

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the trappings of gender, performing as a woman wherever desire and aspiration take him or her. Another of Dogeaters’ central characters is Daisy Avila, daughter of the assassinated liberal Senator Domingo Avila (who doubles for the historical Senator Benigno Aquino). Daisy embodies the revolutionary subject. Much earlier in the plot, upon winning the title of “Young Miss Philippines,” Daisy denounced the pageant as a sexist spectacle and sank into a deep depression; she rebelled by taking up with foreign banker Malcolm Webb and joining the resistance led by Santos Tirador. For collaborating with leftist guerillas, she is arrested, tortured, and raped by military men under orders from General Ledesma. Toward his story’s end, Joey Sands, having witnessed the murder of Daisy’s father, must escape from the Tondo shack of his uncle, his shameless exploiter and abuser, who has now gone off to surrender his nephew to the authorities. Joey steals his uncle’s drugs and kills his dog Taruk.16 Joey’s fugitive status forces him underground, to a mountain camp where he joins the guerillas of the New People’s Army. Daisy Avila, now a guerrilla member, welcomes him and teaches him how to shoot a gun (232). With this open-ended conclusion to his story, Joey’s trajectory illustrates both  “the extent to which Hagedorn posits sexual deviance as an intermediary to political resistance” (Mendoza 818) and the search for new kinds of communities, for “nonnationalist socialities” (Ponce 150) that deconstruct and supersede the narrative of the nation through a queer diasporic reading of neocolonial dependency, sexual norms, (imported) popular culture, crony capitalism, and the politics-as-usual of the controlling bourgeois families.

Beyond the Closet, More Closets In Dogeaters’ representations of same-sex eroticism and hermaphroditism, the culturally-specific figure of the Filipino bakla appears to embody intersexed or intergendered qualities. For Ponce, the figure of the bakla “can connote effeminacy, cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, working-class positionality, and ‘real’ man sexual-object choice” (182). Yet, the view and experience of homosexuality as inversion expressed in this characterization is shifting in the Philippines. Where once male-male sexual relations were 16  This name could refer to the historical Luis Taruc, leader of the Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon guerilla group that demanded agrarian reform. The Hukbalahap, as they were known, first fought the Japanese and then Manuel Roxas’s government from 1942 to 1950.

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viewed through a kabaklaan perspective—being-bakla or having the quality of bakla-ness—gay sexual identity has been influenced by international gay liberation movements and global media productions. Consequently, these relations are transitioning toward a recognition of a gay-gay or egalitarian relationship among men. This view of same-sex intimate relations has been shaped by translocal and “universalizing” forms of sexual identification that propagate what Benedicto calls “a precarious sense of belonging in an imagined gay globality” (317). But, like the radical contextualization of el ambiente by which Ellis explains the interrelational character of Latino and Latin American homosexualities, the urban-gay situation in Manila is formed in the neoliberal spaces of the city, that is, in gay bars and nightclubs, in hair salons and gyms as well as in local magazines and internet sites. Viewed through the mediation of these meeting places and fora, gay modernity is mediatized and universalizable according to endogenous values. These spaces and sites belong to the metropolitan setting of the “bright lights,” whose construction—whether in an imaginary queer Manhattan or an idealized gay America—offers a cosmopolitan  alternative to the local scene, a certain global  surpassing of the bakla and local sexual practices (Benedicto 319–322). Realuyo’s The Umbrella Country (1999) is another turn-of-the-century Philippine novel that reflects on the evolving experience of male homosexuals during the martial law period, paying special attention to the American culture industry and mass-media’s impact on psychosexual development, as well as to the promising prospect of immigration in the minds of its characters (Ponce 153).17 Realuyo reveals in an interview that he grew up in a home where his father was mostly absent and in which he was “basically raised by women” in a matrifocal setting. “Because of the lack of a male figure,” Realuyo explains, “I used to always think I knew exactly how to be a woman but had no idea what it was like to be a man. This might have affected my character and sensitivity to women’s issues” (“A Reader’s Guide,”4th unnumbered page). It is in a similar context that the narrator-protagonist Gringo reenacts, in the company of his playmates, the glamorous “Miss Unibers” competition. 17  Other queer novels, roughly contemporaneous with The Umbrella Country, addressing the Marcos dictatorship’s oppression, are R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s (1995) and Noël Alumit’s Letters to Montgomery Cliff (2002) (Ponce 153).

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Such behavior may be viewed as a gendered form of sexual expression in this ambiente and also as an escape from the oppression of normalized cissexual behavior. Gringo witnesses the brutality with which his father treats his long-suffering mother, Estrella. As the father forces sexual relations on her and mocks her for supposedly wishing to find another husband, Gringo likens their encounter to that of “two smoked, trained cockfighters” (23), but one that sounds like a “crying bird” and “cats.” Mommy was pushing him away but he wouldn’t budge. He seemed to be some kind of a powerful giant who managed to pin her down on the bed, as if he had so many hands. I stood watching, still wondering if this were all a nightmare. (24)

Violence in this primal scene is traumatizing enough to suggest that Gringo’s development will be impacted with regard to the boy’s erotic object-choices and sexual identity. And, when Daddy Groovie discovers evidence of Pipo’s beauty-queen obsession, he tries to beat the gayness out of him with a bamboo cane: “The long yantok was slicing the air. I could feel it on Pipo’s skin…. I could hear him cursing. Puta ka. Lalaki ka ba o ano? Huh? Huh? Are you a man?” (45). Gringo will later hear Ninang Rola advising him not to “hit anyone in your life”; Gringo takes this to mean, “not to take after Daddy Groovie, or Pipo even” (95). The novel’s explicitly gay character is nicknamed Boy Manicure. He is the neighborhood’s beauty salon operator, the parlorista, commonly viewed as a weird but generally accepted fixture in the community; and he is described and referred to by the neighbors as such, relegating him to an abject, if familiar, stranger within the community. There is a mysterious vagueness to Boy Manicure. Realuyo explains his depiction as follows: For Boy Manicure I wanted to create a gay character who exists only in the perception of the people around him, based on the stereotypes and homophobic ideas of the society he lives in. Because no one really knows him, everybody fears him, so they must make him an outcast. Very few people are strong enough to withstand that pressure. Boy Manicure is no exception. (“A Reader’s Guide,” 4th unnumbered page)

In keeping perhaps with the stereotype, the same transgendered and effeminate hairdresser in the novel will be outed as a sexual predator, one who eventually will rape Pipo. This transgression will result in Boy

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Manicure’s violent punishment: an anonymous killer from the community will murder him, chopping off his hands as well. (Realuyo seems to allow the stereotype to remain a stereotype, a pernicious one at that.) In seeking out community or at least support groups outside the sphere of homophobic authoritarianism, Pipo and Gringo’s experience as “protogay protagonists” (Ponce 158) draws them into “queer socialities that lie outside the realms of national identification and patronage,” and beyond the bounds of the nation and its regime’s compulsory heterosexuality (see Ponce 156). Gringo’s homosexual initiation takes place in the company of Boy Spit, the newspaper peddler for whom the protagonist-­ narrator has developed a fond attraction. The initiation takes place in a “cave,” which is really a clearing surrounded by tall arching grasses located near a slum, where Boy Spit has brought him past curfew. A circle of boys is seated around the initiation site. They all, shirtless and with pants lowered, masturbate one another. The boy in the center of the circle, the focus of the “jerk circle” gathering, is barely recognized by Gringo as his brother Pipo before Gringo submits to his own sexual initiation (Realuyo 231–234; see Ponce 160–161). Gringo and Boy Spit’s reciprocal and mutually appreciative intimacy is profoundly homosocial, one that recalls the egalitarian Western friendship tradition common in the early modern period and that precedes Valentín and Molina’s loving companionship. Halperin traces the model to descriptions by Aristotle and Montaigne, finding it again in the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus, and even in the bromance of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon (How to Do 118–119). Also, in Joey Sand’s traumatic politization, we find a precedent to the kind of egalitarianism in sexual relations affirmed in The Umbrella Country. Yet for brothers Pipo and Gringo, their emigration to “D’America” means leaving behind the “feminine” domain of their mother and reuniting with that of their father in Queens, New York. Presumably, they will be thrown into a new scene that will give their kabaklaan sexual identities a new context and meaning. Despite the implicit “modernization” of Philippine gay culture away from the ambiente  of the native land, in another place and time, this culture could bring along with it the Philippine holdovers of inversion, effeminacy and “sodomy.” “Hence, through the interstices of the virtual and physical spaces of gayness, femininity and lower-class status make their apparitional debut” (Benedicto 327). The journey from bakla to homosexual will be haunted by spectral “memories of underdevelopment.”

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The Woman Most in Need of Liberation Puig, in an authorial footnote of El beso, cites a certain “Altman” who observes how the process of socialization negates the supposedly “bisexual” human nature as psychosexual identities are shaped in accordance with historico-culturally instituted norms of masculinity and femininity. The masculine norm has  required the determination and ability on the part of the male subject  to dominate women. In accordance with this model, it is the woman’s obligation to seek her fulfillment by attaching herself to a man and by succumbing to his desires. A strictly enforced dichotomization of male and female roles, by offering few avenues to bisexual identity recognition, causes harmful effects to homo and heterosexual individuals (Puig 199–200). According to Altman, if we are all potentially multi or polysexual, our liberation requires an acknowledgment of our polymorphous sexual nature. Puig finds support in Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counterculture (1969), which he credits in stating that “the woman most in need of liberation, and desperately so, is the ‘woman’ that every man carries locked up the dungeons of his own psyche” (Puig 200). Near the end of their time together, after Molina has declared his love for Valentín, the latter acknowledges his affection for him and tells him that he, Molina, is the spider woman, “who traps men in her web.” Valentín then expresses his own sense of having reconciled the homo/ hetero split in himself, and the two exchange a farewell kiss. Toward the dialog’s end, Valentín exacts a promise from Molina: that he allow no one to abuse or exploit him or otherwise treat him with disrespect (265). Valentín’s conciliation with Molina’s homosexuality is now based on an acceptance of Molina’s personhood regardless of sexual orientation and preference. Their union, their meeting of the minds and bodies in a space beyond the dominant masculinist and hierarchizing mode of male homosexual encounters, takes on a utopic dimension, and possibly an internationalist projection. The Philippine American novels examined here have followed a similar trajectory in surmounting the inversion model of gayness and in proposing a more gender-neutral and egalitarian mode of same-sex relations. Still, because most of the world is not yet homonormative, the question of the closet, of the homo/heterosexual distinction, and of the persistence of the “premodern” classifications of same-sex relations continues to impact the lives of those who would belong to a gay community. Filipina

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philosopher and activist  Natty G.  Manauat, in telling her “coming out story,” alludes to the ongoing sense of urgency inherent in the lesbian condition in the “Catholic” Philippines and to a process that begins with recognition and validation of the same condition: Coming out is a process that never really ends. We live in a society where everybody is assumed to be heterosexual until proven otherwise. Lesbian visibility challenges society to acknowledge our existence. Coming out to oneself is the first step. Coming out to other people must follow. It doesn’t simply end there. What’s the use of coming out if we cannot remain out? This is my current struggle.18

Works Cited Amícola, José. “Hell Hath No Limits: de José Donoso a Manuel Puig.” Desde aceras opuestas: Literatura/cultura gay y lesbiana en Latinoamérica, edited by Dieter Ingenschay, 2006, pp. 21–35. Ashok, Savitri. “Gender, Language, and Identity in Dogeaters: A Postcolonial Critique.” Postcolonial Text, 5.2, 2009, pp. 1–14. Aguilar, Dietris. “Simbología: realidad y sueño en ‘El lugar sin límites’ de José Donoso.” Espéculo 24. http//webs.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero24/donoso.html. Accessed September 2, 2019. Arenas, Reinaldo. Antes que anochezca. 3rd ed., Tusquets Editores, 1992. Guyotte, Roland L. “Jessica Hagedorn.” Making It in America: A Sourcebook on Eminent Ethnic Americans, edited by Elliot Robert Barkan, ABC-CLIO, 2001, pp. 145–146. Bejel, Emilio. “Arenas’s Antes que anochezca: Autobiography of a Gay Cuban Dissident.” Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture, edited by Susana Chávez-Silverman and Librada Hernández, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, pp. 299–315. Benedicto, Bobby. “The Haunting of Gay Manila: Global Space-Time and the Specter of Kabaklaan.” GLQ 14.2–3, 2008, pp. 317–338. Bolton, Sony Coráñez. “Deconstructing Filipino Studies: Queer Reading Beyond US Exceptionalism.” A review of Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading by Martin Joseph Ponce, GLQ 19.4, 2013, pp. 575–577. 18  Manauat, Natty G., “Out With It! My Coming-Out Story,” in Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian. Ed. Anna Leah Sarabia (Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing, 1998), p. 85.

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Bernal, A. Alejandro. “Donoso, José (Chile; 1925).” Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by David William Foster and Emmanuel S. Nelson, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 142–148. Brown, Gavin, Kath Browne, and Jason Lim, editors. “Introduction, or Why Have a Book on Geographies of Sexualities?.” Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics. Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 1–18. Browne, Kath, Gavin Brown and Jason Lim, editors. Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics. Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Burke, Jessica. “Fantasizing the Feminine: Sex and Gender in Donoso’s El lugar sin límites and Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña.” Romance Notes, 47.3, Spring 2007, pp. 291–300. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Chávez-Silverman, Susana and Librada Hernández, editors. Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture. University Wisconsin Press, 2000. De Jong, Alex. “Bakla. The creation of a Philippine gay-identity.” https://www. academia.edu/5155866/Bakla._The_creation_of_a_Philippine_gay-identity. Accessed October 14, 2019. Donoso, José. El lugar sin límites. Editorial Bruguera, 1977. Ellis, Robert Richmond. “Introduction.” Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture, edited by Susana Chávez-Silverman and Librada Hernández, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000a, pp. 3–18. Ellis, Robert Richmond. “Looking Queer in the Autobiography of Terenci Moix.” Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture, edited by Susana Chávez-Silverman and Librada Hernández, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000b, pp. 257–274. Foster, David William. “Agenda and Canon: Some Necessary Priorities.” Sexual Textualities: Essays ON Queer/ing Latin American Writing, edited by David William Foster, University of Texas Press, 1997a, pp. 1–27. Foster, David William. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. University of Texas Press, 1991. Foster, David William. Sexual Textualities: Essays on Queer/ing Latin American Writing. University of Texas Press, 1997b. Foster, David William and Emmanuel S. Nelson, editors. Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, 1994. Foucault, Michel. “The Repressive Hypothesis.” The History of Sexuality, Volume I.  Trans. Robert Hurley. The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 301–329. Garcia, J. Neil C. Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM. Hong Kong UP, 2009.

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Griffin, Mark. All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson. Harper, 2018. Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. Penguin Books, 1990. Halperin, David M. What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity. University of Michigan Press, 2007. Halperin, David M. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hsieh, Nizehn. “Interview with Jessica Hagedorn.” A Gathering of the Tribes (October 23, 2006), https://www.tribes.org/web/2006/10/23/interviewwith-jessica-hagedorn. Accessed February 17, 2020. Ingenschay, Dieter, editor. Desde aceras opuestas: Literatura/cultura gay y lesbiana en Latinoamérica. Iberoamericana, 2006. Lockhart, Darrell. Review of Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture, edited by Susana Chávez-­ Silverman and Librada Hernández. University of Wisconsin Press, 2000, pp. 279–280. Manalansan, Martin F., IV, and Augusto F.  Espiritu, editors. Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora. New York UP, 2016. Manauat, Natty G. “Out With It! My Coming-Out Story.” Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian, edited by Anna Leah Sarabia. Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing, 1998, pp. 79–86. Manzor-Coats, Lillian. “Introduction.” Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by David William Foster and Emmanuel S. Nelson, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. xv–xxxvi. Matibag, Eugenio. Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Reflections in Narrative. University of Florida Press, 1996. Mendoza, Victor. “A Queer Nomadology of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/articlepdf/77/4/815/391346/AL077-04%2D%2D6MendozaFpp.pdf. Accessed September 30, 2019. Montreal, Lani T. “Connections.” Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian, edited by Anna Leah Sarabia, Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing, 1998, pp. 27–41. Munõz, Elías Miguel. El discurso utópico de la sexualidad en Manuel Puig. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1987. Munõz, Elías Miguel. “Puig, Manuel (Argentina; 1932–1990).” Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by David William Foster and Emmanuel S. Nelson, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 339–345. Pew Research Center. “The Global Divide on Homosexuality: Greater Acceptance in More Secular and Affluent Countries.” https://www.pewresearch.org/ global/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/. Accessed October 15, 2019.

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Ponce, Martin Joseph. Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading. New York UP, 2012. Puig, Manuel. El beso de la mujer araña. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976. Rafael, Vicente L. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Duke UP, 2000. Realuyo, Bino A. The Umbrella Country. Ballantine Books, 1999. Sarabia, Anna Leah, editors. Tibok: Heartbeat of the Filipino Lesbian. Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing, 1998. Sarduy, Severo. De donde son los cantantes. 2nd ed., México, DF: Joaquín Mortiz, 1970. Sarduy, Severo. Ensayos generales sobre el barroco. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987. Schalbe, Will. “Jessica Hagedorn on Writing Experimentally and Trusting the Imagination.” Literary Hub (October 21, 2019), https://lithub.com/jessicahagedorn-on-writing-experimentally-and-trusting-the-imagination/. Accessed February 17, 2020. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. UC Press, 1990. Soto, Francisco. “Arenas, Reinaldo (Cuba; 1943–1990).” Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by David William and Emmanuel S. Nelson, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 24–36. Whitam, Frederick L. and Mathy, Robin M. Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States. Praeger, 1986.

PART II

Shared Issues of Identities, Traumas and Migrant Experiences Across Two Continents

CHAPTER 5

Disrupted Nationalisms in Times of War: Young Ha-Kim and José Revueltas Martín Camps

In Black Flower (2012) by Young Ha-Kim, Korean immigrants arrive in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution and involuntarily join the conflict. In Los motivos de Caín [Cain’s Motives] (1957) by José Revueltas, a Mexican-American fights the Koreans during the Korean War (1950–1953), and among them, a Korean soldier who is of Mexican descent. Conflicts awaken nationalism and a sense of belonging; nevertheless, in these narratives the idea of community is blurred due to binationalism. Benedict Anderson addresses the solidification of “imaginary communities” via conflagrations: “Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.” (7) Nevertheless this homogenized view does not consider internal conflicts that challenge the sovereign community due to the fluid identity of

M. Camps (*) Department of Modern Languages and Literature, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_5

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migrants that are in between nations. The texts in question examplify heterogenous forms of identities from the contact zones. Koreans that assume Mexicanness, and a Korean-Mexican that is tortured by a MexicanAmerican, request a bicultural reading of the conflicts that go beyond the monolingual or one nation paradigm. In this sense, Black Flower and Cain’s Motives exemplify Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones,” through its portrayal of “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—such as colonialism and slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (7). As we will see in the following pages, the contact zones among Mexicans and Koreans become a place for negotiating shared histories of migration, and power relations marked by war. The relationship between Asia and Latin America in cultural subjects seems challenging because of geographical distances and linguistic barriers. Nevertheless, there are many points of contact that document historical and fictional encounters and forms of dialogue between cultures that share much in common and that have mutually influenced their literatures and enriched their imaginaries. That is, horizontal relations cannot be solely defined by financial or trade interactions driven by profit and global expansion, but by a sincere exploration of otherness and by closing the cultural gap to better allow understanding and support among cultures. The political shift of Latin America and its recent political relations with the United States, a modern day “Caliban,”1 have caused it to seek other trade partners in Asian countries and, particularly, in South Korea, whose citizens have migrated since the early twentieth century. I concentrate on South Korea and Mexico, taking into consideration the Korean perspective of Mexicanness in Young Ha-Kim’s novel and the Mexican interpretation of the Korean War in José Revueltas’s novel. The Korean novel recognizes an influence of Magical Realism, a global literary phenomenon that has become an exportable and “packageable” interpretation of Latin America.2 1  For Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, Calibán, a Shakespearan character, embodies the United States as a materialistic and spiritual wasteland. His counterpoint is Ariel (Latin America) who is quite the opposite. 2  Latin American Boom writers of the 1960s, such as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, and particularly, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, imposed a literary style and form that made waves across world literatures. A criticism of Magical Realism, from a marketable perspective, is that it has created an exportable or digestible version of Latin America, which means that it can be read as concentrating too much on

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The ultimate proof of patriotic loyalty to a host country is by fighting in its military in times of war. These novels problematize identity connections during war due to loyalty ambivalences that arise when immigrants must fight in a conflict between their host country and their native country. A disrupted nationalism in the contact zone causes disconnection in immigrants’ social links with their compatriots back in their native country. It creates an “extended” patriotism for immigrants, that is, the type of identification with the country of origin that can withstand time and separation during any conflict with the host country. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, the “contact zones” become spaces of asymmetrical relations of power between cultures contending against each other. The cultural attachment of those Korean immigrants who arrived in Mexico in 1905 was as strong as that of Mexican Americans fighting the Korean War. Their deterritorialized identities were based on their binationality and the shortening of distances and interrelations.

Korean Immigration Amid the Mexican Upheaval Black Flower (2012),3 a novel by Young Ha-Kim, is set in the context of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea, when a thousand Koreans left their country for Mexico, searching for better life conditions.4 Upon their arrival, these immigrants from various social backgrounds soon realize that they are being enslaved to work in Mexico in the henequen (agave) fields. The main character, Kim Ijeong, falls in love with a noblewoman, Yi Yeonsu, whose family has royal connections. The Koreans find themselves in the midst of the Mexican Revolution and eventually take refuge in Guatemala. Young Ha-Kim himself did research in Mexico about this little-known Korean emigration. In its “magicality” rather than on its harsh realities. Besides Magical Realism, another important literary movement that influenced Asian writers, particularly in the Philippines, was IberoAmerican Modernismo. At least two essays in this volume address this connection in the works of Jesús Balmori. 3  Regarding the name, the author states in a note: “Black is a color created by combining all the other colors. Similarly, everything is mixed together in this novel—religion, race, status, and gender—and what emerges is something completely different” (304). 4  In 2007, Yucatán inaugurated the Commemorative Museum of Korean Migration that includes the voyage of those Koreans who went to Mexico searching for a better life in the henequen (“green gold”) fields.

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writing this novel, Kim, inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), uses a multiplicity of voices, and a narrative of journey, and creates a story of founding a new Korean community in the jungle of Guatemala, similar to the foundation of Macondo in the novels by Márquez. It is documented that 1033 Koreans (802 men, 207 women, and 27 children, 677 of them from the Seoul-Incheon area) arrived in Mexico in 1905 during the Porfirio Díaz presidency with a four-year work contracts but, because of Mexico’s internal conflicts, they were unable to return to Korea.5 They arrived in Salina Cruz port, then traveled by train to Coatzacoalcos, where they took a boat to Puerto Progreso, Yucatán. Their contribution to henequen harvesting was their clever idea of using gloves to protect their hands, thus a higher crop yield. After henequen farming declined, some relocated to Tijuana and Mexico City; those who remained, integrated into and enriched Mexican culture. In “The Narration of Transnational Territory in Kingston’s China Men and Kim’s Black Flower,” Ju Young Jin analyzes the transnational topics in these novels and how they created a textual territory when it was common to find Asian indentured servants in the Americas. Jin reads the characters’ displacement as “deterritorialization”: “Among these figures of displacement, indentured workers can be a locus to trace how the force of global capitalism produced the (im)migration and the contact zone for transnational identity to develop inside and between different nations and cultures” (2). Indentured labor had a purpose to bring an end to slavery by offering “free” labor instead of slave labor in the production of tropical commodities. In British colonies, free contractual labor followed slave emancipation in 1834. As Richard Allen states: “Many of these workers were expected, at least initially, to return to their homeland upon completing their contractually mandated period of ‘industrial residence.’ However, hundreds of thousands of these men and women remained in the colonies where they worked and became an integral component of local populations” (n.p.).

5  A South Korean film, Henequen [애니깽] (1996), directed by Kim Ho-Sun, deals with the same topic. It focuses on bad working conditions at the sites. The landowner abuses workers by cutting their hair with a knife. Meyers appears in the film as a ruthless individual who has benefitted from Korean labor. The film concludes with Zapatista revolutionaries liberating the Koreans. A similar production, in the Brazilian context, is Gaijin: Caminhos da Liberdade [“Gaijin: A Brazilian Odyssey”] (1980) by Tizuka Yamasaki, based on real events of Japanese immigrants and their misfortunes in Brazil.

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Black Flower is divided into three parts. The first section provides a context for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 over Japan’s imperial designs in Manchuria and Korea—it ended with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth that was mediated by Theodore Roosevelt. This victory, causing alarm in the West, was the first of an Asian country over a European one. In 1905, Korea was declared a protectorate of Japan, whose domination ended in 1945 after U.S. and Russian troops invaded Korea. The country’s conditions were harsh and many people dreamt of leaving to search of a better life. Thus, the novel is a story of a human immigration caused by economic forces and war. Korean emigrants left from Jemulpo Harbor in 1905 expecting that Mexico, an unknown nation, would be the promised land. In the novel, these emigrants, not knowing where Mexico is, keep saying that “Mexico is far. Very far” (6); they hear that it is below America. A missionary brings a map to show them Mexico’s shape: “On it was a country that looked like a sunken, empty belly” (7). They were sold on the idea that in Mexico “work, money, and warm food were said to await them” (8). They are fed these ideas by John Meyers, a member of the Continental Colonization Company, who advertises a destination “where the sun was warm year-round” (9). Meyers was the name of the actual contractor who persuaded Koreans with newspaper ads in the Jwansong Shinmun: “In North America you can find Mexico, a civilized land with unprecedented riches equal to those of their neighbor to the North, the United States of America…. Most Mexican citizens are rich and only a few are poor and that is why they need laborers. (Romero Castilla in Destino México 137.) In the novel, John Meyers also presents an exaggerated and deceiving view of Mexico, a place where Chinese and Japanese made fortunes in short time; he urges the young Koreans to sign up with his office and not to miss this opportunity. Meyers’s bad reputation and misleading techniques thwarted his efforts in China and Japan, and this is why he has come to Korea with a new strategy: to hire families so they could settle in Mexico. Meyers’s hiring practices are carried out unbeknown to the Korean government; therefore, after lack of approval by his supervisors, all contracts are voided. These Koreans arrived during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz who ruled Mexico from 1876 until 1911 when the country was open to foreign investment and attracting international workers. In Korea then, two significant events happened, the end of the Yi Dynasty and the period when Korea was under Japanese rule, between 1910 and 1945 (Romero

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Castilla 129). Díaz’s land policies led to an increase in “exploitation agriculture” of certain agricultural products. Also, Korean immigrants arrived immediately after the Caste War of Yucatán (1847–1901), a revolt of the Maya people to fight the injustices of a “color pyramid” with Spanish descendants at the top, then Criollos, Mestizos and, at the bottom, indigenous people. This racially based war has been described in Península, a Mexican novel by Hernán Lara Zavala.6 Mexico meant a new beginning for the immigrants, as Bak Jeonghun rejects the idea of going back to Korea: “That pitiful country, what has it done for us that we should go back? Did it not starve us when we were young, beat us when we grew up, and abandon us when life was finally bearable?” (74). The immigrants’ plan was to stay in Mexico, manage to survive, owning a piece of land, and starting a family. Soon enough, the Koreans start missing their home country. In Yucatán, there are no mountains: “The vastness of the plains was felt strongly by the Koreans, who had never in their lives seen an endless horizon” (81). They also could not find rice in Mexico or kimchi; instead they were given “tasteless” corn tortillas and, in the train, “they saw strange plants arranged in evenly spaced rows on a dry soil, like upside-down demons’ toenails, or flames, or even overgrown orchids” (81). These plants would become the source of their labors and a punishment to their hands. They were divided among twenty-two haciendas. During the henequen harvest, singing never stopped, ranging from songs from Belize Blacks, Mayans, Guangzhou coolies, mulattoes, to those from Korea.7 The hacendados wanted to take advantage of those who did not speak Spanish and had no Korean consular representation in the area. The only interpreter was Gwon Yongjun, who became an important asset to the hacendados and was eventually promoted from negotiator to representative. To the contractor, Koreans and henequen were commodities. The latter’s fiber was used to make sturdy, high quality rope, whose main competitor was Manila hemp. A henequen plant produces about thirty leaves a year, and it has pointy, blade-like spikes—Koreans call the plant “dragon 6  The novel tells of a revolt squashed after the death of Manuel Antonio Ay. Lara Zavala uses the historical figure of Justo Sierra O’Reilly, as a character, and describes the racial tensions between the indigenous populations and the Whites, that did not intermarry. 7  Belize Blacks from neighbouring country Belize (below Yucatan) brought by British colonists as slaves. Mayans were the local indigenous communities, Guangzhou coolies were unskilled laborers from Asian countries, mulattoes were people of mixed black and white ancestry.

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tongue orchid.” Workers use machetes to cut off henequen leaves and their pointy spines, which cut into the workers’ bodies and, adding to their misery, Yucatán sunshine is even “more unbearable than the henequen” (94). Eventually, “women began to make leggings and gloves from pieces of cloth and sticks” (117). Their quota was 1500 leaves a day, but beginners could barely cut 500, a result that earned them a whiplashing by the hacendados. They make twenty-five centavos a day, but the food expense is also twenty-five centavos. The Koreans now realize that they have ended up in a country ravaged by the unfair system of the tienda de raya (company store used to exploit the labor force) where workers became financially indebted to the hacendado—if unpaid at their lives’ end, the debt is passed down to their children. The immigrants complain, but the hacendados tell them that their four-year contract cannot be broken. The hacendado protagonist, Carlos Menem, orders the interpreter to talk to the Koreans who have been voicing demands. The working conditions of these immigrants are witnessed by a Chinese man in Mérida; he consequently writes an article for a Chinese newspaper in San Francisco denouncing them, thus bringing the situation to the attention of the Korean Empire. As Father Paul, one of the charaters in the novel, says: “We came here to earn money, not to be whipped. We came here because we were hungry, not because we wanted to become dogs to some mad hacendado” (169). The Koreans realize that they form part of a sophisticated system that benefits only the rich and that protects Díaz’s policies: “Porfirio Díaz tells us to harvest sugar cane, henequen, and chicle, even if we have to import laborers. As you all know well, he brings in foreign capital while allowing foreigners to manage the haciendas” (182). The hacienda system enabled the raising of cheap agricultural products to be sold for a good profit in Europe, thereby allowing Diaz’s científicos, a group of foreign landowners in Mexico, to make fortunes. After a contentious strike, the Koreans negotiate with the hacendado and agree to work for two more years and, by paying eighty pesos, they can leave the plantation; the landowner promises to stop whipping them and, should they wish to return to Korea, they can; however, the ticket’s one-­ hundred-­peso cost will be added to their debts. In the second part, two years have passed and some have died and others escaped, which corresponds with the historical record. Some have gone to Mérida, others to Mexico City, places where a number of them have become accustomed to eating kimchi with tortillas. Gwon Yongjun is determined to return to Korea and says “Even a fox dies with facing the direction of where it was

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born” (198). Gwon Yongjun, the interpreter, now has a concubine, Yi Yeonsu, wishes to leave with him; she is expecting Ijeong’s child. Gwon Yongjun, booked to leave from San Francisco, misses his ship because, after stopping in Chinatown to smoke opium, he decides to live there instead. Yi Yeonsun ends up with Bak Jeonghun, the barber for General Alvaro Obregón, a Mexican General during the Revolution. When Mexican revolutionaries ask Ijeong why Koreans fight the Japanese, he explains: “Because they took away everything. Japan annexed the whole country. The Mexican revolutionaries shared his rage as they thought of how the United States had swallowed up New Mexico and Texas in the north of Mexico” (233). This creates a connection because they are involved in similar struggles. Ijeong then joins the revolutionary forces and keeps a journal in which he denounces the misuses of power: “We had the Korean Empire, but we were not happy. Now, it is the same with Mexico. From somewhere comes the stench of blood. The stronger nations, like Japan and the United States, start wars and support civil wars in order to rule the weaker nations” (239). Ijeong finds Yoshida, a cook he met on board during his journey to Mexico. Yoshida asks Ijeong why he has become a villista and confronts him with evidence of Villa’s cruelty towards Asians: “Did you know that Villa killed some two hundred Chinese in Torreón for no reason?” Ijeong responds that Villa is just “hotheaded.” He has joined the Revolution to fight against the hacienda system.8 Subsequently, the novel details in depth the battles of Villa and Obregón, and the final stages of the Revolution. Ijeong finds Yeonsu, his lover from the start of his journey to Mexico, and his son who now lives with the barber Bak Jeonghun; Ijeong decides to continue the struggle, this time in Guatemala. The novel touches upon the presence of Chinese communities in Mexico who arrived as agricultural workers but then moved to commerce; their residence in northern

8  Mexican writer Julián Herbert’s The House of the Pain of Others: Chronicle of a Small Genocide (Minneapolis: Greywolf Press, 2019), relates the story of 300 Chinese immigrants that were assassinated. A despicable event of racial hatred that took place in Torreón, Coahuila on May 13–15, 1911 by the forces of Francisco I. Madero and a local mob. This was a reaction to the success of Chinese merchants and their disposition to work for lower wages. This sentiment culminated with the deportations of Chinese populations from Mexico in the 1930s.

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Mexico provoqued racist demonstrations, and legal strategies to displace them.9 The third part of the novel relates the establishment of a fictional “New Korean Nation” among the ruins of Tikal, Guatemala, during the presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. Jo Jangyun, who founded Sungmu (“revering the military”), a military school in Mérida, and Kim Ijeong want a new nation to signal to Japan and the United States that Korea is still alive. Ijeong hones his guerrilla techniques learned from his time with Villa, and they use the Tikal ruins as fortification to defend themselves from ambushes. Guatemalan forces attack the New Korean Nation whose defenders fight to the bitter end in an epic battle that puts an end to Ijeong’s life and those of the other rebels. As Bak Gwansu seeks refuge in one of the temples, Guatemalan soldiers find and kill him, the last of the rebels to go. Soldiers find in his pocket a document written in Chinese characters that reads: “Born on Wi Island, Jeolla province, 28 years old, Bak Gwangsu” with the fading Korean Empire seal—even sadder, “no one there could decipher these characters” (297). After the release of the novel’s translation into Portuguese, Young-Ha Kim mentioned in an interview that Latin American authors influenced his style: “I was very influenced by Western classical and modernist authors, such as Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, and Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. I also like Oscar Wilde and Yukio Mishima” (Entrevista N/P). Kim also commented that he has read Brazilian authors, such as Jose Mauro de Vasconcelos and Chico Buarque. He elaborated in regards to Black Flower: “It was natural, the influence of Magical Realism, since it dealt with what happened in Latin America. It seems unprecedented, also, its mosaic-like structure, without a main character or hero. I thought the story was about people who disappeared without a trace” (Entrevista N/P). It seemed natural to Young

9  The presence of Chinese communities in Mexico has received ample attention from a historical perspective in the following books: Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940 (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2010), Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism and Exclusions in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands (Stanford; Stanford UP, 2012), Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migrations and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960. (Chapell Hill, U of North Carolina P, 2013) and Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2017).

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Ha-Kim to build on the magical realist style since he was working on a novel that took place in Latin America.10 To Wendy Faris, “The magical realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions” (172). Magical Realism could be defined as an alteration of reality, the real, and the imaginary, all merging in a hyperbole that reconstitutes reality and impregnates it with fantasy. Black Flower exemplifies Magical Realist strategies and themes such as the multi-generational story, the unending wars, and the fight against the corporate hegemony of the henequén industry, and the foundation of a promised land in the jungle. Most of these themes can be found in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a landmark novel that relates the story of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, and that is representative of the Latin American Book of the 1960s–1970s. “The novel provides a road map of the desire for modernization of Latin America” (Camps 84), a desire to connect Macondo to the world. As Stephen Hart has written: “A leitmotif of the novel [One Hundred Years of Solitude] is the sense in which occurrences seen as supernatural in the First World … are presented as natural from a Third World perspective” (116). Indeed, there are some influences in Young-Ha Kim that can be labeled as Magical Realism, particularly in the desire of the immigrants to establish a community of Koreans in the Guatemalan jungle, a community that later fails because it is destroyed by the Guatemalan government. Another point of contact with García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is the many lost battles of Coronel Aureliano Buendía or José Arcadio Buendía’s and Ursula’s respective journeys to find the ocean or to find her son. The entire story seems like a far-fetched hyperbole of the Macondian world, 10  Another Korean novel that acknowledges an influence from Magical Realism is The Guest (2001) written by Hwang Sok-Yok, one of South Korea’s most important writers, narrates its characters’ war traumas and scars that need to be healed. In the novel, Catholicism and Marxism, likened to a “plague” (also known as “guest”), are foreign fanatical concepts that have invaded and devastated Korea. The novel follows a twelve-chapter ritual, a type of exorcism. The ghosts that appear in the novel represent the unresolved issues of the past. In this same introduction, the author mentions Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example where “the reader is exposed to the ghost of a forefather who inexplicably returns to life” (8). The dialogue with the ghost is a leitmotif in García Márquez novel, for example, Prudencio Aguilar whose ghost returns to meet José Arcadio Buendía. The ghost manifestation is an opportunity to deal with the past and to find a path to reconciliation and healing. Indeed, supernatural events are common in magical realist texts that challenge rationalist structures.

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but Young-Ha blurs the limits between historical facts and fiction as we enter slowly into his world of multiple voices and stories; this is yet another example of García Márquez’s influence, the multiplicity of voices and the complex genealogy of those Korean immigrants in the tropics. Black Flower describes an overlooked immigration to Mexico, a country where Koreans thought they would achieve their dreams, only to discover that they had been deceived by workforce speculators into forced-labor and diminishing conditions during its bloody civil war. The results of transnational global capitalism at the onset of the twentieth century were as profound and dramatic as those today. The economic perils of the Global South always impact the Global North and geographical border divisions cannot stop human migration. In the following section we will see an opposite example, this time a Mexican American arrives in the mist of the Korean War to see his identity disrupted by encountering that the enemy is an immigrant in Mexico, perhaps a descendant from those first Koreans that arrived to Mexico in 1905.

Trauma and Identity Narratives of the Korean War11 In this section, I analyze Los motivos de Caín [“Cain’s Motives”] by Mexican author José Revueltas.12 The novel begins with a prologue from the author explaining his meeting in Tijuana, Mexico, with Jack Mendoza, his protagonist, a man who is constantly afraid of being discovered as a man who lives “under his human disguise.” Jack is a Korean War defector who exhibits a persecusion complex as a consequence of the conflict. Three biblical epigraphs explain the base for the title: Cain, after killing his brother Abel, is condemned by God to spend the rest of his life remembering what he had done. Jack is in Tijuana, a city that represents a sort of 11  The only Latin American country that participated in  the  Korean War was  Colombia whose Colombian Battalion suffered 168 soldiers killed, 448 wounded, 60 missing, and 30 POWs. There are two Colombian novels that treat this conflict: Mambrú (1996) by R.H. Moreno Durán and Cementerios de Neón (2016) by Andrés Felipe Solano. 12  Revueltas was a political activist and writer who was jailed due to his political activism. He was incarcerated when he was fourteen years old and was sent to the “Islas Marías” prison and later to the Palacio de Lecumberri penitentiary. He joined the Communist Party in 1928 and was expelled in 1948. Among his works, we find Los muros de agua [Water Walls] (1941), El luto humano [Human Mourning] (1943), Dios en la tierra [God on Earth] (1943), Los días terrenales [“Days on Earth”] (1949), Los errores [“Mistakes”] (1964), and El apando [The Hole] (1969).

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anti-paradise. He arrives in a country that appears strange and foreign to him, though he is of Mexican descent. There he experiences that paradoxical maxim: “Chicanos are Americans everywhere, except in the United States and Mexicans everywhere, except in Mexico.” Not having slept in days, he begins to see the same person repeatedly passing before him, a delusion that denotes madness. Los motivos de Caín is told from the protagonist’s traumatized perspective. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) include insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, and a heightened sense of uprootedness and estrangement. This type of mental illness affects the afflicted person’s normal life by making them relive a traumatic event. Jack is therefore a sad and fearful being who exhibits bizarre behaviors. As Sheena Chamberlin professionally explains it: “The re-experiencing of the traumatic event manifests in various ways. Commonly this re-experiencing occurs in the form of recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event or dreams that replay the experience” (363). In Jack’s case, it was the Korean War that caused his condition. Tijuana, in the novel, is where American soldiers visit bars and brothels. Feeling out of place in this border town, Jack muses: “I am outside, strange, maybe faceless, maybe without lips, without a voice and nothing has to do with the fact that I speak the same language and that I am also Mexican” (14). Oddly enough, Jack was circumstantially born in South Carolina. In Tijuana, Jack bumps into a girl who accidentally drops her “corn on the cob.” The girl demands that Jack buy her another one and he agrees, but the girl picks up the dropped one from the ground and also eats it. Jack, startled by the girl’s sudden accusation that he was trying to sexually harass her, flees. The narrator points out that “the girl realized that Jack was a fearful man, a pure excuse of a man, a defenseless and unhappy one” (16). Jack is perplexed by his running into beings who seem strange and desolate. His instinct is to continue moving, to “keep fleeing, even if it is inside the prison” (19). On another street, he describes a grotesque scene where a man is hitting a prostitute who manages to finally produce a roll of bills to give him, her pimp; as the man walks away counting the bills, the denigrated woman picks up her cigarette pack from the pavement and enters a bar. The narrator describes this scene as the living occurrences of existence, in which human beings are “immersing themselves, beautiful and splendid” (21). Jack wonders whether he is dead for “to flee, that is the fate of those who die” (22). Jack looks for an exit from this labyrinth

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so that he may become “human again” (23). The root of his troubles is, of course, is his Korean War trauma. Former sergeant Jack (Mendoza) defected from the U.S. military and is now a fugitive from a war where the country of the “free and brave offered the blood of their children to save the democratic world” (24). Before arriving in Tijuana, Jack stops in Los Angeles to visit Bob Mascorro and his wife Marjorie, friends from a factory in Pasadena where they used to work, who had rescued him from a night of rain and silent darkness. He begins an account of his condition as Cain, and confesses to having “the strange awareness of being a Cain who has lost his memory” (27), although he does not remember when he committed a crime or against whom. In the garage, he runs into Lutero Smith, a crazy black pastor who wanders the Mexican neighborhood asking for donations and reciting biblical apocalyptic excerpts. He accuses him of being the murderer of the boy found in Sleepy Lagoon13 and claims that “if you killed, do not let the innocent pay for your crime” (29). Smith runs away, convinced, in his also deranged mind, that white lynchers are approaching. Bob Mascorro explains that the neighborhood is in a blackout because the city officials have cut off electrical power in the Mexican neighborhood. During the war, there were strong racial hatreds toward “pachucos” (subculture of Chicanos and Mexican-Americans) by Navy sailors, who sought to punish Mexicans and who only wished to “drink and fornicate … with our Mexican girls” (33). Jack explains that he has a damaged spirit because of the war, but also that he feels persecuted because of his Mexican blood, a condition described by Jack as “the Jewish condition,” that is, of being persecuted by the world, a situation that Jews share with Blacks and Mexicans who have experienced hatred and torture, and “the contempt of the zoological man” (35). Jack announces that he has deserted from the army, and his American friends have helped him cross the border into Tijuana without being detected. In Chap. 4, there is a discussion on how war imposes a new nomenclature to mark distance from real spaces. Jack says, “When we arrived you couldn’t tell it was Korea” (38). For example, when the hill X-25 is portrayed, its original name is lost, as well as the enemy’s name, he confusedly 13  In Los Angeles, the “Sleepy Lagoon” case referred to the murder of José Gallardo Díaz in 1942. The police quickly arrested several Mexican Americans. This murder is considered as a precursor to the Zoot Suit riots by “pachucos.” That same year Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps.

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says, like the biblical Cain: “Where am I? And you, friend, comrade, enemy, rival, brother, hero, murderer, where are you?” (40). Site X-25 stands for the hill’s real name that in Korean is “The Smooth Slope of the Enchanted Smile,” but now is covered with entrails and corpses. Consequently, war destroys abstractions and alters words to erase the enemy’s humanity. For example, in the midst of the destruction, soldiers discover a planted field that the bombs did not destroy, “a chaste and vital land that returned them again to being men” (42). The place reminds Tom, one of the members of the platoon, of his plot in California as he takes out his pocket Bible to recite some verses. Tom’s pious attitude, ascribed to his participation in the American Legion, contrasts with his brutality. The narrator explains the American cause and objective: “to develop farms like yours in all corners of the world” (43). On that hill is where they arrest a young Korean hidden in a rock fissure with a radio transmitter. Jack, as sergeant, decides to turn him over to Army Intelligence to be interrogated. When the North Korean soldier is sent to the camp, Jack starts to sing Mexican songs. He, unable to detect any emotion on the part of the prisoner, avers that Asian faces are impenetrable: “they have no face, they are faceless men” (52). The prisoner, however, reacts to Jack’s songs and begins to sing a ranchera [Mexican folk song] and begins to speak in Spanish: “I’m Mexican and Korean” (53). It is now that the prisoner becomes a familiar face, “the familiar face and friend of the chinitos [“little chinamen”] who wash clothes or serve in ‘Chinese’ restaurants in Chihuahua” (53). Jack suddenly wants to abandon everything for he cannot understand the concept of war, “that progressive multiplication of false assumptions and fetishes” (54). The Korean soldier hailed from Culiacán, Sinaloa, from a Mexican mother and a Korean father who moved to Korea after Japan’s defeat. From then on, Jack fraternizes with his “countryman,” helping him to discard his Communist Party membership card, and asks him not to voice the word “communist” because it is understood by English-speakers. The Korean Mexican adds that it is understood “In all the languages ​​of the earth” (56). Land in the novel is where all began (Garden of Eden); it is thus the social and racial equalizer that makes us all global beings. When a soldier faces the humanity of an enemy soldier, each realizes their commonality. Tom, another soldier from his troop, suspects that Jack has hidden the prisoner’s card to try to help him and, for a moment, Jack thinks that the prisoner will give him away; however, Jack is called by Army Intelligence

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to interpret. The medical doctor overseeing the torture is Jéssica Smith, a corpulent woman with big breasts. Jéssica greets Jack, licking her lips lasciviously. Once in the room, the North Korean is treated as a nonperson, spoken about in the third person. All they have been able to extract from him is that his name is Kim, which could also be the initials of the communist youth party in Russian. Jéssica then proceeds to denigrate and feminize the prisoner, labeling him a “pretty little whore.” Jack approaches Kim and in his eye he finds “the eye of Divine Providence that would persecute Cain forever and ever” (74). Therefore, the novel’s main theme is established, which is the ancestral sin, the primitive guilt that pursues the character throughout the novel. The “eye” has been a leitmotif in Revueltas’s narrative, representing the paranoia or delirium of persecution caused by the all-encompassing government vigilance. In this novel the eye of God represents the omnipresence of divine watchfulness. Jéssica personifies repression, the warden of all the prisons on earth (the jéssicos and jéssicas). Jack asks to be left alone with the prisoner, who asks him to kill him. But Jessica reveals that she too speaks Spanish and has understood the incriminating dialogue between Kim and Jack—the latter urinates in his pants from sheer fear. Jessica forces him to help her torture Kim and then, when it comes to cutting off Kim’s genitals, he feels that his humanity has been snatched in such a short time, “in accordance with how time is calculated in hell “(79). Jéssica, aroused by the mutilation, demands sex from Jack. He agrees on the condition that she put Kim out of his misery, to which she complies by injecting Kim with an overdose of insulin. Jack’s last sentence is “I was already removed from humanity” (81). Henceforth. he will feel unrelenting guilt for his participation in the torture and murder of a compatriot turned enemy. The novel’s emphasis on the eye is an internalization of Foucault’s panoptic idea embodied in the circular design of a prison with its cells arranged around a central well to constantly observe inmates, as treated in Revueltas’s El apando. As Foucault mentions: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (200). The purpose of this system is to internalize punishment; a panopticon is most cruelly efficient when its purpose is embedded in an inmate’s psyche so that he himself becomes self-vigilant. In principle, this concept may be implemented throughout all societal institutions, i.e., from schools to hospitals. In The National Body in Mexican Literature, Rebecca Janzen, having studied Los motivos de Caín from a ritualistic perspective, writes:

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“to portray repressive power and people’s responses to it … reflects their subjugation to more powerful characters, notably police, medical professionals, union leaders, teachers, and priests, all of whom represent aspects of an increasingly powerful Mexican state in the 1940s” (15). The insistent gaze, the persecuting eye, is the origin of paranoia, of the delirium of persecution contracted in prison by the continuous vigilance and the feeling of always being observed by guards. In Los motivos de Caín, Revueltas exhibits the horrors of a war whose purpose is to erase any trace of humanity, just as the “hill of the enchanted smile” becomes a coded number on a military map. Here, the North Korean prisoner is also deprived of his Korean Mexican identity, just as Jack’s as an American of Mexican heritage. Kim is Jack’s double; both are fighting a war that only belongs to them by having adopted a second nationality. Kim has to whitstand the discriminatory treatment of people of Asian descent in Mexico, the “chinitos” [little chinnamen] (53) as the author has refered before, a categorization that covers diverse origins (Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos). However, as borders are erased in the war, what we think of as an enemy can also be a compatriot. Kim would have probably been in the same dilemma had the North Koreans captured Jack whose Mexican blood would not have saved him from torture and death as an American soldier. Ultimately, “[t]his novel creates an ethical relationship made by Jack, as he abandoned his dominant position as an American soldier and demystifies the other who had been categorized as the enemy” (Jungwon Park 275). Jack’s subordinate position allows him to better understand Kim, but does not exempt him from his guilt. In “The Impossibility of Home,” Candice L.  Pipes analyzes how African American soldiers faced two battles, against the enemies of a foreign war and against the familiar enemies at home, who discriminated against them. Minorities have long been cannon fodder, disposable beings at home and in war. The discrimination they experienced in their native land made it difficult when it was time to come home. Pipes writes: “If home is property and safety and security, then African-Americans are, by definition, always not at home” (2). The uniform they wear as a symbol of hope also carries a paradox: the country that expects even the ultimate sacrifice from them in war, is the same country that hinders a dignified life at home. In this sense, there is no home for Jack Mendoza, for Los Angeles is a place where racism and discrimination against African Americans and Latinx abound. It is worth remembering that the Korean War was the first “integrated” war (President Truman integrated the military in 1948), and

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so minorities had to fight on the war front and on the home front. For Jack, post-traumatic stress disorder destroyed his mental health and his relationship with others and threw his individuality into a state of existential crisis and perpetual paranoia under the recriminating eye of an internalized panopticon.

Conclusion The connecting elements in the narratives by Young Ha-Kim, and José Revueltas, may be understood in terms of disrupted nationalisms and the negotiations of the contact zones that can feel like part of a state without being inside its boundaries, a sort of transborder. These can be Korean immigrants arriving in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century, or the two “enemies” in the Korean War, a Mexican-Korean and a Mexican-American. The boundaries of nationalism falter as we are confronted with our human and cultural connections and the absurdities of killing and dying for an “imagined community” and we see the characters struggle with unbalanced relations of power imposed by their fluid identities. There is not much written about the cultural interactions between Asia and Latin America, particularly from the perspective of Asia. As we have tried to demonstrate here, by pointing out the connections between different literary traditions, Magical Realism seems to be the node (or a form of reading Latin America from Asia) by which we might begin to understand and establish a literary dialogue. As literary critics Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris have argued in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995), Magical Realism is “a mode suited to exploring—and transgressing—boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction” (6–7). Indeed, Magical Realism can be used as a catalyst to interrelate diverse modes of writing. It can work to reinforce close cultural gaps and create a common ground for ascertaining global connections beyond trade, outsourcing, technological advances, and economic relations. It can also work to lay bare psychological war wounds and to find creative ways to externalize combat trauma. As seen in this essay, South Korean novelist Young Ha-Kim and Mexican novelist José Revueltas describe in their novels two wars forty years apart, but coincide in including characters who are seen as foreigners or enemies but are products of their immigration histories. The thousand Koreans

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arriving in Mexico in Young Ha-Kim’s Black Flower belong to the first waves of Asian immigrations to Mexico and have helped to define the ethnic composition of this country. Their descendants are still there, some in Mexico City, others in Yucatán, etc. In Revueltas’s Cain’s Motives, we encounter a Mexican-Korean who becomes acquainted with a Mexican-­ American soldier selected to torture him and who eventually becomes complicit in his murder. This traumatic event, torturing a conational, psychologically wounds the character, who feels like a modern Cain. All the protagonists in these fictions are confronted with a form of disrupted nationalism associated with diasporic immigrant connections between their home countries and their host nations. The fog of conflict stirs the identities of these novels’ characters and their fixed idea of nation and forces them into the grinding space of the contact zones.

Works Cited Allen, Richard B. “Asian Indentured Labor in the 19th and Early 20th Century Colonial Plantation World.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Asian History. Oxford U, March 2017, http://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/abstract/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-33. Accessed 4 July 2018. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1991. Camps, Martín. “The Plague of Modernity: Macondo, Inc. and the Branding of ‘Magical’ Latin America.” Critical Insights: Magical Realism, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo, Salem P, 2014, pp. 84–96. Chamberlin, Sheena M.  Eagan. “Emasculated by Trauma: A Social History of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Stigma, and Masculinity.” Journal of American Culture, vol. 35, no. 4, 2012, pp. 358–365. “Entrevista com Kim Young-Ha” Geração Editorial. 2 April 2014. http://geracaoeditorial.com.br/entrevista-com-kim-young-ha/. Accessed 4 July 2018. Faris, Wendy. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson and Wendy Faris, Duke UP, 1995, pp. 163–190. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1977. Hart, Stephen M. “Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicized Ghosts in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The House of the Spirits, and Beloved.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, vol 9, no. 2, 2003, pp. 115–123. Jenzen, Rebecca. “Representing Horror through Ritual: José Revueltas’ Los motivos de Caín.” Hispanófila, no. 173, 2015, pp. 293–301.

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Jin, Ju Young. “The Narration of Transnational Territory in Kingston’s China Men and Kim’s (Black Flower).” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, pp. 2–9. Kim, Young-Ha. Black Flower. Translated by Charles La Shure, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. McClancy, Kathleen. “The Rehabilitation of Rambo: Trauma, Victimization, and the Vietnam Veteran.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 503–519. Ota Mishima, María Elena. Destino México: Un estudio de las migraciones asiáticas a México, siglos XIX y XX. México, El Colegio de México, 1997. Park, Jungwon. “Korean, The Wandering Signifier in Foundational Chicano Narratives.” Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Intercultural Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic World and “the Orient,” edited by Ignacio López-Calvo, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 264–279. Parkinson Zamora, Lois, and Wendy B. Faris, editors. Magical Realism: History, Theory, Community. Duke UP, 1995. Pipes, Candice. “The Impossibility of Home.” War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, vol. 26, 2014, pp. 1–15. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Revueltas, José. Los motivos de Caín. México, Impulso, 1957. Romero Castilla, Alfredo. “Huellas del paso de los migrantes coreanos en tierras de Yucatán y su dispersión por el territorio mexicano.” Destino México: Un estudio de las migraciones asiáticas a México, siglos XIX y XX, edited by María Elena Ota Mishima, México, El Colegio de México, 1997, pp. 123–166. Sok-Yong, Hwang. The Guest. Translated by Kyung-Ja Chun and Maya West. Seven Stories P, 2005. Vees-Gulani, Susanne. “Troubled Memories: Posttraumatic Stress German Writers, and the Bombings of World War Two.” War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, vol. 17, no. 1–1, 2005, pp. 175–194.

CHAPTER 6

Common Ground: Shared Textuality and Visuality in China and Latin America Miguel Rojas Sotelo

This chapter deals with a double mirror and a comparative reading of recent cultural products developed in China and Latin America (most precisely in Colombia and Mexico). The commonalities shared during the first era of the Bandung conference followed important cultural exchanges during the late 1970s and 1980s which brought attention not only to the politics of the time, but also to cultural flows among otherwise estranged territories. Invisible yet tangible ties were consolidated after the massive translation of authors of the Latin American literary boom, followed of media and film exchanges, which started with the consolidation of

M. Rojas Sotelo (*) International and Global Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA North Carolina Latin American Film Festival, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_6

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diplomatic ties, were postcolonial commonalities were decoded.1 This section deals with the way minority voices (indigenous and first nations) in both regions are represented in audiovisual, literary, and the visual arts. This chapter embraces a cultural and environmental approach; however, it does not deal with the political economy of such flows, nor does it directly discuss the environmental impacts of such relations (the expanding frontiers for cattle, palm oil, and soy in the Amazon regions of Brazil, Colombia, or the Argentinean Pampas and the general degradation of air, water, and soil in China as a result of rapid modernization). By using rhetorical images and transplanting them into cultural practices, this chapter attempts to correlate individual practices to the body of the nations in discussion. Visual artists Libia Posada (Colombia) and Qin Ga (Mongolia/China) deal with issues of social mapping. Posada’s iconic photo series, Signos cardinales [“Cardinal Signs”], 2008–2018, and Ga’s famous performance piece, the 微型長征 [“Miniature Long March”], 2002–2005, and his latest 围栏计划 [“Grassland Fence Project”], 2019, bring issues of mapping and the body to the center of the discussion of how modern China and  Chile was the first country of the region to have diplomatic relations with the Peoples Republic, due to Pablo Neruda’s deeds (he was a diplomat in the 1930s in Shanghai and traveled in China in the 1950s) and consolidated in December 1970, just before Neruda’s Nobel Prize. Also, Cuba’s relations with China helped to establish a generation of philologist that after the “cultural revolution” would translate dozens of titles of the literary boom. The most well-known was the “colecciones de la literatura Latinoamericana” by Yunnan People’s Publishing House, which translated close to fifty titles between 1986 and 1991(Jian, 2016). At the end of 1985, Premier Zhao Ziyang embarked on what was the first high-level leadership visit from China to Latin America, visiting Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. The visit consolidated diplomatic relationships after the long period of stabilization of the Peoples Republic. Benjamin Creutzfeldt (2019) recalls how “His discourse was couched in terms of ‘Third World’ friendship and emphasized the need to strengthen South-South dialogue, while reiterating a commitment to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” The visit left a cultural mark on the public: documentaries, films, and children stories from China were broadcasted and widely shared during that decade along several other productions coming from the eastern bloc. There have been many cultural/artistic events, and film festivals about Latin America held in China in recent decades. In 2016, China, in collaboration with 14 Latin American countries, held the largest (and longest event) called “The Year of Chinese-Latin American Cultural Exchanges.” The event included the areas of arts, literatures, films, books, media, cultural relics, and tourism in the forms of performances, joint performances, exhibitions, forums, film showing and translations. The opening ceremony was held in Beijing; the closing ceremony was held in Lima, Peru, attended by Chinese president, Xi Jingping. 1

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Colombia deal with issues of territoriality, displacement, and their own revolutionary histories that—as tattoos and scars—shaped the social and physical formation of the body-nation. It then moves to decentered spaces such as Inner Mongolia, the core of carbon mining in China, and La Guajira in the north-eastern border between Venezuela and Colombia, where El Cerrejón, the largest open-pit carbon mine in Latin America, is located. By studying cultural products such as Zhao Liang’s documentary film 悲兮魔兽 [“Behemoth”] (2016), or the poetry of contemporary Wayúu indigenous writers from la Guajira, Vito Apushana (Miguelángel López) and Estercilia Simanca, this section recognizes the common spaces and practices that make the two regions subject to the forces of global capital and to falling under the spell of Western progress and development ideals. Finally, the chapter focuses on a group of films, documentary and fictional, that use observational modes of narration to share horizontal and vertical flows of people across the territories of both continents that change the cultural geographies of the globe: Lixin Fan’s documentary 归途列车 [“Last Train Home”] and Cary Fukunaga’s fictional film Sin Nombre [“Without a Name”] both premiered in 2009; and Oscar Quemada-Díez’s La jaula de oro [“The Golden Cage”], from 2014, produce family portraits—individual and social—about two of the largest perennial exoduses the world is facing—one, internal; the other, transnational. Working over several years, directors Lixin Fan, Fukunaga and Quemada-Díez traveled with people who embarked on these journeys— some round-trip, others one-way—to share their intimate experiences of migration. Like many of China’s rural poor, Central Americans leave their native villages to find work in the large urban and industrial centers in Northern Mexico and the United States, not to become workers, but to enter at the bottom of the service industries, becoming expendable—collateral damage in the equation of economic growth under neoliberalism. These cultural products have a common characteristic: the use of immersive strategies to generate “embodied” experiences. They also reach out to larger audiences beyond the literary, cinematic, or artistic circles. They deal with environmental crises, mass flows, and the transformations—physical and symbolic—brought by economic development compressed into a few decades. As China celebrates seventy years of a modernizing project with a long march to Mars, Latin America struggles to move out of its Third World status as proximity with the North restricts its own pace. Still, there is “common ground” on how nation-building,

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citizenship, public space, minority voices, representation, and participation in a globalized/localized world is represented.

Germination On 3 January 2019, just before 10:30 a.m. Beijing time, the robotic spacecraft 嫦娥四号 [“Chang’e 4”] made a soft landing on the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin area, some 238,855 miles away, becoming the latest step forward in China’s Longest March to Mars. To have reached the far side, or dark side, of the moon, as Liu Jizhong, dean of China’s Lunar Exploration and Aerospace Engineering Center, told Agence France-Presse, “has helped our country make the leap from followers to leaders.” Once a secret mission, China now announced its successful landing and shared the first lunar images captured by the unmanned space probe via state media. Because the signal had to bounce from satellite to satellite, the world received the news at the same time. It is not a surprise that China engaged in such an enterprise: the total length of the Great Wall of China is about 13,170.70 miles and was completed two thousand years ago. The extension of this long march, through which the Chinese have attempted and achieved a landing on this unexplored side of the moon, can also encompass the country’s transformation since opening its economy. President Xi, during a speech celebrating China’s forty-year reform, reminded the country how this was achieved through what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” However, China’s Longest March, reported by Mao Zedong to have been 7800 miles (1934–1936) and that took the Red Army out of the Jiangxi Soviet area to its base at Yan’an, is still the basis for the building of the modern nation. In the mid-1930s, American journalist Edgar Snow visited the Communist base in Yan’an to provide the first English-language account of Mao’s Long March, which he included in Red Star Over China. Snow called “the Long March an odyssey unequaled in modern times … took them across some of the world’s most difficult trails … and across the high snow mountains and the great rivers of Asia” (Snow 1968, 190). Snow’s account noted how the army gathered detailed information on the exact distance as well as the number of mountains, rivers, provinces, towns, and armies faced along the way; yet, the force of his poetic description of the topography goes beyond measurable distance. In short, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has made the country reverse its “open door policy” of the late nineteenth century (ratified in 1899) that became the

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modern colonial chapter at the basis of the new nation.2 With a number of lows and in-betweens (civil wars, famines, the Cultural Revolution), the march took the country through four decades of continuous economic development (1978–2018). Time magazine reported on 2 January 1967 how “nobody really knows precisely what is happening in China.” Bernhard M. Auer, general editor of the magazine, noted that few Western reporters were allowed to work within China’s borders “and—as far as they could tell—even Chinese citizens were having trouble keeping up as Mao Zedong’s fledgling Cultural Revolution (which), ‘erupted into stride and stridency so bitter that it produced widespread chaos and verged on civil war.’” No one today doubts the economic miracle in a nation of almost 1.4 billion people. Chinese advances in infrastructure, science, and the environment, besides the social benefits of a socialist state, are changing the balance of power worldwide. No one also doubts the great challenges that lie ahead. Yet, the last five hundred years in Latin America have been defined by extermination, exploitation, and massive extraction operations. The last two hundred years of republicanism have also been plagued with civil wars, military coups, frail constitutions, and fragmentation of territorial integrity. The region has grown economically, but has lagged behind world economic growth on account of an unequal distribution of income; the few gains on its war on poverty are overshadowed by this disparity. In Latin America today, 184 million people live in poverty, around 30 percent of its total population. What is even more alarming is that 63 million of those live in extreme poverty, the highest number in a decade according to a United Nations report (2017, 16). The arrival of “stable” democracies has not put an end to corruption and inequality. The region’s full potential has not been reached since poor economic performance follows terms-of-trade booms in previous decades, as an unbroken cycle. The region has tried to consolidate its markets to become more competitive and cohesive (OAE, Mercosur, CELAC, UNASUR, ALBA, etc.); however, it is still divided by external and internal forces that have impeded these attempts to bring about economic and political unity. A clear 2  China’s Open Door Policy was accepted by the U.S., the U.K., Japan, and other European powers, allowing those countries to have equal access to the Chinese market. It was created in 1899 by American Secretary of State John Hay and lasted until 1949, that is, after the conclusion of the Chinese civil war. It has been considered a colonial rule by the Chinese. A new spin on the policy has been taken under the Trump administration, reversing the once “open door policy” for one bilateral policy that we can name as “control window.”

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example of this failure is the Pan-American Highway, which remains incomplete since construction began in the mid-1920s. Currently, it is hardly used as a connector because many sections are poorly maintained and others are under the control of violent groups. As a unifying project of 30,000 miles in extension, it lingers because of political problems around the entire region. The Word Bank stresses how “significant is the fact that East Asian countries participate much more actively in cross-­ country production networks, known as Global Value Chains (GVCs), than most Latin American countries” (2015). China is in the middle of the most progressive (some say aggressive) expansion and multilateral development, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In fact, the World Bank finds that Latin American countries tend to develop GVCs only at the beginning, as exporters of raw materials, or at the end, as manufacturers of finished products, not in the middle, where the so-called “sweet spot” that provides the most potential growth gains is found (2015).

Body Territory The history of China as a political entity, its geopolitics, is long and complex. Ever since its earliest dynasties (circa four thousand years ago), the goal has been cultural unification, a civilization objective. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that China was able to set its territory. In fact, tensions are still ongoing in places like Tibet, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and Taiwan. From the West’s longstanding perspective, China was an insular country because of its geography: large deserts, great plains to its north and west, the Himalayas, the South China Sea on its southwest and south, and the Pacific Ocean to its east. This geographic configuration shaped how its civilization and culture developed. China is also as large as a continent, with a total land area of more than three million square miles, the third-largest country in the world after Russia and Canada. China also has numerous islands, and a coastline that extends for more than eleven thousand miles. It was due to the colonial desires of Great Britain, France, the U.S., and later Japan that modern China’s borders were set. China is also postcolonial and, for our purposes here, it will be compared to some Latin American countries. Colombia, located at the northern tip of South America, was once part of a larger Spanish colony, the New Kingdom of Granada (1550–1717) and the Viceroyalty of New Granada (1717–1821). After independence, it became part of La Gran Colombia (1819–1890) along with today’s

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Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, Guyana, parts of Suriname, northwestern Brazil, and northern Peru. Little is known of its pre-­ Columbian past due to the erasure of indigenous histories by part of the imperial conquest of the Americas. After its independence from Spain in 1819, the country faced dozens of civil wars, lost what today is the American-created nation of Panama in 1903, and settled territorial conflicts with Brazil and Peru in the 1920s. For decades, Colombia found itself, like China, isolated; its central government was located on a high plateau, thousands of miles from any seacoast or major river. It was not until the 1980s and early 1990s that Colombia opened up to the world, China discovered Colombia in the translations of the Nobel Prize winner (1982) Gabriel García Márquez and also, in part, as a result of its participation in the global economy due to a global commodity, (not coffee) cocaine.3 This was also due to a change in its constitution in 1991 that brought a neoliberal agenda, privatized most public assets, and decentralized administration thus opening new economic frontiers and extractive agendas. Geography is then a marker of the social relations within sovereign states; the shape and contents of the national map becomes the image of the body/nation. Cultural producers in both nations use the physical territory and the socio political conditons as the subject matter of their work, such as the case of García Márquez and Mo Yan (Jian: 51).4 Most recently, visual artists like Libia Posada (also a physician), a contemporary artist from Medellín, Colombia continue the tradition. She specializes in emergency and social medicine as well as in artistic practices focused on public health, partner violence, forced displacement, trauma, neuropathology, cognition, traditional medicine, and community healing practices. Since the early 1990s, Dr. Posada has worked in public hospitals and in her 3  After the Nobel Prize of García Márquez, China saw the potential for a new literary movement in post-socialist period. Via the Latin American Institute in Beijing and literary magazines such as “Arte y Literatura Extranjera” in Shanghai, dozens of works were translated. Large print outs of most of the authors of the Latin American Boom were produced, the favorite by far was García Márquez (Yian & Jun, 2001). 4  Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize, second for a Chinese, commented on his attraction and influence for the genre of “Magical Realism,” in particular William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez. Chinese and international press commented about it in 莫言: 《我不是“中国的马尔克斯”》,《南方日报》, 2011年6月28 日. (Mo Yan, “I am not the García Márquez of China”, Daily of the South, June 28, 2011) quoted in (Jian:51); and “Mo Yan and China’s ‘Nobel Complex’”, Evan Osnos, The Newyorker Magazine, October 11, 2012.

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private practice, while also being a visual artist. As a physician, she cares for patients suffering physical and psychosocial trauma from Colombia’s history of inner conflict, including violent crime, narco-terrorism, forced displacement, and epidemic gender violence. Her art, ranging from performance to installation art, includes photography, drawing, and video, and in many cases it is collaborative, situated, and contextual (Rojas-­ Sotelo, Parish 2018, 22). Violent reality in Colombia affected millions of people in past decades and shows scars not only on humans, but also in its geography. After a long process of peace negotiations with Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) [“The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”], from 2012–2016, the country has moved to a so-called “post-conflict” era. As part of the process of reconciliation, standards on the effects of war have been established to account for the physical and psychological wounds of many Colombians. According to the Registro Nacional de Víctimas [“National Registry of Victims”], over 6.7 million individuals have been subjected to direct violence since 1985 (2016). Dr. Posada was trained under the so-called “social medicine practice,” which focused on treating not only individual patients, but also the social body (illness easily defeated by vaccination, nutrition, sanitary and general health campaigns). This social body has been ill for a long time; between 1946 and 1966, Colombia experienced a period known as violencia política [“political violence”], where hundreds of thousands were killed in a sectarian war fought between the two major political parties to hold control of the government. There were three hundred thousand dead and two million internally displaced as a result of the “pacification process” conducted by the military regime (1953–1957), a situation that ended after a political solution. This involved the establishment of shared presidential terms, called frente nacional [“national front”], which lasted until 1976 between liberals and conservatives. One effect of this long war was the emergence of multiple left and right-wing groups excluded from the agreement that challenged land distribution to rural and poor urban settlements. Colombian emergency rooms, trauma centers, and operating rooms had an influx of corpses owing to the social and political unrest. As an artist, Posada’s representations of the body are not direct exercises of morphology, biological structure, anatomy, or illustration. Her work addresses how to consider issues of territory, topography, mind mapping, and landscape. She informs her practice with geographical references, such as those under the title notas de geografía distópica [“dystopic geographic notes”] that use statistical information from public health

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databases and official maps that show lack of access to health services in areas of poverty. Research results and visual processes illustrates the body-­ nation, its illness, and its wounds. Major works such as Signos Cardinales [“Cardinal Signs”] (2008–2018) and Hierbas de Sal y Tierra [“Herbs of Salt and Soil”] (2012) have resulted from of this approach. Signos Cardinales (2008–18) is a series of portraits of forced migration that proposes an exercise of collective and individual mapping. In a series of participatory workshops, the subjects—mostly women of color— described their routes of displacement, or long marches, from their territories of origin to the main cities or countries where they found refuge (Fig. 6.1). Posada focuses on data collection (hard) to support her work, then she resorts to an individual and collective (soft) approach where participation becomes a medium in which the individual and collective body literally speaks. This approach is also a criticism of the double practice, medical, Fig. 6.1  Libia Posada participatory workshop for Signos Cardinales (2008). (Courtesy of the artist)

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and artistic. For the first series of Signos Cardinales, Posada used oral, visual, cartographic, and corporeal history to tell the stories of ten women and two men who were forcibly displaced in Colombia. Each individual described their journeys of displacement to Posada, who then used atlases and individuals’ input to create maps of their journeys. She later drew these maps on their legs and feet and photographed the results. As an artist, Posada plays with the genre of portraiture or, perhaps, counter-­ portraiture since what she depicts are the legs and not the face, a genre reversal. These portraits are not idealizations of the subjects, but direct references to the harsh reality of force displacement and, as such, they become not allegories but documents. The subjects are not of upper-class origins, but real people (mostly indigenous and black women), not able to commission an artist to produce such images. These portraits also do not smooth the image of the subject for they show the wounds, scars, and heavy use of the limbs. While they do not identify the subject, they share in detail the journeys and the vehicle of salvation (the legs). Lastly, they are not displayed in picture frames or in the standard height of portraits (eye height): they go to floor level. They become a counter-mirror image of the beholder experienced by walking towards it. From afar they resemble mountains, deserts, or eroded land, but in proximity, they look like aerial photographs with layered maps. She chose legs and feet as the canvas for this piece because they serve as units of measurement and as vehicles that facilitated displacement for many of the individuals featured (2018) (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2  Signos Cardinales (2008) an ongoing project by Libia Posada. (Detail). (Courtesy of the artist)

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Like any other map, Signos Cardinales provides a legend for the viewer to understand the key points necessary to make a journey. A variety of symbols illustrate individuals’ trajectories. Some, like roads, rivers, and national parks would be a mainstay of any map. Others, however, such as symbols for massacres and mine fields, speak to the violence that caused these journeys. Additionally, these maps offer a structuring of both time and space. Numbered houses provide a geographical history of people’s locations of displacement. While each map is created from a uniform alphabet, they are arranged in configurations that result in a unique narrative structure for each image. (Rojas-Sotelo, Parish 2018, 88) (Fig. 6.3). Since 2002, Posada has been producing maps with a project called Cuadernos de geografía [“Geographic Notebooks”]. The three maps included here (Fig. 6.4) are part of a larger series on geography. The maps are used to identify borders, the political division of territories, or to give a sense of resources, demographic distribution, etc. In these maps Posada, the cartographer, presents data on ideology, poverty, and land mines in Colombia. Here, a cartography effect emerges, which is part of her larger interest in the body, geography, culture, and society. The sequence of the images shows the failure of a nation’s project. These works consist of lithographic renderings of maps as annotated geographic atlases, where territories are matched by ideology, poverty, and landmines (left to right). The map showing an image of a double compass (wind rose), underlining the directions, left, right/right/left is a direct reference of the ideological

Fig. 6.3  Signos Cardinales (2008). Detail & Conventions. (Courtesy of the artist)

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Fig. 6.4  Libia Posada. From the series Cuadernos de Geografía. (Courtesy of the artist)

battle taking place in Colombia; the poverty map matches areas with poor health coverage, general violence, and a lack of government presence (it reflects the data on fatalities who might otherwise be alive had they national healthcare programs). The last map is the artist’s rendering pictorially of the data of mutilations and casualties caused by landmines in rural Colombia. These maps also introduce another of Posada’s interests: the way arts and sciences are distributed, circulated, and appropriated by society. Some of her work has been reproduced and circulated commercially. This reflects a practice developed by Brazilian visual artist Cildo Meireles (in his project, Inserções em circuitos ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola, 1970), in which the artist imprints currency (paper bills) and soda bottles (Coca-Cola bottles) with anti-capitalist messages and then returns the objects to circulation in the market. This approach allowed Posada to extend the reach of her work by introducing it to the public in spaces that are not related to art or medicine. According to UNICEF, landmines and explosive (remnants of war) continue to kill or injure fifteen thousand people a year in Colombia, many of them children (UNICEF 2014). Posada’s Lección de anatomía (2003–2004) consists of a series of anatomical figures of children with amputations. Here Posada explores the impossibility of medical practice, its limits and shortcomings (health as utopia) in the Colombian context. These maps and renditions have been reproduced and distributed to school-supply sections of bookstores, in corner stores, and magazine stands (Fig. 6.5).

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Fig. 6.5  Lección de anatomía (2003–2004). (Courtesy of the artist)

Seeding and Embodying Many journeys take place seasonally, either one-way or roundtrip. Some of these have historical outcomes. The Long March is still a cornerstone of modern Chinese history; bringing this epic story to a current projection of the idea of geography and the revolutionary body was the goal of a collective of artists in 2002. Today the Long March Project, is also a contemporary art space in Beijing, aimed to retrace the historical Long March, the six-thousand-mile fleeing of China’s Red Army from Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek (1934–1936). The multidisciplinary approach of the collective’s members is well known: it included talks, performances, and displays, from 2002 to 2005, at twelve different sites along its route. The Long March Project was initially conceived by artist and curator Lu Jie along with artists Qin Ga and Zhijie.

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Qin Ga, a photographer and performance artist from Inner Mongolia, is the most known member of the collective. Qin’s solo exhibition, The Miniature Long March 2002–2005, was originally exhibited at the Long March Space in Beijing (2005) and later exhibited internationally in many important art gatherings and events. It reflects Ga’s personal concern with China’s history as he not only performed the Long March, but also incorporated it onto his geo-body (Shea 2017, 79). When Lu Jie and a team of artists decided to recreate the Long March in 2002, Ga was unable to join them; Qin Ga then decided to tattoo a map of China onto his back and from Beijing followed the march creating a “miniature long march” on his body. As the team (led by Jie) reenacted the Long March, Ga would tattoo each new site on the map, permanently leaving each route and site on his body/map. It was like having a permanent mark (scar) in the body-geography, just like today the Great Wall of China stands for the civilized state (Fig. 6.6).5 This first attempt by the collective to complete the march stopped later in 2002 (it started at Ruihin, Jianxi Province, and ended at Luding Bridge, Sichuan Province). A couple of years later, the team decided to send Ga to try to complete the march. Starting from the Luding Bridge, he would have to cross over snowy mountains and swampy grasslands, marching towards Yan’an. Traveling with him were tattoo artist Gao Xiang, photographer and cameramen Liu Ding, Gao Feng, and Mei E. Every time the group reached a new site on the road, Ga would have the site and route tattooed onto his back, recording the process with video and photography, as well as collecting tools, instruments, and small paraphernalia as a way to archive the process itself (Fig. 6.7).6 5  For over two millennia, the Chinese thought of themselves as a civilization rather than as a nation. It was not until the nineteenth century that China called itself a nation state in a Western sense. However, as Martin Jacques explains in his bestseller When China Rules the World (2008): “The most fundamental defining features of China today, and which give the Chinese their sense of identity, emanate not from the last century, when China has called itself a nation-state, but from the previous two millennia when it can be best described as a civilization-state.” How China is shaping itself currently is based on this notion; the recent Belt and Road Initiative is another clear demonstration of how this “civilized” turn is shown in policy and action. The China we know today dates back to 221 BC, the date that marks the end of the Warring States period and the birth of the Qin Empire, which was able to consolidate a territory similar to what China is today (particularly its eastern half, the most populous and prosperous). 6  In this brief passage, Qin Ga recalls part of the expedition. “It was really like the Red Army in the ’30s. We crossed the snowy mountains, the swampy grasslands, through Tibet,

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Fig. 6.6  Qin Ga. Miniature Long March (2002–2005). © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art. (Courtesy of the artist)

Fig. 6.7  Remotely following the Long March team’s progress in 2002. © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art & Wang Jixing, Red Star Over China, 2019. (Courtesy of the artist)

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In 2019, the film Red Star Over China (also titled The Secret of China and Red China) was released. Directed by celebrated Chinese director Wan Jixing (Mi Cai Fang, 1989; Kuo’s Story, 1992; Flag of the Republic, 1999), the film is based on E. Snow’s account of the Long March and was released just before the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the republic, 1 October 2019. The artist collective continues its work based on the historical Long March to provide a metaphorical framework for a range of Long March Projects. Unfortunately, the project’s website is not able to be accessed from the U.S. (probably due to censorship), but the activities of the collective are well-known in the art world and beyond. Their work was recognized in the blockbuster exhibition Art and China’s Revolution organized by the Asia Society in New York (2008–2009). As the introductory text of the exhibit mentions, “through collaboration with participants from around the world, these projects explore ideas of revolutionary memory in local contexts and aim to reinterpret historical consciousness and develop new ways of perceiving political, social, economic, and cultural realities. The project bears testament to how revolutionary thought continues to influence Chinese visual culture today” (2009). Mapping, walking, exploring, embodying, and inscribing alternative narratives of the nation’s history via participatory works are part of the toolset of Colombian and Chinese contemporary artists. Narration, social sciences, cartography, demography, and geography are all used by these artists as medium. Their interest in these disciplines also informs their work about the uses and misuses of factual information and the construction of knowledge from the sciences and the effects of such general and panoramic views on individuals and society at large. In addition, the omnipresence of maps, atlases, and statistics shapes our understanding of the world. By interrupting the linear flow of history, or by interrupting it via over the Himalayas, and the Kunlun Mountains, some of the harshest natural conditions along the route. When we finally arrived on the banks of the Yellow River in Sha’anxi, we had encountered nearly everything. This experience was completely different from imagining your Long March travels in my studio when you first set out in June 2002. Then, everything was based upon what we learned in the public education here about the grand story of the Red Army and the Long March. The two-year interval between this work led to the two parts being very different as well, but the Long March Project has also changed a lot. However, the metaphor of the Long March is something that we all know continues to remain the same.” From the Long March Project. Accessed 9 September 2019. http://longmarchproject.com/qin-ga-miniature-long-march/.

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reenactment, memory is triggered, and new routes, maps, and geographical accidents complement the rational maps supporting narratives of nation states in the present. By inflicting pain in the body-geography, by recognizing trauma, wounds, and scars, these artists participate actively in alternative forms of history building, a critical history that opens up spaces for collective construction, where minority voices have a chance to be part of the larger image of the nation state. Posada and Ga intend to subvert such power by playing the role of cartographers, those who travel across territories mapping and who, by understanding the topography, the forms, and shapes in the skin of a body-geography, can open spaces of debate about the effects of such practices in the individual and social body.

Black Soil and Mountain-eaten Beasts Pastores [“Shepherds”] We are shepherds We are the men who live in the world of routes. We, too, feed, also return to a fold … and breastfeed us. And we are milk of the dream, meat of the party … farewell blood. Here, in our environment, life grazes us. Vito Apushana, Wayúu poet.7

A nation is composed by a complex collection of topographies that with soil (valleys, mountains, and deserts), water (rivers, glaciers, lakes, and oceans), plants (the flora of the grasslands, forest, and jungles), and animals (the fauna that pertain to those spaces), create the idea of a nation. People live from the darkness and fertility of the soil, and with it also comes mineral riches, the engines of modern nations. Among all minerals—after the age of bronze, iron, gold and silver—coal (and other fossil fuels) sits at the center of the idea of modernity.8 Coal and modernity are two sides of the same coin: coal and progress walk side by side, a dark coin  All translations from Spanish are my own.  As bronze consolidated the early dynasties, gold and silver fueled the conquest of the Americas, establishing the structure of modern Europe and the subaltern state of the colonial territories. Coal’s unit per energy has driven the industrial revolution from Great Britain, to the United States, to contemporary China, in the past two and a half centuries. 7 8

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that with oil (and natural gas) still rules world economies. Without coal, there would be no steam engines, ships, locomotives, power plants, or factories. If well it is dark (I might say the dark side of modernity, expanding Mignolo’s assertion) and pertains to the realm of the underground, coal is pure light. It is the result of processes of compression of the biomass over multiple Ice Ages, composed mostly by plants nourished by the sun.9 As a nonrenewable resource, coal needs people. Coal miners are then subjects of history, and for instance have been part of modern politics. Miners have organized for better work conditions, payment, and respect of their human rights.10 Market forces and transnational interests during this time have pressured the expansion of coal extraction to all corners of the world. Nowadays, with the development of alternative energy sources and environmental concerns about coal in the energy mix, the sector has been trying to reinvent itself. This section will focus on two cases in faraway territories: Inner Mongolia in northeast China and La Guajira, Colombia. Both regions include distinct minority groups who are attached to the idea of the land. The nomads of Inner Mongolia have an idiosyncratic culture and a long history built on pastoral and migrant models. The Wayúu of northern Colombia are also pastoral, semi-nomad people attached to their territory. For Inner Mongolians, the grasslands are the marker of their life in northern China. Geopolitically situated outside the Great Wall, Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region, yet one subject to the Chinese nationalist discourse (like Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). Inner Mongolia has experienced continual socioeconomic and environmental change. Geographically diverse, with expansive grasslands, cultivated fields, and barren deserts, the

9  The Carboniferous Period lasted from about 359 to 299 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Era. The term “Carboniferous” comes from England, in reference to the rich deposits of coal that occur there. These deposits of coal occur throughout northern Europe, Asia, and midwestern and eastern North America. The plant life of the Carboniferous Period was extensive and luxuriant, especially during the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian periods. It included ferns and fernlike trees; giant horsetails, called calamites; club mosses, or lycopods, such as Lepidodendron and Sigillaria; seed ferns; and cordites, or primitive conifers. 10  Including the massive coal-miners strikes at Homestead in Pennsylvania in 1898, Yorkshire in the UK in 1984, and China’s recent Heilongjiang strikes in 2015 and the 2016 strikes in Jiangxi Province.

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Mongolian landscape has been traditionally defined in terms of mobility and transformation. As Shu-chin Tsui states in her manuscript Behemoth: A Poetic Vision of Ravaged Landscape, “Recent historiography shows an emphasis on enclosure over mobility and government policy over eco-environmental conditions” (2019). Communal ownership during Mao’s collectivization brought about the overgrazing of the most fertile Mongolian plains. After it, a livestock economy flourished in the post-Mao era, bringing fragmentation of the territory and lots of fences. The open grasslands became fragmented pastures devoted to the idea of production and capital gain; then, coal mining arrived. With both waves, migrants (not ethnic Mongolians) arrived. Behemoth (2016) is a documentary film by celebrated Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang that takes an honest look at this region and to its coal association. Liang, better known for his films on legal cases in China took a different route for this.11 Behemoth, a visual essay, was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2016. The film takes its title from the poetic Book of Job and its three-chapter narrative comes directly from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Behemoth literally means “a monster that eats mountains”; the documentary shows how a pastoral landscape and laboring bodies move from Inferno, Purgatory, to Paradiso—it does not signify what it did in Dante’s story (a Christian journey of salvation), but what it applies to in contemporary China. The film begins with a great explosion (reminiscent of Godfrey Reggio’s opening scene in Koyaanisqatsi, Life out of Balance, 1983) inside of an open-pit coal mine in Inner Mongolia. A guttural voice emanates from the pit (from Huun-Huur-Tu, Mongol throat singing), the echo of the mountain. With the shamanistic and trance-like qualities this sound creates a powerful entry to the realm of the beast. The chapter takes the audience on an immersive exploration of the mine and of some of its miners. As in the Divine Comedy, Virgil, the guide and a migrant worker, carries a broken mirror, its reflections almos allows the audience to be captured and become participant in the visual construction of the film. This visual trick 11  Zhao’s 2009 documentary Petition: The Court of the Complainants as well as Behemoth are banned in China. Petition is about corruption and other aspects of the Chinese legal system; the film was shot over a period of twelve years and details the plight of Chinese citizens traveling to Beijing to file complaints with the central government about local officials. Zhao was born in Liaoning Province, near the North Korea border, and graduated from Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 1992.

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allows Liang, the narrator, to introduce also a rhetoric-fragmented/image of a naked body, that appears in the fetal position, always located in a transitional space (at the edge of a mountain, pasture, city, etc.). These inserts populate the whole film (part of a sort of religious offering setting transition to the different chapters) that introduce subjects and landscapes in the narrative. In frontal close-ups (the reverse of Libia Posada’s counter portraits), we meet anonymous miners/migrant workers whose skin resembles the landscape, cracked and blackened by their occupation (they unsuccessfully wash thoroughly). From the depths of the mines, the film brings us to the monster’s belly in a lengthy take of more than two minutes  through an underground elevator, to furnaces releasing heat and toxic fumes. Purgatory follows, as the film’s focus shifts to steel mills. At the height of the action, the screen turns red with sparks, an image of fire and the heat of metal. A symbolic representation of the Chinese flag emerges, a symbol perhaps of how through hard work China has earned its industrial transformation (Fig. 6.8). Visually, the film moves from gray, to red, to blue, from one chapter to the next. Throughout it, we see closed-ups of workers, washing the soot off their skin, that show their eyes, sweat, the scars on their faces and the condition of their hands. Also, painstakingly, we hear them breathing, heavily. Perhaps a metaphore of a metamorphosis from human to devastated landscape. Those suffering from pneumoconiosis (black lung disease) endure continuous torment—their lungs have become like the ravaged earth. The last chapter take us to the ghost cities of northern China, where the expected utopia of a workers’ nation turned into a form of modern/ urban/civilized/clean living but yet empty spaces. Behemoth is a hybrid film, that is, an art film (a visual essay) and an environmental justice piece. It features the brutalized landscape and violently abused workers through an observational and poetic approach. Between 2014 and 2017, Qin Ga initiated another march, now in his native land. Ga crossed plains, deserts, hills, and rivers to investigate the Ā lāshàn League and Xilingol League prefectures on the east and west side of Inner Mongolia. The rough topography did not stop his journey, but enclosures and fences prevented him from moving forward on those plains that seemed to stretch to the horizon. “An ordinary, settled life engulfed by modernity and homogeneity reflects the herders’ use of enclosures and modern society’s emphasis on boundaries and sovereignty, which are cut off from traditional nomadic life” (Cancan 2019). Ga’s interaction with the once seminomad herders was based on the notion of fragmented

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Fig. 6.8  Behemoth (2016) Zhao Liang. (Stills from the film)

spaces (fences), while still being under the spell of nomadic/pastoral life. Along the way, Ga photographed marshes, deserts, plains, rivers, and mountains and also recorded aspects of nomadic fashion. As Ga moves on the land, his artistic practice became mobile, documenting the fleetting nature of the plains. Showing, also, how grazing became an accumulation of the capital labor force and how the Inner Mongolia highlands, plains, cities, and deserts part of a global industry. Ga’s project is titled 围栏计划 [“Grassland Fence Project”], 2019, and it is a collection of images, videos, and objects of a vanishing nomadic culture that inform us about their former harmonious relationship with, and reverence for, nature and the belief that all things that were equal and interconnected are becoming a distant image under the new socialist yet capitalist regime (Fig. 6.9). The ecological paradise of the pastoral landscape is captured in a poem, an ode to the nomadic life of the Yinshan, engraved in the Southern and

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Fig. 6.9  Qin Ga, Where Are You Going? From the project 围栏计划 [“Grassland Fence Project”] (2019). Installation. © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art. (Courtesy of the artist)

Northern Dynasties traditions, between 420–589 AD; which is fading fast from the horizon. Under the Yinshan. The sky is like a scorpion, and the four fields are covered. The sky is grey, the wild donkey. The wind blows the grass and sees the cattle and sheep. “敕勒川, 阴山下. 天似穹庐, 笼盖四野。天苍苍, 野茫茫. 风吹草低见牛羊.”

This verse sings of the richness and magnificence of the grasslands of the Northland and expresses the importance of water and soil and a passion for nomadic life. It sings of the prairie and the life of the nomads. Recent Mongolian poets and writers have enjoyed a sort of revival because of the continuous ecological devastation of the grasslands. Among them, we find: Mandumai’s short stories such as “Horse, Wolf, Home” (2015), “Source of Fortune” (1981), and “The Four Eared World and the Hunter” (1997); Guo Xuebo’s “The Desert Wolf” (1996) and “Mongolia” (2014);

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and Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem (2008). The 2018 Lu Xun Literary Award was granted to another Inner Mongolian author, Baoerji Yuanye, who won it for his prose anthology, A Flow of Trotting Horses (2015). The same Lu Xun, in 1937, acknowledged that it was “our” Mongol (Genghis Khan) who defeated Europe before conquering China. In the grasslands, the accumulation of organic material that is now coal still needs great quantities of scarce water to be extracted. Someday, the ghost cities in Liang’s film will fill with new inhabitants and more urban centers will arise. In order to keep such growth, China also needs to constantly produce more energy. This region is rich in fossil fuels (26 percent of the Chinese total coal reserves are in Inner Mongolia), but quite poor in water (it has only 1.6 percent of the overall water supply). Already scarce and its underwater reserves contaminated, water is also being affected by global climate change (Fig. 6.10). A similar case is taking place in Colombia. El Cerrejón, the tenth largest open-pit coal mine in the world, is the largest in Latin America. It is located in the province of La Guajira, close to the border with Venezuela. The mine sits at the basin of the Ranchería River, the only river running through a region that is a vast semi-desert and that is limited in the north by the Caribbean Sea. This area of the country is home to several

Fig. 6.10  Qin Ga, 围栏计划 [“Grassland Fence Project”], 2019. Videos, pictures, painted wallpaper, and wire. © Qin Ga and Tang Contemporary Art. (Courtesy of the artist)

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indigenous communities. In the area of the coal mine, we find the Wayúu, a semi-nomadic indigenous people. Wayúu poet Miguelángel López (Vito Apushana) describes, in his celebrated poem, “Rumá” (2004) the arrival of the white man (the Alijuna) who is destroying the land: This afternoon I was on the hill of Rhumá: and I saw Elder Ankei of the Jusayú clan pass … and I saw the family of my friend the walker Gouriyú go by… and I saw the survival of the lizard … and I saw hidden paraulata nests … and I saw Pulowi dressed in space … and I saw Jurachen—the storyteller, walk towards new conflicts … and I saw Kashiwuana—the hunting snake, to a lost kid, the cardinal bird out of a hollow cardoon … and I saw the red of the last sun of the day … and, about to leave, I saw a group of Aríjuna come from afar, happy as if they were in a living museum.12

The Wayúu were the only indigenous nation that was never conquered by the Spanish early on in the conquest; they settled in these faraway lands along the Guajira peninsula which happens to be today and at the center of a modern mining operation. Coal extraction has ravaged their ancestral lands and affected their nomadic traditions. Recently, infant mortality has skyrocketed due to malnutrition, a byproduct of the river Ranchería having been diverted for mining purposes. Dry conditions in the semidesert of La Guajira have worsened due to a prolonged drought brought about by global climate change. This situation constitute the most severe challenge to these communities in centuries. According to a 2005 census in Colombia, the Wayúu population numbered approximately 12  Arijúna translates from Wayuunaiki “those who destroy” and refers to the white or outside people in their territory.

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270,403—twenty percent of Colombia’s total Amerindian population and forty-eight percent of the province’s population, which is currently declining.13 On top of the ravaged landscape, the lack of social and political investment (twelve governors in the past eight years due to political corruption) has created a state of crisis (El Heraldo, 2019, frontpage). As Estercilia Simanca Pushaina, a most prolific Wayúu writer, shares in her 2018 poem “Los niños Wayúu” (fragment): Wayúu children are burned with a brazier. Wayúu children do not eat what they would like or when they wanted to. Wayúu children look for water descending into wells in whose depths there is only greenish water and an old toad. … The Wayúu children do not want their sisters to leave with that old man who looks like the toad of the swamp. Girls don't want to leave either. Wayúu children do not know that there are NGOs fighting for their rights. Wayúu children do not know about Inter-American Courts of human rights. Wayúu children do not know about human rights. Wayúu children do not know how to give thanks. Wayúu children do not know that they are "Our Wayúu children" because they have never felt owned by anyone. Wayúu children do not know that they appear in photographs and see them in Madagascar, Singapore and in the cold mountains of Alberta while a white grandfather plays a horse and walks his Wayúu grandson. Wayúu children do not know that other Wayúu children have been born in many places. Wayúu children do not know that water is a fundamental right. 13  At El Cerrejón, low-ash, low-Sulphur bituminous coal is excavated. Exploitation began in the mid-1980s. Total proven reserves are estimated at 503 megatons. The mine is controlled by transnational capital Xtrata Inc. However, prosperity has not brought the promised progress and development offered, the benefits of modernity, to the people of the region. La Guajira is the second poorest province in the country, with 61 percent of illiteracy among the Wayúu, and with one of the highest mortality rates in the nation (DANE 2013). As in the case of Inner Mongolia, for the inhabitants of La Guajira, and the Wayúu in particular, development is another phantom while living in the storm of the times.

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… Wayúu children do not know that the train means progress. Wayúu children do not know progress even if it passes by and devours their sheep. Wayúu children do not know that a Jew died unjustly because Pontius Pilate washed his hands. Wayúu children do not wash their hands. … There are many things that Wayúu children ignore. That is why they smile.

Pushaina’s plea for children is a scream for justice at a moment when many benefit from their suffering. The National Institute of Heath in Colombia reports that up to five thousand children died of malnutrition between 2013 and 2018.14 According to the documentary Las Huellas del Cerrejón (2017) [“Traces of the Cerrejon”], directed by Sebastián Coronado-Espitia and produced by the National Institute of Anthropology (ICAN), up to twenty thousand Wayúu have been forcibly displaced from the Ranchería Valley due to mining—many others have died on account of violence. If in China natural extraction means governmentality, in Colombia, it means the opposite. Extraction needs no governmentality, only hegemony: lack of regulation and oversight drive these profitable enterprises in the global south. In the 2018 film Pájaros de Verano [“Birds of Passage”], an exploration of the origins of the drug trade in Colombia takes place. The film is set in La Guajira and is seen through the eyes of a Wayúu family that becomes involved in the booming marijuana business serving American dealers in the 1970s. Pájaros de Verano is divided into five chapters: “Wild Grass,” “The Graves,” “Prosperity,” “The War,” and “Limbo.” The film follows the narrative structure of Behemoth. When greed, passion, and honor collide, a fratricidal war breaks out among the Wayúu; their lives, culture, and ancestral traditions are tested to the limit. The basis of the plot is global capital (drugs); the cycle returns a few years later with coal mining (another global commodity). It is capital that disrupts the (almost surrealistic) life of the Wayúu. For them, as for the Neanderthals of old Europe and the Mongolian nomads of today, life  See: Tasa de mortalidad por pertenencia étnica en la Guajira. Instituto Nacional de Salud, Colombia. Accessed from: https://www.ins.gov.co/Direcciones/ONS/publicaciones%20alternas/boletin8-wayuu/popUp6.html. 14

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Fig. 6.11  El Cerrejón Coal Mine. & Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego, Pájaros de Verano (2018). (My photo and stills from the film)

conditions have changed so rapidly that they have been unable to adapt (Fig. 6.11). Today, we are reversing millions of years of natural and progressive carbon dioxide capture and sequestration. In an age of ecological and

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environmental crisis, the degradation of the earth corresponds to the dehumanization of the body-geography. The examples in this section speak for those silenced and whose muted voices become a poetic strategy. Indigenous images and voices become echoes that compress past and present as (d)enunciatory counterpoint. Poetry in its visceral/visual and textual form is the most potent of all art forms. Who is listening/viewing?

Harvesting and Dispersion In the past decade, China has developed the most advanced electric speed-­ train system in the world. In a matter of hours, passengers can travel long distances in the comfort of top-of-the-line, quiet, and well-served trains that traverse most of the country. Train stations have been built from scratch or retrofitted to accommodate the new fleet of 和谐号 (Hexie Hao, “harmony”) and allows them to “float” across China’s (body) landscape. The eastern regions are fertile alluvial plains that have been developed thanks to China’s great river systems. This is the region that has been densely settled and farmed for thousands of years and where all members of the great dynasties resided. Along the edges of the Mongolian Plateau extensive grasslands are found, home to the pastoral, nomadic people who interacted, competed, and clashed with China’s sedentary population from time immemorial. The vast “grass oceans” hosted Saka and Yuezhi, Xiongnu and Hun, Jurchen and Mongol, for whom segments of the Great Wall were built. Even the Tibetan plateau has been bridged by this spell, and a train line (the highest in the world) connects Beijing and Lhasa. Additionally, the south, with its tropical climate and high-tech capitals (Shenzhen and Guiyang), have also been plugged into the frenzy of trains: traveling from Hong Kong to the industrial east is now a reality. These expanded topographies are today compressed thanks to the rapid development of China’s infrastructure built in just few decades. Development in the form of highways, airports, ports and, most importantly, a rapid train system have made mobility between the urban and rural divide possible. In the 2010 film 归途列车 [“Last Train Home”], filmmaker Lixin Fan documents the journey that millions of migrant workers make each year to return from urban centers to their rural villages during the Chinese Lunar New Year or Spring Festival. The film, by exploring the experiences of families reunited once a year, reveals China’s modernization. It is a great example of an observational documentary, has great access to the subjects featured, and shows the human flow that is processed in train stations.

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Crowd management has become a daily practice. In large cities, metro and train stations gear up and change at peak hours (twice or several times a day) to allow workers, tourists, and travelers to get to their destinations. But it is during the New Year celebrations that the country enters a state of shock as the result of the largest seasonal internal migration on the planet takes place. This film, which revealed to the West this reality, shares the personal story of the Zhangs, a family that could be the stereotype of migrant factory workers in China on their way to the middle class. It reveals the human story behind the omnipresent “Made in China” stamp in the global supply chain. For seventeen years, Changhua Zhang and Chen Suqin have lived near the factories around Guangzhou, retuning once a year to their poor rural village to visit their relatives. Their children stayed in the village and have been cared for by their grandparents. As with most workers, Chan and Chen can only afford to return home once a year, during the holiday. As a result, their teenage daughter Qin is very resentful and angry. On one of these holidays, the working parents arrived, after waiting for five days at the train station because of a power outage, to find that their daughter has dropped out of school and become a factory worker. Now she makes the clothes that she always wanted. She wanders around the wastelands of Xingtang City, looking for dance clubs while sharing dilapidated living quarters with other workers (Svetvilas, 2010). Most of these stories are horizontal, as movement happens between the developed east (or the new industrial southwest) and what used to be the poor and underdeveloped inner mainland. That same year, another film revealed to the West seasonal migration in a vertical, south to north, fashion: Sin Nombre [“Without a Name”]. A story of misadventure, directed by U.S. based filmmaker Cary Fukunaga, tells the journey of Sayra, her father, and uncle from Honduras to New Jersey. Some elements remind us of Gregory Nava’s 1983 classic film El Norte [“The North”]. For decades, hundreds of thousands of people cross yearly the vast expands of the Americas on a dangerous journey north. Those who manage to arrive join the other eleven million people from Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean who live in the shadows as undocumented subjects in the United States. They leave as a consequence of the rapid economical transformations in their home countries that embraced neoliberalism and open markets during the past thirty years in exchange for very limited social gains. These policies devastated small farmers, agroindustry, and public services generating prosperity among a small group and leaving more than half of the population

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without work, land, and hope. Amid the economic downturn, organized crime has stepped in to fill the vacuum in these countries. Violence and criminality have worsen their quality of life. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are now almost failed states as violence and corruption have become endemic. With the 1994 NAFTA ratification, the Mexican railroad network system was privatized. A system that was once a proud state-run enterprise now consists mostly of freight trains that move oil and other raw materials. It is also used by migrants from Central America and Mexico trying to get to the U.S border. Known as Las Bestias, these trains can be boarded from southern Mexico to border areas. Travel on these trains is not allowed by the Mexican government; yet, it is estimated that close to a half million migrants board them annually. According to Salvadorian sources, up to 30% of migrants are returnees (cyclical travelers), those who try to return to the U.S. after deportation, or those traveling alone or with family members for the first time (Dominguez 2014). The opening scene of Sin nombre introduces two main components of the narrative: criminal gangs who control human traficking and contraband, and the train lines that transport goods and migrants. As in Behemoth, this film takes place in an continuous nightmare atmosphere in which all subjects find themselves under dire conditions. The film shows clubrooms of gangs arguing over territory, the killing and abusing of children and women, and the cultural aesthetics of gang members who are copiously tattooed to denote pride and hierarchy—none more than Lil’ Mago, the leader, whose face is tatoo-covered like a war mask. Casper is a gang member who recruit new members through force. He brings twelve-year-old Smiley to a meeting where the boy is brutally initiated as he is stripped of his dignity and childhood. Then the trio, Lil’Mago, Casper, and Smiley, board a northbound train to rob and harass passengers. It is then when Casper meets Sayra, an encounter that seals their fates. In contrast with their harsh stories, there are scenes of great beauty in these films. As the landscape rolls past, riders look to the horizon moving from lush semitropical landscapes to bright deserts. Scenery and people pass by, as in a visual travelogue, and travelers await patiently for the train to arrive at its next stop. In other scenes, crowded trains resemble rivers that flow across the placid landscape. Its riders sit, rain or shine, protecting their precious cargo (presents to their family or small supplies of food and money); there is even room for love and solidarity.

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The 2013 film La jaula de oro, Diego Quemada-Díez, delves into these issues more profoundly. The film, a road-movie, follows, in great detail, the precarious journey of four teenagers, Juan, Samuel, Chauck, and Sara, from Guatemala to the United States. Harsh and emotional, it focuses on the feelings of helplessness, jealousy at times, and overall camaraderie that develops among them. The film took eight years to make, it premiered in 2013, and took two more years to reach the U.S. market. Quemada-Díez explains that what motivated these young people to immigrate was the striking inequalities back home. The director explains how “authorities in both the North and the South are creating the circumstances for people to migrate. And then they put up walls. It is a great hypocrisy. We ought to create conditions of fair trade. The free trade agreements—that we are told are inevitable and wonderful—are destroying the welfare of many people.” (Cinemaerrante 2016).15 In the film’s last scene, which takes place in a U.S. factory, we see Juan, the only youth who completed the journey (the others beame lost or died in the process) and now lives a harsh, lonely life in a hostile environment where his only activity is work. Quemada-Díez recalls his own experience as a migrant, where the “migrant becomes a slave in the production chain” (2016).16 La jaula de oro also explores issues of identity and gender. Since its main characters are mestizo (Juan, Samuel, Sara) and indigenous (Chauk), they represent the social body of the nations of the south. The film reverses the idea of civilization, miscegenation, and progress. Chauk, a Maya speaker, represents the spiritual realm, a connection to the land and 15  La Jaula de Oro is the first film by Diego Quemada-Díez who previously made two shorts: I Want to Be a Pilot (2006), about a child in Kenya, and La Morena (2006), on prostitution in Mazatlan, Mexico. After working on dozens of films, many of them documentaries, the director decided to use real locations and real people, and the crew moved along the migrant corridor from Central America to the Southern U.S. Casting occurred some weeks in advance of the shooting. Real migrants, refuges, and trains are depicted during the story. 16  The film took approximately seven years to make, collecting testimonials from migrants at different points of their trip: in shelters, jails, deportation centers, in Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. From these, Quemada-Díez developed a fictional narrative. The film, rather than focusing on sadness, hate, discrimination, or violence, instead focuses on hope, camaraderie, and love. “Several children told me how immigration (ICE) agents would beat them to make them sign what they called a ‘voluntary departure from the U.S.’ form so that if you came back, you were a criminal on paper and that they could put you in jail if they wanted…. There are detention centers across the United States that resemble concentration camps; it is very impressive.” Quemada-Díez’s said in an interview in Cinemaerrante in 2016.

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culture (amid a sharp representation of the degradation of civilization and the failures of modernization). Juan represents reason, individualism, and materialism. And, owing to the clash that occurs among them (Sara represents the confluence of creativity and innocence), transformation occurs. This is a narrative film with a documentary style. All subjects are natural “actors” and only rehearsed their dialogues and scenes right before each shot. They knew the general story line and understood the emotional crescendo of the narrative. After eight months and close to six thousand castings, the actors were selected. Quemada-Díez contacted Fátima Toledo, from the film City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002), who worked with children from the favelas in Rio de Janeiro to help with the film. By participating in workshops, the actors were able to feel comfortable in front of the camera and deliver a powerful and convincing exposé. These films reveal many stories; their subjects are always looking north/ east-west, dreaming of capitalist benefits and the great sacrifices that must be made to achieve them. They show resolute parents and rebel teens who must face family breakups, hard conditions, and desperation. Fan’s Last Train Home took three years to make; Fukunaga’s film took two-and-ahalf years (Fig. 6.12). Many other cultural products treat such dispersion and mobility, such as the successful soap opera Que bonito amor (Televisa 2012) that tells a story of cross-border migration and love in the most melodramatic form, or the 2014 bestseller book Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario that, by focusing on the story of an individual, it tells the stories of many. These films, simultaneously made, were unaware of each other. They are products of social experiences that take place in contextual territories. Yes, they respond to global forces and, in a sense, reference each another. Born out of a Chinese documentary tradition (fourth and sixth-generation socially engaged cinema and films made under the infamous Hundred Flowers Campaign) and partially from the tradition of Latin American  Third Cinema (militant cinema, essay cinema, and the so-called poor cinema), these cultural products are only a small sample of the many narratives that give sense to the transformations taking place in China and in Latin America today. They share, in a sense, common ground. Spanish poet Daniel Rodríguez Moya, while working in the United States in 2013, wrote his most known poem “La Bestia” (The American Way of Death). Its first and last stanzas are these:

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Fig. 6.12  Lixin Fan, Last Train Home (归途 列车), 2009; Cary Fukunaga, Sin Nombre, 2009; Diego Quemada-­ Díez, La Jaula de Oro, 2013. (Stills from the films)

Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high, There’s a land that I heard of Once in a lullaby. E.Y. Harburg. … The wagons pass through the fields where the strangest flowers explode. Nights and days pass in circular motion as ropes of time. Every mile earned on the rails drive away another southern station on the plain.

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Slow running machine with bunches of men at his sides. The smoke of diesel blurs a profile that is lost afar. Goes ‘The Beast’ on its way to the border. Moves north The old rattle of a freight train.

Moya’s poetic voice echoes those of the migrants themselves that move in crowded machines throughout the ravaged lands of the South. This poetic voice is also present in young Qin (Zhang). In the central scene of Fan’s film, the rebellious teen stubbornly pushes ahead through the crowd, trying to find her way out of a packed train station. She is an image of alienation but also of struggle and subjectivity. When the family finally arrives home, an emotional bomb detonates: the daughter berates her parents and is slapped in return. Following this act, she turns directly to the camera and screams: 你想拍我吗? [“Do you want to film me?”] 这才是真正的我! [“This is the real me!”] 你还想要什么? [“What else do you want?”]

She speaks to us, the audience, but also to her parents, to the masterminds behind China’s miracle economy, to the boys she wants to date, to the bosses of the garment factories, and to the users of the “Made in China” labels. The comfortable distance and mediation we usually enjoy while in the confort of the theatre or home is lost. We are accomplices of her fate, our unassailable desire for consumption allows cheap labor and exploitation to produce inexpensive consumer goods. Who else is there to blame for economic growth (and debacles) and environmental degradation? Looking right at the camera, Qin continues: 你还想要什么? [“What else do you want?”]

As people move across the landscapes of Asia and Latin America, the flow of information that once seemed disconnected (at times also exotic), is now shared. Indigenous subjects are recognized as such, and their

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struggle raises concerns about the territory (an extension of the social body), and the way it is treated under modernity. Latin America’s cultural influence in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China, present on how stories of coloniality and nation building are experienced and shared via poetry, novels, visual art, and films, seemed at first disconnected, but now have started to make sense. The fascination with the Literary tradition of the Boom, Latin American history, its colonial past, and anti-colonial stuggles, opened up Latin America to the East, and also broke the way Latin America used to look to the East. In the middle of the debacle of the neoliberal model, a new flow has started to influence the situated and contextualized cultural productions, and deepened communalities instead of differences. Those minority voices move across time and space, and the East and the South; those body-geographies are here and now screaming directly into our faces. Their cultural and artistic works demonstrate a collective voice of the Global South. It is this voice with its immediacy that constitutes the common ground in Latin America and Asia. Acknowledgement  Thanks to visual artists Libia Posada, Qin Ga, and poets Vito Apushana (Miguel A. López), Estecila Simanca Pushaina, and Daniel Rodríguez Moya for their generosity in allowing to used their work in this chapter.

Works Cited Cancan, Cui. “Where are you going? Qin Ga’s recent work. At Tang Contemporary Art. Beijing.” Ocula. 2019. https://ocula.com/art-galleries/tang-contemporary-art/exhibitions/qin-ga/. Accessed September 2019. CEPAL. “Social Panorama in Latin America.” United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. 2017. https://www.cepal. org. Accessed July 10, 2019. Cinemaerrante. “La jaula de oro: Interview with Director Diego Quemada-Díez. 2016. https://cinemaerrante.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/la-jaula-de-orointerview-with-director-diego-quemada-diez/. Accessed August 20, 2019. Coronado-Espitia, Sebastián. Huellas del Cerrejón: Transformanciones Socio-­ Ambientales en el sur de la Guajira. Produced by the National Institute of Anthropology, 2017. Chen, Huang. “From Funan River to East Lake: Reflecting on Environmental Activism and Public Art in China.” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. 3(3), 2016, pp. 315–323.

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Creutzfeldt, Benjamin. “Overcoming the Greatest Distance: China in Latin America.” New Perspectives on China’s Relations with the World: National, Transnational and International. Daniel Johanson, edited by Jie Li and Tsunghan Wu, Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing, 2019, Chapter 9, pp. 134–141. Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadisticas (DANE). Boletín No. 4, 2013. Estadísticas sociodemográficas. Información Regional La Guajira– Territorio wayúu. http://www.laguajira.gov.co/web/attachments/article/1880/1880_Boletin4LaGuajira.pdf. Accessed August 19, 2019. Dominguez Villegas, Rodrigo. Central American Migrants and “La Bestia:” The Route, Dangers, and Government Responses. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, September 10, 2014. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ central-american-migrants-and-%E2%80%9Cla-bestia%E2%80%9Droute-dangers-and-government-responses. Accessed August 26, 2019. El Heraldo. “La Guajira ya tiene el gobernadora 12 de los últimos 8 años.” Frontpage, 2019. https://www.elheraldo.co/la-guajira/la-guajira-ya-tiene-algobernador-12-de-los-ultimos-8-anos-653943. Accessed August 12, 2019. Ga, Qin. “The Miniature Long March.” Locative Media Gallery. LEA Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Volume 14, no. 3–4 (June–July), 2006. Garnaut, Ross, Ligang Song, and Cai Fang, editors. China’s 40 Years of Reform and Development: 1978–2018. Canberra: ANU Press, 2018. Jacques, Martin. When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. 2nd ed. Penguin Books, 2008. Jian, Hou. “La literatura latinoamericana en China: breve historia de su traducción, recepción y difusión.” Orientando | Temas de Asia Oriental, Sociedad, Cultura y Economía, Year 6. No. 12, (April–Sept.) 2016, pp. 17–85. Lang, G. and Y. Xu. “Anti-Incinerator Campaigns and the Evolution of Protest Politics in China.” Environmental Politics, 22(5), 2013, pp. 832–848. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.765684. Lu, Jie and Qiu Zhijie. “Curators’ Words.” Long March—A Walking Visual Display. New York: Long March Foundation (unpaginated), 2003. Lu, Jie and Qiu Zhijie. “Long March: A Walking Visual Exhibition.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 1 no. 3 (Fall), 2002, pp. 55–59. Lu, Jie. “The Paradox of the Curatist: The Long March as Author.” Manifesta Journal, no. 5 (Spring/Summer), 2005, pp. 204–211. López, Miguelángel. Encuentros en los senderos de Abya-Yala. Ediciones ABYA-­ YALA, Ecuador, 2004. Osnos, Evan. “Mo Yan and China’s ‘Nobel Complex.’” The Newyorker Magazine, October 11, 2012. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/moyan-and-chinas-nobel-complex. Accessed on June 11, 2020. Rojas-Sotelo, Miguel and Erin Parish. Se Paciente | Be Patient. Artistic and Medical Entanglements in the Work of Libia Posada. Raleigh: Art Studio Project Editions, 2018.

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Shea, Timothy. “Where There Are No Art Circles: The Long March Project and New Geographies of Contemporary Chinese Art.” Yishu: Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, volume 16, 2017, pp. 77–83. Shuqin, Cui. “Chai Jing’s Under the Dome: A Multimedia Documentary in the Digital Age.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 11, no. 1, 2017, pp.  30–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2016.1269481. Shuqin, Cui. “Behemoth: A Poetic Vision of Ravaged Landscape.” Unpublished manuscript form. Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, 2019. Snow, Edgar. Red Star Over China. Grove Press, 1968. Svetvilas, Cheleenan. “Made in China: Last Train Home Documents the Life of the Migrant Worker.” IDA Journal, 2010. https://www.documentary.org/ online-feature/made-china-last-train-home-documents-life-migrant-worker. Accessed August 4, 2019. The Guardian. “China Aims to Make First Landing on Dark Side of Moon.” 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/15/china-aimsmake-first-landing-dark-side-of-moon. Accessed September 4, 2019. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “Assistance to Victims of Landmines and Explosive Remnants of War: Guidance on Child-focused Victim Assistance.” 2014. https://www.unicef.org/disabilities/files/Assistance_to_victims_of_ landmines-2014.pdf. Accessed August 1, 2019. World Bank. “The Trade Challenge for Latin America and the Caribbean.” 2015. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/05/19/worldbank-the-trade-challenge-for-latin-america-and-the-caribbean. Accessed August 11, 2019. Yeh, Emily T. “Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures to Grasslands.’” Nomadic Peoples, vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan), 2005, pp. 9–30. https://doi.org/10.3167/082279405781826164. Yian, Lin & Xu Jun. Introduction and Translation of Latin American Literature, Theory and Praxis: Dialogue about Translation. Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2001. 林 一安, 许钧, 《拉美文学的介绍与翻译》, 《文学理论与实践: 翻译对话录》, 南京:译林出版社, 2001.

CHAPTER 7

Korean Reality Television-Travel Shows in Constructing Latin American Cultural Identities (2010–Present) Min Suk Kim

Our ways of making the Other are ways of making ourselves. —Fabian, 1990: 756

Identity is always in the process of being constructed and reconstructed. Among the various cues, others’ perceptions (how we are seen or imagined by others) effectively trigger this iterative process whenever we find ourselves in the eyes of new others. The represented identity can differ by who the other is, what our relationship is to them, and how we see ourselves in that other, but reciprocally, their ways of making us affect our ways of understanding the other, and vice versa. It is especially apparent in South Korea, being cast suddenly before diversified global eyes, as the

M. S. Kim (*) Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_7

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epicenter of Hallyu (the worldwide sensation of Korean pop culture) in the new millennium. Koreans are witnessing a new form of globalization that no longer flows unilaterally from the “West” to the rest of the world. Previously unimaginable cultural influence is emanating from South Korea to every corner of the world “without passing through the center” (Moretti 112). Drawing on Franco Moretti’s discussion of European novels, the direct flow from one periphery to another represents a movement “almost unheard of” (112). However, the advances in communication technology and worldwide accessibility to the Internet since the late 2000s have made new ways of interactions/exchanges possible. While South Korea today is no longer a mere periphery, the unexpected popularity of this former periphery’s pop culture across the world certainly opened novel encounters and unusual connections, bringing previously unexplored people and societies into view. How South Korea is seen today and newly valued by (non-)traditional “others” pushes the nation and its people to reexamine and remap their sense of gravity and spatiality in the changing global geopolitics. In Transpacific relations, Latin America is skyrocketing to the center of this epistemological reorientation, expansion, and pluralism, as it has become one of the major shores that Hallyu (Korean Wave) reaches. The enthusiastic fandoms of Hallyu in Latin America reported by Korean news draw people’s attention to this “American” region and its people. By becoming a fresh point of reference in the “Americas,” Latin America helps Koreans expand their notion of “America” (from the singular to the plural Americas) and their Transpacific relations beyond North America or the United States. Latin America, as a result, further allows South Korea to secure greater diversity and pluralized viewpoints in the shifting global reality and power. Latin America has been relatively unknown and new to Koreans; thus, I argue, this new “other” can better influence the process of construction/negotiation toward a plurality of identities not only for South Korea, but for Latin America as well. However, the insertion of Latin America into the Korean mass consciousness has just begun and continues primarily due to the recent boom of reality-travel television shows in South Korea. Do we as Koreans have something concrete enough to call a “national imagery” or “cultural narratives” about Latin America? The answer is “no.” Since the end of the Korean War (1950–1953), a limited but relatively sustained economic growth and political relationship has existed between South Korea and Latin America. However, there have been no

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significant sociocultural exchanges or encounters that could provide the Korean public a “collective memory” of Latin America. Koreans have rarely experienced “Latin America” or something “Latin”; in some cases, Koreans have not known whether particular cultural objects or experiences were Latin American. For instance, Koreans have known of Machu Picchu because it is one of the Seven Wonders of the World but, until a popular television show premiered in 2014, few knew that it is found in Peru. Many Koreans have nostalgic memories of the mega-hit television drama Angels’ Chorus, which aired in 1990–199l and turned “Ms. Jimena” into a metonym for the ideal female teacher. However, no Korean could have imagined that their favorite drama with such modern aura was a Mexican drama named Carrusel (1989–1990). The first “Latin” character, LeeMario (2004), a product of Korean popular culture, was Italian. This “cheesy margarine butter III” character, appearing in a sketch-comedy TV show with the “Bésame mucho” song as background music, became a sensation with his flamboyant, yet joyful images—a handsome looking smiley man with anchor beard, glossy, silky blouse, heavily gelled hair, who likes to flirt and dance out of context. These attributes were quickly coded as “Latin” characteristics and began to represent a cultural identity, erroneously, of Latin America in the Korean cognitive map. A subsequent character, González (2009), was performed in a similar fashion: a flashy-looking character with shaggy sideburns who “came from Mexico” danced to the cheerful “Cuban Pete” song and tried to sell anything and everything, affixing “-rrita” or “-rrilla” to the end of every Korean sentence. This vast void of knowledge about Latin America and its people has been easily filled by the global cultural powerhouse of the U.S. media, particularly by Hollywood. The massive circulation and heavy consumption of U.S. cultural productions and the absence of knowledge and interest in Latin America led Koreans to uncritically perceive some commonly projected images of sexualized (Latin Lovers), violent (gangs and drug dealers) and/or primitive or innocent (indigenous people in jungle) Latin Americans. The image that Korea held of Latin America is indeed vague and fragmented, including a passion for soccer, Hispanic celebrities in the U.S., Venezuelan beauty pageant queens, lascivious weather forecasters, Caribbean paradises, the Amazon, ancient indigenous civilizations, political and economic turmoil, natural disasters, drug cartels, and some cultural artifacts like salsa, samba, tango, tacos and tequila.

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Latin America was, and probably still is, the most “Far West” (with a question mark in “West”) region for Koreans. In 2013, Buenos Aires was used in a top Korean television drama, The Heirs, to intimidate the impoverished heroine. The rich chaebol father forces her to choose between two flight tickets, one to a well-known Western locale if she breaks up with his son right away, and the other to “a very different place to the U.S., the U.K., or France,” an unknown, farther, and terrifying place where she will be forgotten forever. This is just one example to show how psychologically remote Latin America was to the general Korean public. Nonetheless, this episode led to Buenos Aires being on the most-searched word list on the nation’s several search engines (Newsinside.com). People were curious about this unfamiliar foreign location, and numerous news reports spread on the Internet introducing this “Paris of South America” (Etoday.com). Media plays an influential role in shaping public perception and constituting other countries’ images and cultural identities. It is especially true when “the less real-world information viewers have about a social group, the more apt they are to accept the television image of that group” (Rodríguez 17). Even after the proliferation of Internet media, television still acts as the most powerful medium of communication to spread information, knowledge, and images to “sizeable” audiences in the fastest fashion. I would argue that this is even truer in South Korea, where television, including cable networks, possesses a broad audience of all ages. In this regard, the recent trend of the Korean television industry to introduce more productions of, in, and (most importantly) with Latin America(ns) deserves further scholarly attention to examine the images and cultural identities of Latin America(ns) currently being proliferated on Korean television.

The Inclusion of Latin America into Korean Television Productions1 Once restricted to the news and documentaries, dramas, music programs, and reality-travel programs of Korean television today incorporate Latin America(ns). The significant rise in interest in this region began in the 1  Korean television broadcasting industry can be largely classified into two categories/eras: the conventional free-to-air terrestrial TV networks and the new nationwide generalist cable TV networks. The nationwide terrestrial networks are KBS (Korean Broadcasting System), MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation), and SBS (Seoul Broadcasting System)—the first

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early 2010s with broadcasts about the unexpected popularity of Korean culture in various Latin American countries, a cultural phenomenon called Hallyu. Koreans were cheerfully surprised, yet puzzled, by the fervent love for their homegrown product in such a seemingly remote region of the world. People believed it to be just a passing trend, but the popularity did not cease. Instead, the once-minority geek culture is becoming one of the entrenched popular foreign cultures in Latin America’s media landscape, like Japanese animation. The sustained broadcasts of the region (i.e., the latest K-Pop concert in a Latin American country) laid the ground for interest and curiosity. However, a greater awareness was awakened by the Korean entertainment industry (television), which began filming in Latin America or casting Latin Americans in their shows. In 2011, one of the most famous music programs of South Korea, Music Bank, launched its worldwide live-concert tour thanks to the growing fandoms of K-Pop overseas. Occasionally shot in a foreign country, the program has been playing an educational role by introducing the host two are the  public broadcasters and  the  last is the  commercial with  public characteristics. These three TV networks are the traditional and very competitive power houses in every sectors of the Korean media productions such as the news, the entertainment, the K-drama, etc. However, this triangle system changed in 2009 when the Amendment of Media law passed to deregulate the media market of South Korea. It gave birth of four generalist cable TV networks established by the  preexisting major newspaper companies: JTBC, TV Chosun, MBN, Channel A. This is why they began with strong identities as news channels, but today they also have strength in  the  entertainment sector, but  not quiet on  the  drama sector. Meanwhile, there is another generalist entertainment cable TV network, TvN (Total Variety Network), owned by CJ ENM. This channel launched in 2006 way before the Amendment of  Media law, and  has its strength more on  the  entertainment and  drama sectors than the news. The majority of people in Korea today have access (subscribe) to all previously mentioned channels. There are currently hundreds of  channels in  Korea with  various specialties such as  in  religion, fashion, education, animated cartoons, sports, Chinese television, etc. (i.e., Disney channel, golf channel, etc.). The diversification of the television networks has brought higher level of competition among the TV networks and made them, especially cable TVs, to search for new audiences and trademark shows. This is, I argue, one of the biggest reasons why Latin America has emerged as a new destination/theme for the today’s TV productions in Korea. In regards to Latin America, there is a telenovela channel, a cable and satellite specialty, 24-hour channel that launched in 2009 in South Korea. However, the channel transmits not only telenovelas provided by Globo TV from Brazil but mainly Korean entertainment shows produced/broadcasted by other Korean networks like KBS, TV Chosun, MBN, etc. The channel has little social impact since it is not well-known to Korean viewers and broadcasts more Korean TV shows than telenovelas.

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country’s cultures; for example, historical sites visited by K-Pop idols and famous local songs reinterpreted and performed by K-Pop singers on stage alongside their original performances. To date, the show has been filmed in fourteen cities across Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The latter is indeed the second most frequented region to which Korean viewers are exposed: Viña del Mar (Chile, 4th worldwide tour in 2012), Rio de Janeiro (7th in 2014), Mexico City (8th in 2014), and Santiago (Chile, 12th in 2018). In the entertainment travel-television sector, the survival show, Law of the Jungle, has been filmed in Latin America the most (65 episodes), in places including the Amazon/Galapagos (2012–2013), Caribbean Belize/ Mayan Jungle (2013), Brazil (2014), Costa Rica (2014–2015), Nicaragua (2015), Panama (2016), Patagonia, Chile (2018), and Mexico (2018). Also, the award-winning backpacking reality show, Youth Over Flowers, was shot in Peru and transmitted six episodes in 2014. Another backpacking variety program, Traveler, made a two-week trip to Cuba and was broadcast over three months in 2019. There is also a reversed reality-travel show, Welcome, First Time in Korea? Premiering in 2017, the program features a foreigner living in Korea who invites three friends or family members from their home country to travel to South Korea for the first time. From among twenty-seven different countries (as of Dec. 2019), Korean audiences have met Spanish-speaking friends and families from Mexico (2017), Spain (2018), Paraguay (2018), Chile (2019), and the Dominican Republic (2019). The K-Drama sector probably faces the most difficulties for filming overseas. However, increased global market revenue of the industry has allowed a nationwide cable network, TvN, to air two very successful dramas filmed in two Spanish-speaking countries: Memories of the Alhambra (2018–2019) in Spain and Encounter (2018–2019) in Cuba. Simultaneously broadcast, these two dramas captivated audiences and created a significant synergy by drawing a considerable amount of attention to Spain and Cuba due to the seemingly unusual and exotic mise-en-­ scènes. As the main website of Memories of the Alhambra states, the Spanish-speaking region is imagined as a remote space “in which a man and a woman from two very different worlds [mainly economic and social status] can accidentally encounter” and possibly fall in love free of social disparities and norms. In sum, the remarkably increasing number of Korean television programs that feature Latin America (and Spain) is clear evidence of Koreans’

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growing interest and awareness of Spanish-speaking regions. I claim that it is the very first time in Korean popular culture history to have this magnitude of imagery, information, and knowledge of Latin America produced first hand—not imported—and circulated in a significant volume. It is an opportune and needed moment, therefore, to analyze what type of images are portrayed and how they are (re)presented and translated through the practice of subtitling.2 To do so, I will focus on the two travel-entertainment shows I believe have most impacted on Koreans’ understanding of Latin America(ns): Youth Over Flowers (2014) filmed in Peru and Welcome, First Time in Korea? (2017) with Mexican travelers.

Latin America in Korean Media: Youth Over Flowers (2014) in Peru The travel-reality program has run for numerous seasons and spin-offs. It began showing backpacking trips, mainly to European countries, taken by Korea’s most popular veteran actors (Grandpas Over Flowers) and later actresses (Sisters Over Flowers). Youth Over Flowers is the second successful spin-off of the all-time cultural phenomenon in the Korean reality-­ television history, Grandpas Over Flowers (2013–2018, five seasons; sold to/remade by NBC in the U.S., Better Late Than Never, 2016–2018) with elderly actors in their late 70s and 80s. Defying a youth-centric gaming atmosphere of the Korean entertainment mediascape, Grandpas Over Flowers focused on storytelling, more genuine and soothing, with eye-catching and picturesque mise-en-scènes of Europe and very informative histories of people and important sites. While most shows on cable channels rarely secured a viewing rate of 1 percent (Moon), the show averaged 6 to 7 percent ratings and reached 9.6 percent, demonstrating its extraordinary popularity and social impact. The show transmits informal, even childish dialogue among four elderly colleagues who have had a long-standing friendship in the acting-career together with straightforward, yet warm-hearted individual interviews. However, what makes this program truly striking is not that they reveal 2  Television subtitling is a very common practice used, particularly in Korean variety entertainment shows and talk shows. Unlike the general use of subtitling from a foreign language to the target language, this form of subtitling is used for humorous effects, to both highlight and summarize (non)verbal content mostly in the same language. (for more information, see Park, 2009).

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their personal lives, but how the filming crew interacts and communicates with them through the entire trip, asking thought-provoking questions on topics such as aging and dreams in one’s 80s. The program makes evident that informative, educational, and even philosophical content can be perceived as entertaining by contemporary Korean audiences. The program’s remarkable popularity derives from the fact that it reflects issues and concerns of a rapidly aging and highly modernized, yet competitive society like that of Korea. In the same format, Youth Over Flowers premiered in 2014, spanning four successive seasons with different castings and locations such as Laos, Iceland, Africa, and Australia. This series is designed to find what “youth” means to the different five groups of people as they backpack in poor conditions. To this end, the first destination and the age group were carefully chosen to resonate with the most viewers. Three renowned Korean singer-­ songwriters and friends of twenty years in their 40s went on a backpacking tour with no luggage to Peru. The series begins with the cast at a restaurant in Korea, where they initially gathered to hold a preliminary meeting. Surprised to learn that their flight leaves in only two and a half hours, the three people—Sang Yoon, Hee-yeol You, Juck Lee—are forced to hasten to the airport. Once on their way, they receive travel guidebooks and an envelope with Peruvian currency to cover their budget (1700 U.S. dollars for three persons on a ten-day trip). Subtitles highlight: “[I was told that] it is Peru, named Lima.” “5817 sol? Confused by a currency never seen or heard of.” You tells his wife over the phone before the flight departs; Peru, a South American country, is a remote location with no context to Korean people. Other than providing three admission tickets to Machu Picchu, the show has asked them to make all arrangements, from booking hostels to choosing cities to visit. The plane takes off shortly after You books three beds in a hostel for their first night in Lima via his cellphone. The first impression they receive after arriving in Lima is negative: dreary sights in the middle of the night and hostility. First, a seemingly welcoming and talkative non-registered taxi driver rips them off on arriving at the hostel, which is located on a scary and empty street in Miraflores. Spooky music plays in the background, with them showing their intimidation by the hostel’s steel-barred and narrow entrance that leads to another barred door upstairs. Other images include a convenience store where you can only get merchandise by shouting through a small window guard, and subtitles that read “Not jail, but hostel entrance” and “Danger.”

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The following day offers different impressions, cheerfully packed streets with the friendly local food stands. A small old bus runs by with its attendant hanging out an open door—a nostalgic sight to Koreans who lived in the 70s and 80s. The three musicians begin their day buying underwear and a coin purse, another nostalgic object for the contemporary highly digitalized Korea. Along with what they do, eat, and visit, detailed information in subtitles always accompanies the beautifully depicted (aerial) shots. Their meandering offers various types of knowledge and imagery to viewers: Parque Kennedy’s caption reads “A beloved park of Liman people,” ceviche’s “Fresh raw fish cured in lime juice, full of vitamins, the number one healthy food of Peru,” along with a short explanation of Peruvian food as “The most diverse culinary culture in South America, mixed with American natives and Spanish immigrants.” Homesick, they eagerly look for a chifa, Peruvian-Chinese restaurant, and walk down to the Miraflores seashore. The first day ends with panoramic views of the coast and a poetic subtitle with “Wow” sounds inserted: “Miraflores, Blue Pacific embraces coastal cliffs.” The second day features the “exotic” way to the Huacachina, a village built around a small oasis and surrounded by dunes, located in the Ica Province. Exotic scenery, as a marker of foreignness, offers a mode of visual tourism that is a powerful seller in the travel show (Nye and Kim 36). In addition, the show further subtitles this mesmerizing description: “Endless desert, and a paradise in it—oasis, Thrilling buggy ride through the desert, Sandboarding in the middle of the desert under the hot sun.” Even the highways to the Ica look different and exotic, evoking the musician’s admiration: “Desert next to the ocean, highway through the sandy hills with no tunnels, non-existing landscapes in Korea.” Out of endless “exotic” and “new” images, sudden flourishes of familiarity to Korean eyes and ears surprise them: the abundance of a long-vanished national car, yellow Daewoo Tico taxis at Ica city, and a local taxi driver speaking a good amount of Korean. The program explains that the Tico taxi comprises 50 percent of Peruvian taxis, and all Ica region taxis are Tico. The combinations of unfamiliarity and familiarity, the exotic and the nostalgic, evoke more connected feelings to this foreign nation. “World Wonder, Riddling geoglyph, Mystical Nazca Lines” is what the Korean audience first experiences in the third episode through the musicians’ eyes from a light aircraft. After a two-and-half-hour trip on a bus from Ica, they arrive at Nazca, erroneously illustrated as a “Trace of the ancient Inca Empire.” The show once again offers detailed information

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about the Nazca Lines, such as the size, depth, soil, and zoomorphic shapes, accompanied by aerial shots and terrestrial close shots of the lines alongside the Star Wars theme song. The subtitling practices continue to emphasize the old civilization’s enduring antiquity and mystery: “Who? How? Why was it painted 1500 years ago? It all remains a mystery.” Also, the show alludes to the travelers’ resolutions to be better fathers by abiding timelessness: “Wish their beautiful promises made here remain unchanged like the Nazca Lines.” The trip moves on to its climax, to Cuzco, leaving the three travelers’ pledges behind. After a “sixteen-hour bus journey of hell, winding up and down through the Andes,” they set foot on Cuzco—“Heart of the Inca Empire hiding in the Andes.” The excitement of landing in Cuzco is illustrated by the repetitive references of the dramatic subtitles: “Where it makes contact with the sky, where the sunlight descends full, the capital of the Inca Empire, where one finds the traces of medieval times, the most Peruvian spirit of Peru.” At the bus station, they look at taxi drivers with distrust; they ride only after they check the price list displayed on the wall and make sure they have change. An unexpected parade of people dressed in folkloric customs welcomes them. The lit Plaza de Armas and the Cuzco’s night are elegantly depicted as golden, and “Classicism and charm coexist in the narrow streets.” Local vendors are amicable, sometimes shy but also humorous. Rosa, a designer at a local clothing store, puts monteras and polleras, traditional hats and skirts of Quechua women, on them and takes them out on the street. Other tourists take pictures with them, and they all have a good laugh together. They wrap themselves up warmly with locally purchased ponchos, alpaca sweaters, and a llama plush that accompanies all their way back to Korea, and then they leave to find the twelve-angled-stone. This national artifact is highly praised, and the show invests time in informing the viewers about it. While Yoon suffers from altitude sickness, the other two musicians and the director observe and discuss this “Pinnacle of stone technology,” paramount of Incan architecture: “How could they possibly move stones of twenty tons, stack them high, and hold together without any mortar?” An apparent idealization of the ancient civilization is also noted in the subtitle “Inca: A country with no slaves, no poverty, no starving people. A miracle made with only two hands gathered together from a wasteland. Here is the culmination of the masonry skills that made this miracle.”

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Another token of appreciation is also made in Cuzco, as the program director reveals his empathy with Peru as another subaltern place that also suffered from colonization. While giving information on the colonial and postcolonial (hi)stories of Peru, he explains that the Incan constructions stayed still despite severe earthquakes, while the monuments built by the Spaniards fell. When he says that the Cuzco Cathedral was built by “Spanish invaders” after having destroyed the Viracocha palace of the Inca, the cast grieves together. Plentiful subtitles follow: Due to the Spanish rule, Cuzco seems European. However, the legacy of the Inca Empire remains on the ground. The pinnacle of the Inca stone technique, which lasted 800 years, enduring major earthquakes and Spanish persecution. Although the splendid civilization of the Inca Empire has disappeared, their descendants take pride in their ancestors’ lives, and their achievements still endure and live the moment with people of Cuzco.

The program establishes the postcolonial Global South connections by pointing out the common history of colonial suppression that both Korea and Latin America have suffered, triggering sympathy in the Korean public who remember the cultural obliteration conducted during colonialism. It induces Korean viewers to feel sorry for their/our pain and cultural loss, and at the same time to celebrate our/their postcolonial survival and achievements as independent nations. The show portrays Korean history reflected on a similar one; it exalts the sense of solidarity between two distant nations, blurring the absolute otherness, the dichotomist Self and Other. Yoon confesses in the embedded interview footage, “I think we already know that we are assimilated and enjoy this trip so much that we couldn’t compare it to when we first left” (emphasis added). Meanwhile, orientalist gaze, though more nuanced and ambivalent, is most prevalent in Salineras, “Pure white salt pans on the steep mountainsides of the Andes.” The dazzling view, from the top, of decreasing terraced salt ponds, turn them speechless. An old woman working in the flats is captured on the screen, and a subtitle remarks: “Hee-yeol wants to see her up close.” He goes down and says “hola” and watches. “Hee-yeol is left speechless in front of a man-made nature.” Lengthy researched geographical information about the Salineras follows in the form of subtitles, and later highlights: “Gift of the sun. It is run by the descendants of the Inca and produces salt as it has done since the Incas.” Furthermore, it depicts the Peruvian as one “who lives together with nature.”

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As Aitchison (2001) stresses, tourism can be seen to engage with colonialist discourse since it largely deals with “first world western tourists to consume third world places and people as pleasure products” (135). However, in this case, Korea is not the “West,” nor is Latin America the “East.” The program’s agenda is not mere pleasure-seeking or a psychological exercise of the self-affirmation for a superior “Korean identity.” Besides, it seems not to satisfy the hegemonic relation between knowledge and power, as viewed by Said and Gramsci. The show documents and (re) presents this other, but there is no intention to silence their voices or to take the authority of speaking for them (Spivak). On the other hand, it could be argued that it fulfills the positioning of “explorers from [more] urbanized and industrialized countries” heading towards a less-or-non-­ modern Other and “signify a colonial legacy where places are viewed as mystical or treasured landscapes preserved by time to be explored, and often exploited, in their natural state” (Aitchison 137, emphasis added). The romanticization of Peru as a mystical space of gifts and spiritual experiences reaches its climax at Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu, entitled as “The last destination dreamed by backpackers around the world,” the “Must visit before you die,” and the “Forgotten dream of Hee-yeol” is initially engulfed by fog. They decide to wait, despite schedule conflicts back in Korea; Yoo says: “For us, Machu Picchu exists like a utopia. I gave up a lot to myself… but I won’t give up at this time.” Hand in hand, they climb up again and together finally come face-to-face with Machu Picchu—“The last temple of the Inca Empire located closest to the sun, Machu Picchu that shared Inca’s last breath, Lost city unbelievable even in front of your eyes, Finally appears.” They cry in silence. Individual interview footage intertwines with the scenery of Machu Picchu, and the travelers share what they had in mind at that moment with the audience. They talk about youth, friends, and themselves before this trip, “getting old,” “fatigued,” “not anymore passionate in love and blunt about sorrows,” and “losing confidence becoming an older generation.” The subtitle asks again: “Did they find answers?” Yoon finds “youth” as “mobile” and the “courage to try a new thing,” and Yoo says: “Honestly, I thought I was no longer young. But I’ve been changed during this trip. ‘I can’t make it, It won’t work.’ They disappeared…. Que será será! I can still be whatever I want!” Lee remarks, “I think the people in here, who come to Machu Picchu in Peru, are youth.” The show continuously promotes admiration of this old civilization that is long gone alongside the technology of the Incan people: “Works

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that cannot be reproduced even with modern technology” and “Inca, the first human being to use refrigeration technology. It is well-known that potatoes had been stored for up to six years through technology 500 years ahead of the West.” On the one hand, one can say that the program has contributed to labeling Peru as even more an advanced and civilized society by recurring qualifiers of “sophisticated,” “perfect,” and “surpassing” technology “ahead of the West.” However, on the other hand, the last phrase reveals the show’s and, by extension, Korean perspectives on Latin America, separating it from the “West” and by glorifying a world “lost” to “antiquity.” Youth Over Flowers (2014) has made ambivalent and nuanced contributions to the (re)construction of Latin American cultural identity and imagery. By filming an entertainment show in a remote Latin American country, Korea, while taking a risk, has created and circulated images and information about this region on a massive scale. It has consequently filled the void in Korean epistemology and led to an exceptional rise in its tourism to Peru and its neighboring countries. My research into the Q&A section and blogs of Naver, the nation’s premier search engine, confirms that inquiries about Peru have gone from random searches for school assignments to an active accumulation of cultural capital of the country, through people’s blogging/travelogue pilgrimages to the show’s routes. By making postcolonial Global South connections and raising an unexpected nostalgia founded on the cultural similarities between the two nations, the show has helped to eliminate a great physical distance between Koreans and Latin Americans. Amicable images of indigenous people generously offering foods to and engaging with the travelers, beautiful scenery, eloquently subtitled illustrations of the Andes, the Inca heritage, its rich culture, and once advanced civilization evoked the construction of the “desirable” Other. However, the show reinforces the pervasive tradition of portraying Latin America(ns) as non-modern spaces and subjects, and overly reproduces the old and simplistic trope of “the land of the sun.” Biased images and the attention given to antiquity or immobility, the (pre)-Incan wonders, and innocent-looking, yet not quite fortunate, images of indigenous people have normalized the exoticized fascination and the tendency to romanticize the Other. Natives, mainly the indigenous people portrayed most in the show, are represented and interpreted as “living in peace within nature and ancestors legacy,” not in their own context/struggles of life but in the arrangements of the show—the same mistake often made by

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eighteenth and nineteenth-century European travelers that Mary Louise Pratt criticized in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing (1992). The television industry’s attempts to profit from their shows with its search for authenticity are particularly attractive tactics in tourism media. Even though the program did not intentionally try to essentialize Peruvian cultural imagery or identity, it did not surpass the narratives of an unspoiled, natural, and ancient Peru—static and pre-modern, and thus, an authentic, exotic, romantic, and spiritual Latin America.

Latin Americans in Korean Media: Welcome, First Time in Korea? (Mexico) Welcome, First Time in Korea? is a reality-television travel show that officially premiered with its first Mexican episodes on July 27, 2017. While other travel shows take Korean celebrities overseas, this program caught viewers’ attention with its reversed format: Korea(ns) as the object— observed and appreciated—by foreign travelers as the speaking subjects. The center moves to the Other. Agency is given to them; their voices and their perspectives are emphasized. Korean audiences re-take the role of observer, watching the foreign travelers projected on screen as they gather impressions about these cultural and ethnic others. Nevertheless, the Korean audience is forced to face the Self—how Korea is seen and how it is understood, or misunderstood. Each trip (4 episodes) features a foreign cast, a well-known TV personality or an ordinary person living in South Korea, culturally well-informed and fluent in Korean. The cast invites three friends or family members from their home country to travel to South Korea for the first time. The trips typically follow the format of the three friends traveling on their own for the first two days, followed by a two-day special tour organized by the hosting foreigner. Mexico opened the first official episodes with Christian Burgos, a young Mexican, an active celebrity in the Korean entertainment industry since 2015. To close season one, the same group revisited Korea, in winter, together with groups from three other countries (India, Italia, and Germany) that had also drawn significant attention from Korean audiences. The episode begins with Ricky Martin’s upbeat song “La Mordida” under the title “This time it is Mexicans!” and a colorful sombrero with the word “Mexico” in Korean. The subtitle switches to “Mexico, a nation of

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passion on the other end of the world,” and footage of Mexico, acquired from the Mexico Tourism Bureau, follows: a zoomed-in, waving Mexican flag, aerial shot of the iconic landmark, Angle of Independence, street signs, cactus, the Pyramid of the Sun, busy streets at night full of people and neon signs, a young lady blowing a kiss in festive costume, and people dancing in a night club. The music promptly changes to a cheerful mariachi song, and the Mexican friends who are visiting Korea appear on the screen, wearing Mexican wrestling (lucha libre) masks, holding a Mexican flag, dancing salsa, terrifyingly eating live octopus, gaming in a VR arcade, and taking pictures with Korean locals in a hipster area and a soccer stadium. Then, the subtitles pop up: “NO plan, NO measure, NO preparation,” “But we’re excited. Super positive, so much fun! Mexican trio,” and “Mexican friends’ a real travelogue in Korea, hot as tequila.” Following robust visual and written information, the four hosts—three Koreans (comedian Jun-hyun Kim, rapper DinDin, announcer A-young Shin) and one Italian TV personality (Alberto Mondi)—appear on the screen with Burgos in the middle. Kim, pronouncing “Mexico” correctly in Spanish, and DinDin, tongue-trilling “Burgos,” they cheerfully create a welcoming atmosphere. Kim continues, “South America [sic] is on the complete opposite side of the Earth. Do Mexican people know much about Korea?” Burgos replies, “Mexicans don’t know much, but K-Pop is pretty popular.” Shin adds, “In Korea, the same … Mexico is sort of unfamiliar to us. Vaguely … ‘oh, Mexico will be passionate. They will party; hang-out well.’ Only vague images like these we have.” Their opening commentaries reflect the mutual lack of knowledge/imagery that citizens from both countries have of each other. DinDin’s follow-up comment reveals that certain Koreans find some national characters in common between two cultures: “I think Mexican people have similar sensibilities to ours, … [Kim intervening] a somewhat hot temperament.” Burgos concludes, as the only person who has experienced both cultures: “We are similar in some ways. We are both passionate, but in different ways,” a commentary that provokes the viewer’s curiosity on dis/similarities between Korea and Mexico, an unstudied cultural tie in Korean cognitive mapping. Immediately the viewers witness a small argument between the Korean production team and the Mexicans at a restaurant in Mexico City, where they first meet to film how they will plan the trip. The scene highlights very different characters, with the Korean team begging for more “detailed” and “organized” “plans” and the Mexican friends arguing to be more “impromptu,” not understanding

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the Koreans’ anxiety. The footage ends with them all singing the famous chorus of “Cielito Lindo” with a mariachi band. The scene changes to footage of Mexico—cacti, the Mexican flag, the Monument to the Revolution, and a residential area. Boosted by Enrique Iglesia’s song “Bailando,” Christopher—friend and cousin of Burgos— opens the door and says, “Hola, ¿qué tal? Bienvenidos.” The subtitle highlights his open and warm-hearted greeting to strangers. Accompanied by individual interviews translated in Korean subtitles, the show introduces all three Mexican friends with numerous cross-cutting footage and added summarizing captions: (1) Christopher is characterized as “the king of endless pleasure” supported by visuals of him in a lucha libre mask, laughing and dancing to “Gangnam Style” in the Gangnam area with a sombrero. He then puts on a funny-looking wig in the subway. (2) Pablo, as “fluent in Korean” and “the cutie” with footages of him reading signs in Korean, taking pictures before a big ad of his favorite K-Pop girl group, and putting his hands on his cheeks when he learns that the program producer knows his beloved member of the group in person. (3) Andrei, as “the social king who embarrasses even his best friends” and “happy virus” with visuals of him teaching the song “Guantanamera” to a stranger on the street, jumping into a group of tourists taking pictures, and asking suddenly “Are you married?” to a male passenger sitting next to him on a bus. In just eight broadcast minutes, the Mexican friends cause strong impressions on the Korean audience. Now the scene changes to Korea, to the airport. The Mexicans are coming out of the gate, but one, Andrei, is missing. It turns out that he missed the flight, but he appears on the screen relaxed and says, “No se preocupen. Es algo muy común. Ya me ha tocado. [“Don’t worry. This is very common. It has happened to me before.”]” Perplexed, yet amused, reactions by the hosts arise. Two Mexicans become clumsy when dealing with a bus ticket machine and, later, with a digital door-lock. They are impressed by the clean bus with no vendors on it and are puzzled watching Korea’s overwhelmingly monotonously colored (black, white, or silver) cars. Well-mannered, they yield to ladies; very social and open-minded, they take pictures with local soccer fans who offer them beer at the stadium after a match; as ardent patriots they bring the Mexican flag, sombrero, national soccer team uniform, and lucha libre masks everywhere they go in hopes that Koreans learn more about Mexico. The next day, they go out to find Andrei—“un muchacho morenito de Veracruz [a dark-skin boy from Veracruz].” They visit a Buddhist temple

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in the heart of the city. They prove that it is not only Korea that is ignorant about Mexican culture; they say “samurai” when referring to the Four Buddhist Heavenly Kings. At the temple, they become mesmerized by such exoticism. Watching the footage in the studio, Monti and Burgos help the hosts to better understand by explaining that “you will feel the same when you go to Mexico and see the Pyramids.” Three Mexicn friends, then, try spicy Korean street food. Pablo eats it well, Andrei quickly gives up, but Christopher, trying so hard to be “macho,” will not admit that it is spicy. The other friends laugh, watching him blushing and coughing. Burgos explains what macho means for the Korean audience. They walk through the street with the Mexican flag, greeting elderly Koreans with a friendly, yet mistakenly informal “hello” in Korean. While this amuses Korean viewers because it is an unthinkable mistake for them, they also are grateful because the foreigners are trying to speak Korean to interact with others; they know that they do so in a well-meaning way. At night, Burgos visits their accommodations with his sister, who was also visiting. After spending some time laughing and dancing salsa, Christopher shows Burgos the taped messages from his parents, who miss him and are also very proud of their son. Christian bursts into tears and tells them how tough and lonely it has been for him to live in a foreign country, far from everyone he knows, and to endure being a foreign personality. The screen switches to the hosts in the studio who are empathizing or crying while watching the footage. They cheer him up by sharing their similar experiences in other countries. Subtitles follow: “I love you; A word that comforts a weary heart; Affection transcending from the other side of the world; Christian’s emotions so sympathized; Christian’s friends hold his hands tightly; and Families in Mexico, that he misses so much.” To draw from narrative theory, if empowerment is the outcome of interest (Rappaport 1995), the story of Burgos has significantly caught the Korean audience’s attention and produces cognitive and emotional consequences. It touches their heart. Korean viewers feel compassionate and relate to Burgos’s struggle and perseverance as they simultaneously feel moved by his family and friends’ caring, loving, and support. This again proves that appealing to core emotions can cross the line between the Self and the Other more easily than theories or political propaganda. The level of intimacy and emotional investment triggered in Burgos’s narrative has the capacity to bring the distant “other” into full view and prepare a space where the Other can appear and speak (Thomas 221). Othering thus loses

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its ground and power when it must confront individual narratives. This is because the practices of othering function best amid ignorance, collectiveness, and impersonalization. The affectively embodied narratives of Burgos—a young male from Mexico, who came to Korea due to his love for Korean pop culture, and who has family and friends that we saw care so much for him—make it difficult for the other to be ignored. It forces Korean audiences to become more sensitive to such voices; thus, it constructs more inclusive and empowering spaces. As the episodes evolve, Korean viewers find the Mexican friends assimilating more and more into Korean culture. They start to make sense of the unfamiliar or strange things that they find in Korea by applying them to Mexican equivalents. They associate things between the two nations and become more “connected”: Korean dish bulgogi with Mexican consomé, Korean ssam culture with tortilla and taco culture, the tallest building in Korea with Torre Latinoamericana, and the Dangsan subway station with the Metro Oceanía, etc. They also make comparisons and understand more deeply not only Korean culture, but also their own. For example, eating shared dishes vs. individual dishes, deferential speech vs. more casual speech, shoes off at home vs. shoes on, collectivist Koreans vs. individualist Mexicans, etc. The more connections the Mexican friends make, whether they provoke a sense of similarity or difference, the more they feel related. The same occurs with Korean viewers. Lisa Onbelet (2013) highlights the concept of mirror images—the self cannot exist without the other—drawing on the thought of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: “I am defined as a subjectivity … precisely because I am exposed to the other” (62). The Mexican friends get to better know themselves, their culture, and their nation by reflecting through Korea; the same occurs with Korean viewers through the Mexican travelers. On the trip’s last day, they ride on a city-tour bus and share their thoughts looking over River Han in sunset: Christopher: Even so, it has been a great experience. How do you feel? Pablo: I feel like this trip changes your perspectives. I think here everyone comes together as Christian told us, right? Everyone comes together to achieve the common good, something that in Mexico does not. We would have to change the mentality of our country much. Christopher: You know, what I liked the most? The order of all things. Everything is perfectly planned.

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Pablo: Everything is organized. Christopher: Clean. Pablo: Indeed. Christopher: When did you see garbage in the streets? Andrei: People are very kind… although very conservative, but very nice, aren’t they? They treat you pretty well; the service is really good. Christopher: I think it is very important, I mean, I leave with a different idea about… many things, but mainly to be able to change my attitude as a Mexican when it comes to supporting and having something better. I am very happy for all that I have experienced and learned. (emphasis added) When the footage ends, the camera turns to the studio. Host Kim comments on something similar: “Many people who watched the Mexican friends also wished that they could live just like them, with a positive outlook.” By watching the Mexicans who are always trying to take things positively and find humor even in hard moments, Koreans reflect on their lives that oftentimes are too tightly wound and with no time for leisure and humorless. It reminds the viewers of Burgos’s comment: “That is how we Mexicans, I believe, overcome,” along with the subtitle: “Thinking of good things in difficult situations, infinitely positive Mexican friends.” In the beginning, the Mexicans did not understand the Korean production team’s obsession with organized and detailed planning, and now they leave with a different perspective. Similarly, Koreans did not receive well the Mexicans’ “impromptu” attitude, but they end up learning that sometimes it is good to be loose and to enjoy the moment. The final episode ends with this subtitle: “Korea-Mexico win-win, the trip in which we have learned about each other.” I argue that Welcome, First Time in Korea? plays a truly significant role in contemporary Korea by bringing individual narratives of others—pluralized lowercase others—as speaking subjects and consequently agitating the depersonalizing traditional sense of the Other and practices of othering. It also induces processes of mutually informing and understanding, derived from the in-betweenness of observer and observed, traveler and host. Othering as mirroring, the Korean public learns to see themselves through others’ perspectives, yet the show is still entertaining though it recognizes this fluidity of power. Afterward, Burgos was named as a public ambassador to the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics—he ran as a

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torchbearer. He confirmed in an interview with TVDaily.com that “the TV show offers a great opportunity to change the perceptions of various countries” and “my friends are appreciative to the program because Koreans, who did not know Mexico well, now think of it as a country with a positive mindset.” Unfortunately, even though the show created a favorable image and narrative of Mexicans, it also reinforced a preexisting, maybe stereotypical, image of Latin Americans as “not to be taken seriously” (Rodríguez 17). The trip of the Mexican friends was mainly a pleasure-seeking type of travel. They visited a soccer stadium, a temple, a traditional market, the tallest building in Korea, Pablo’s favorite K-pop group’s company, a virtual reality arcade, and hipster areas of Seoul. They were projected as well-­ mannered, polite, and warm-hearted, but most of their time was spent hanging out and having fun singing and dancing. After the Mexican episodes, other foreign groups continued to arrive, and the Koreans watched them visiting historical sites—the Joint Security Area between the two Koreas (Germans), the Korean War museum (Poles)—and participating in cultural experiences—cooking classes (Canadians and others). The stereotypical view about Mexico stood out the most when compared to the German friends, traveling together across the Jeju Island for the final episodes of the first season: the Mexican friends made jokes over Jeju Black Pigs that fed on human feces, while the German friends were seen studying pamphlets and historical background of Jeju Black Pigs.

Conclusion The salience of Latin America(ns) in the Korean mediascape since 2010 has lessened its remoteness for Koreans in general. Thanks to the ardent Hallyu fandom in Latin America, together with the diversified platforms of Korean entertainment (especially cable networks) as well as its search for new audiences and trademark shows, Latin America is emerging as a new destination for television productions, resulting in the rise of Korean tourism to the region. The two travel television shows analyzed in this study have contributed much to the construction of cultural identities and imagery regarding Latin America(ns). These programs’ encounters of Latin America(ns) with Korean popular culture have successfully embedded them into a Korean (re)cognition. Youth Over Flowers (2014) to Machu Picchu, Peru, projects Latin America as spiritual and even as a more advanced civilization than the

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“West.” The show has further established the Global South connection and a sense of solidarity by highlighting the shared (post)colonial histories. However, weighted attention given to the (pre-)Incan wonders in the show has laid a biased construction of Latin America as a non-modern space and normalized the exotic fascination and the tendency to romanticize Peru’s “lost” civilization and indigenous people. The show aims to have Korean travelers and viewers contemplate the meaning of youth, as they live in a highly modernized and rapidly aging society. To fulfill this role, Latin America is used and imagined as a distant space to better center on the self, while the other is silenced and easily idealized. Welcome, First Time in Korea? (2017) offers a reversed or even subverted view of the others, as speaking subjects. Burgos’s intimate and emotional narratives touched the hearts of Koreans, challenging preexisting negative perceptions of the Mexicans by offering the audience the opportunity of experiencing them. As mirror images, the Mexican friends reflected on themselves and their culture while the same occurred with Korean viewers through the Mexican guests. However, it has also strengthened the hackneyed image of Latin Americans as “not to be taken seriously” and “fun-driven” people. Even though both television shows have their limitations, it must be acknowledged that they have established a more favorable and negotiable environment/space for Latin America(ns) to speak for the further construction of their own cultural identities in contemporary Korea. The Korean people are witnessing a new form of globalization, arising from Korea toward every corner of the globe through Hallyu. By becoming a major destination for Hallyu and a new “other” for Korea, Latin America helps the Korean people to expand their notions of the Transpacific beyond the United States. Furthermore, Latin America provokes South Korea (as a former periphery) to reconstruct its own identities in the novel self-other interactions, and to reexplore their sense of gravity and spatiality in the current global geopolitics. In the midst of a changing, diversifying, and shifting global reality and power, Latin America plays a vital role at the center of this epistemological reorientation, expansion, and pluralism for twenty-first century South Korea by offering a new point of reference to secure greater diversity.

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Work Cited Aitchison, Cara. “Theorizing Other discourses of tourism, gender and culture: Can the subaltern speak (in tourism)?” Tourist Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, pp. 133–147. Etoday.com. “‘상속자들’ 박신혜 떠난 ‘부에노스아이레스’, 어떤 곳. [The Heirs, What Kind of Place is “Buenos Aires,” to where Park Shin Hye went.]” 29 Nov. 2013. http://www.etoday.co.kr/news/section/newsview.php?idxno=829432. Accessed 13 Sep. 2019. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Ethics of the Infinite.” Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, interviewed by the author Richard Kearney, Manchester UP, 1984, pp. 49–69. Memories of the Alhambra. “기획 의도 [Drama Design].” http://program.tving. com/tvn/tvnalhambra/7/Contents/Html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019. Moon, Gwang-lip. “‘Grandpas Over Flowers’ a Ratings Hit.” 29 July. 2013, http:// koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=2975200. Accessed 28 Aug. 2019. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. Newsinside.com. “상속자들 16회, 박신혜 행선지는 ‘부에노스아이레스’? [The Heirs 16th Episode, “Buenos Aires,” the Destination of Park Shin Hye?]” 29 Nov. 2013. http://www.newsinside.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=212469. Accessed 13 Sep. 2019. Nye, Joseph and Kim, Youna. “Soft Power and the Korean Wave.” The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, edited by Youna Kim, Routledge, 2013, pp. 31–42. Onbelet, Lisa. “Imagining the Other: The use of narrative as an empowering practice.” McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry. Canada, 2015. http://www. mcmaster.ca/mjtm/3-1d.htm. Accessed 7 Sep. 2019. Park, Joseph Sung-Yul. “Regimenting languages on Korean television: Subtitles and institutional authority.” Text & Talk—An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies, vol. 29, no. 5, 2009, pp. 547–570. Rappaport, Julian. “Empowerment meets narrative: Listening to stories and creating settings.” American Journal of Community Psychology. Vol. 23, no. 5, 1995, pp. 795–807. Rodríguez, Clara E., editor. Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media. Westview Press, 1997. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1987. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Die Philosophin, vol. 14, no. 27, 1988, pp. 42–58.

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The Heirs. Created by Moon-suk Choi, performance by Min-ho Lee, Shin-hye, Park, SBS, episode 16, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=h3Gskqn5J9I&t=156s. Accessed 15 Aug. 2019. Thomas, Helene M. Lessening Africa’s ‘otherness’ in the Western media: Towards a culturally responsive journalism. 2014. Murdoch University, Ph.D. dissertation. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/642d/347dfb2c595206f27ce3990e0fafc8 bae608.pdf. Accessed 13 Aug. 2019. TVDaily.com. “‘어서와’ 크리스티안 “멕시코 이미지 바꿔줘 준 ‘어서와’에 감사” [인터뷰] [Christian from Welcome, Thanks Welcome for Changing the Image of Mexico [Interview]].” 2 Sep. 2018, http://tvdaily.asiae.co.kr/read.php3?ai d=15181351481323268019#rs. Accessed 13 Sep. 2019. Welcome, First Time in Korea? Created by MBC Every 1, season 1, episode 1–4 & 29–33, MBC Every 1, 2017–2018. Woo, J. (2018) ‘How a Reality Show on First-timers’ Travel to Korea Grabs TV Audiences’, Yonhap News Agency, 10 May. 2018, https://en.yna.co.kr/view/ AEN20180510011700315. Accessed 13 Aug. 2019. Youth Over Flowers. Created by Young-seok Na, Hyo-jung Shin, Performance by Hee-yeol Yoo, Juck Lee, Sang Yoon, edition 1, episode 1–6, 2014.

PART III

Magical Realism in Its Asian Turn

CHAPTER 8

Beauty Is a Wound: Retelling Modern Indonesian History Through Magical Realism Marco Ramírez Rojas

During the second half of the twentieth century, Latin American literature saw the rise of a narrative mode that would come to transform the literary, cultural, and political panorama of the region and the world. The works of Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, and Gabriel García Márquez opened the door to a literary revolution that transformed how to understand and represent the realities, ambivalences, and complexities of Latin American countries, as well as how their historical processes of postcolonialism and national formation have been constructed. Novels such as Men of Maize (1949), The Kingdom of This World (1949), and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) not only had an immediate impact on their own countries, but also, and more remarkably, brought Latin American literature to a position of privilege on a global scale. As many scholars have recognized, Magical Realism became the first narrative form

This paper is dedicated to Claire-Marie Hefner. M. Ramírez Rojas (*) Lehman College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_8

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that radiated from the peripheral space of Latin America towards other latitudes.1 Although, in most cases, magical realist creations have a strong local anchorage, its narrative tools have allowed for it to be transported and readapted in different parts of the world. Its capacity to combine the tools of realism with fantastic elements, the weaving in-and-out of history and mythical/legendary accounts, as well its facility to incorporate marginalized and subaltern perspectives, allowed for this narrative mode to become a global literary currency that has circulated around multiple peripheral spaces and has served a number of conflicting historical and ideological agendas. The academic debates around the origins, definition, characteristics, and tenuous borders of Magical Realism have been abundant and became particularly problematic as manifestations of Magical Realism moved beyond the territories where it originated and became a global phenomenon encompassing a wide range of works that creatively imitate, replicate, and even challenge the narrative models that initially were typified as “essentially” Latin American. The purpose of this article, however, is not to engage in debates about whether Magical Realism should be considered a “mode” or a “genre”, whether its definition should be framed ontologically or epistemologically, or even whether it should be understood as a culturally-dependent manifestation.2 My intention here is to highlight how the narrative practices that first originated in Latin America continue to have a strong influence on the literary panorama of latitudes as distant, and seemingly unrelated, as those of Southeast Asia. In this 1  According to Edna Aizenberg, the spread of Magical Realism “is a development of revolutionary magnitude … and we should not take it for granted”; it “suggests that Latin American magical realism may well be the first contemporary literary mode to break the hegemony of the center by forcing the center to ‘imitate’ the periphery, and by allowing a vibrant, innovative intertextuality of the margins—between Latin America and Africa, for instance.” Similarly, Franco Moretti maintains that with Magical Realism, “for the first time in modern history, the center of gravity of formal creation leaves Europe”.” (quoted by Faris 40–41) 2  Erik Caymayd-Freixas offers a useful critical review on the debates and theories around Magical Realism. His article “Theories of Magical Realism” is included in the edited volume Critical Insights. Magical Realism, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo. Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris’s Magical Realism. Theory, History, Community also offers a great anthology of critical approaches that trace the critical developments of this narrative mode from its origins to its consecration as a global form.

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article, I approach a novel by Eka Kurniawan, an Indonesian writer who undertook the task to reinterpret and retell the conflictive history of his country with an approach and a language that are unmistakably indebted to Magical Realism. My reading, thus, wants to make visible this bridge that connects two spaces that are geographically, culturally, and historically dissociated but that, by virtue of the link created by literary dialogues, shows interesting parallels and similarities. I will focus mainly in two aspects. First, I analyze why and how Magical Realism continues to be used to represent complex historical postcolonial processes of nation building. Secondly, I look at the possibility of approaching this novel as a “national romance”, that is, as a narrative representation of the family that works as an allegory of national history. Beauty Is a Wound (BIAW henceforth), Eka Kurniawan’s first novel, was published in 2002 and was almost immediately acclaimed as a groundbreaking work in Indonesian literature.3 He soon became a mayor literary figure and scholars such as Benedict Anderson recognized him as a rising literary star and a successor to the renowned Pramoedya Ananata Toer (1925–2006).4 In 2015, Annie Tucker’s skillful English translation brought this novel to an international readership and ensured a much wider circulation of Kurniawan’s multi-generational account of modern 3  Born in Tasikmalaya, West Java, he completed a philosophy degree in Yogyakarta, at the University of Gadjah Mada. Since his literary debut with Cantik Itu Luka—the original title of Beauty Is A Wound—, Eka Kurniawan has published three novels: Lelaki Harimay (2004) [“Man Tiger” (2016)] in the English version of Labodalih Sembiring; Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas (2014) [“Vengeance Is Mine, All The Rest Pay Cash” (2017)] in Annie Tucker’s translation; and O (2016). A collection of short stories, Kitchen Curse, was released in 2019, also translated by Tucker. He was nominated to the Man Booker International Prize in 2016 for his second novel. His novels have been translated into over twenty languages and he is one of the most influential contemporary Indonesian writers. To this date, only one translation of his first novel is available in Spanish, La belleza es una herida. It was published by Editorial Lumen in 2017 and translated by Carlos Mayor. 4  In a note published on the website of Verso Books (25 December 2015), Duncan Thomas recognizes that it was Benedict Anderson himself who first brought Eka Kurniawan’s novels to the attention of the publishing house: “Among many of Benedict Anderson’s distinguishing qualities as a scholar and writer was his desire to engage with new writing across disciplinary boundaries and genres. Without such wide-ranging erudition, a book like Imagined Communities would have been impossible…. It was through Benedict Anderson that we were introduced to Eka Kurniawan.”

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Indonesian’s history. Both in academic and in literary circles, this book has been positively received and has been reviewed in prestigious literary publications.5 This novel is an ambitious epic account of Indonesian modern history that spans over a century and retells, from multiple perspectives and superimposed narrative lines, the struggles for independence and the complex processes of national consolidation. Benedict Anderson summarizes the historical episodes thematized in Kurniawan’s work thus: [BIAW] is a quasi-historical novel stretching from the late colonial period, through the Japanese Occupation, the Revolution of 1945–49, the long extremist Islamic rebellion of the 1950s, the rise and bloody downfall of the Indonesian Communist Party, and the early Suharto dictatorship. But the setting is not national or even regional: it is an unnamed little town close to the Indian Ocean. Nothing is documented, and everything is suffused with magic, traditional and newly created legends, and confusing oral histories. (xi)

In his summary, Anderson carefully points out that the perspective of the narration is not necessarily that of a realistic account of events. What readers find is a carefully arranged mosaic of stories that intertwine historical events with mythical accounts, legendary characters, magical realist events, and ghostly interventions. In his complex literary construction, Kurniawan interlaces fantastic and realistic elements, creating an atmosphere where both planes coexist without clashing. The novel textualizes the ambivalence of a violent and conflictive reality perceived from a hybrid perspective that oscillates between empirical/realistic accounts and local myths, legends, and magical realist explanations of the world.

5  Beauty Is a Wound has been praised in these book reviews: New York Times (“‘Beauty Is a Wound,’ an Indonesian Blend of History, Myth and Magic”), The New Republic (“Where the Dead Refuse to Vanish Eka Kurniawan’s Fiction Reckons with Indonesia’s Bloody Inheritance”), The New  Yorker (“A Writer’s Haunting Trip Through the Horrors of Indonesian History”), and The Chicago Tribune (“Review: Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan”).

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Beauty Is A Wound, a Novel in a Magical Realist Mode Read under this light, BIAW fits, almost word by word, the most classic definitions of Magical Realism.6 Wendy B. Faris, for instance, defines this narrative mode as a literary construction where “the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them” (7) and identifies five distinctive points that characterize this narrative mode: an irreducible element of magic, a strong presence of the phenomenal world, the merging of narrative realms, reader ambivalence, and a distortion of time-and-space dimensions (13). A brief summary of the novel’s plot will allow me to point out the presence of these elements. BIAW opens with the scene of the resurrection of Dewi Ayu—a mixed-­ race (half-Dutch, half-Indonesian) and former prostitute—who, resuscitating in the late 1990’s, walks around the streets of Halimunda after twenty-one years in her grave. The reason for her return is to fight a ghost from colonial times who has cursed her family and caused numerous tragedies that have befallen her daughters and grandchildren. Although her reappearance causes initial surprise, very quickly the townspeople become used to her presence and approach her to pay respect and to ask “What does it feel to be dead?” Tho this question she plainly replies: “Actually, it’s pretty fun. That’s the main reason why, out of everyone who dies, not one person chooses to come back” (BIAW 25). The novel moves back and 6  In January 2016, the literary website Electricliterature.com published an interview to Eka Kurniawan where J.R.  Ramakrishnan asked about the presence of “Magical Realism” in BIAW. Kurniawan’s response corroborated his links to writers such as Faulkner and García Márquez. He went on to say that “they are my favorite writers. I read their books (not just theirs, but Gogol’s, Melville’s, and Cervantes’) and I [was] able to look around, to have a bit of perception that people I know and history I am familiar with could be narrated in different ways.” He also recognizes that the magical aspects in his novel are also “influenced by horror and silat (Indonesian martial art) novels of the 1970s.” Although Kurniawan warns that it is “difficult to put it [BIAW] in one genre” and that “classifying the novel as “magic realism” would be easier for people to figure it out,” I consider that its affiliation to realismo mágico offers a critical perspective that reveals interesting aspects of its postcolonial aesthetic and ideological perspectives. On an additional note, it is interesting to note that One Hundred Years of Solitude only became available in Indonesian in 2001, when Helmi Mahadi’s translation was released by Benteng Press under the title Seratus tahun kesunyian. Nonetheless, it is likely that Kurniawan had previous access to the novel in English or in partial translations. The scholarship on Eka Kurniawan’s reception of Magical Realism, as well as in the broad panorama of Indonesian literature, remains scarce.

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forth in time and retraces the story of Dewi Ayu, her four children (Alamanda, Adinda, Maya Dewi, and Beauty) and the history of the town of Halimunda—a Yoknapatawpha or Macondo-type of an imaginary city—located in West Java. Kurniawan follows different narrative lines that converge in the fate of Dewi Ayu’s family, and moves from the mythical story of the city’s foundation by the legendary Princess Rengannis (an Indian Princess who married a dog and escaped to Halimunda) to the detailed account of Indonesia’s historical events: the expulsion of the Dutch colonialists, the Japanese concentration camps, its declaration of Independence in 1945, the Communist massacres of 1965, all the way to the political turmoil of the 1990s. The life trajectories of the men who marry Dewi Ayu’s daughters connect mythical and legendary Javanese epic traditions and beliefs with the historical conflicts that Indonesia faced throughout the century. As the reader moves through the novel, it becomes evident that, despite its historical anchorage, Eka Kurniawan places as much importance on factual accounts as he does on magical realist explanations. After briefly discussing the elements that affiliate BIAW to the narrative mode of Magical Realism, I want to take the question a step further and inquire: why is it necessary to write yet another novel that embraces these aesthetic and literary techniques? Erik Caymad-Freixas recognizes that throughout all its transformations and, especially, after turning into a global mode, “Magical Realism has remained primarily a counter-culture and counter-hegemonic literary style” (10). Similarly, Maggie Ann Bowers observes its connection with subaltern studies, underlying “the disruption that magical realist narratives can cause to authoritative discourses” (35). Within the Indonesian literary and cultural panorama, Eka Kurniawan’s novel comes to fulfill the specific task of disrupting established and authoritative historical accounts. By adopting (and adapting) the subversive narrative possibilities of Magical Realism, he brings together and interweaves competing cultural, ideological, and discursive systems of signification. On the one hand, he structures the narrative lines of his novel according to the historical progression of events into which he inserts his fictional characters. History, then, becomes the overarching scheme and the background where actions take place. On the other hand, what we find is that the individual stories of the characters operate according to a logic that often defies rationality, positivistic views, and chronological linearity. There is a need in BIAW to provide a comprehensive account of the events that mark and transform Indonesian history, but there is also the need to

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understand a reality that cannot be totally comprehended with the tools of scientific/objective examination. In the opening pages of A History of Modern Indonesia (2005), Adrien Vickers recognizes that telling the story of Indonesia “is difficult because a country as huge and heterogeneous as this does not have a single narrative” (3). His statement does not refer exclusively to the numerous regional, individual, and fragmentary accounts that escape the grand scheme of historical narrations. His observation goes more in depth: he questions the validity of official accounts that describe only political and economic changes. To gain a comprehensive vision of the country’s evolution, he turns to the novels of Pramoedya Ananata Toer. According to Vickers, his realistic style of narration allows him to depict the “experiences of ordinary Indonesians” (3) who are rapidly experiencing enormous changes as they move from colonialism to a modern national state. He recognizes, however, that Pramoedya’s realism only capture a certain portion of the life and culture of Indonesia. The traditional beliefs, spirituality and native worldview that are still part of a large segment of Indonesian society are left out from his works. As he reminds us, it was the task of two other writers to thematize and recuperate these important elements: Indonesia is a place of tragedy and farce, of tradition and modernity. Umar Kayam’s emphasis on traditional roots for a new nation answers the need for depth in a country uneasy with the modern. He and Mangunwijaya are both much more in touch than Pramoedya with the spiritual and religious interpretations that most Indonesians employ to make sense of their lives. (7)

Eka Kurniawan’s magical realist approach brings a dialectic solution to the dichotomy of styles that Vickers points out. The “double-vision” that he offers, merging the techniques of realist detailed accounts and observations of the phenomenal world along with the inclusion of supernatural phenomena and non-rational explanations, allows him to open a comprehensive vision of a reality that cannot be reduced to a “single narrative.” Kurniawan resorts to magical and mythical thinking not only as a choice of style, but to also represent the history and the life of a country that debates between worldviews. This “double-perspective” is one of the characteristic of postcolonial literature, which oscillates between two competing structures of thought and beliefs. Stephen Hart uses the term “split-vision” to describe the

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capacity of magical realist narratives to express a world that is “fissured” between a colonial and a native view (3). Following the remarks of Antonio Cornejo Polar, Heart observes that this double perspective also makes it possible to reveal and depict the “social asymmetries” created by colonial domination (7). Kurniawan’s novel is a perfect example of this split-vision and of a literary attempt to recalibrate the unbalanced scales of symbolic discursive powers. An example from the novel will illustrate this point. At the age of sixteen, Dewi Ayu decides to marry an old man, Ma Gedik, who lives in a hut, removed from society. She sends a messager with this proposal. Hers is a strange request, but the reason of Ma Gedik’s refusal is even stranger: “he had already vowed not to marry anyone, out of his eternal love for Ma Iyang, a woman who had flown off into the sky one day and vanished” (32). As the narrator unfurls this tragic love story, we learn not only the legend behind the names of the two mountains that surround the town, but also the foundational trauma of Halimunda’s history. Ma Gedik and Ma Iyang were two native kids who grew up together and were destined to marry each other. One night, a Dutch Lord caught sight of the beautiful girl and brought her to his home as a concubine, breaking the two lovers’ hearts. Before Ma Iyang set out for the Lord’s house, she and Ma Gedik made a promise to meet sixteen years later at the top of a nearby mountain. Both kept their promise and, after their longexpected reunion, a tragedy occurred. Ma Iyang realized that they would be unable to be together after their reunion because the Dutch Lord would kill her as soon as she returns back to town. So, she decided to fly7: To prove what she said Ma Iyang, with her naked body covered in drops of sweat that reflected the rays of the sun like beads of pearl, jumped and flew toward the valley, disappearing behind a descending fog…. Everyone searched for her, even the Dutchmen and the wild dogs…. Ma Iyang was never found, dead or alive, and finally everyone believed that the woman had truly just flown away. The Dutchman believed it, and so did Ma Gedik. Now that all that was left was that rocky hill, the people named it after the woman who had flown off into the sky: Ma Iyang Hill. (39)

7  The connection must be made between this scene in BIAW and Remedios la Bella’s ascent into the sky in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although the connection is not fully explicit and the nature of the ascents responds to different circumstances, the coincidence in the supernatural phenomenon of disappearing into the sky is remarkable.

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The magical explanation of the disappearance serves a double purpose. First, it reveals the foundational trauma of colonialism that will remain as an unresolved issue throughout the history of the country, symbolized in the saga of Dewi Ayu’s family. Secondly, it inserts a “magical” narrative as an explanation to understand and undermine the consequences of the Dutch colonial period. While the narrator and the characters have no choice but to accept the negative impact of Dutch abuses, the narrative that is constructed to make sense of these events swerves away from the positivistic view of Western logic. By inserting an alternative explanation, Kurniawan negotiates the dominance of the discursive structures of the former colonizers and offers an account that favors the local systems of belief. A short digression is in order to compare this passage with the famous scene in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World where Mackandal, the slave who has led the revolution against the French landowners in Haiti, is burned before the eyes of natives and colonizers. Whereas the former “see” Mackandal escaping the flames in the form of a butterfly— therefore, foiling the punishment—what the French colonizers witness is end of the trouble-maker slave who has been finally put to death. I refer to Carpentier’s novel only to contrast it with Kurniawan’s way of dealing the clash of perspectives. While the Cuban-French author keeps the “dialectical struggle” between two different sets of “codes of recognition”— Stephen Slemon’s terminology (411)—as a clash between two systems that do not merge, the Indonesian writer gives prevalence to the narrative account that challenges European logic. Kurniawan stresses the fact that it was not only the locals who believed in this version of the events. By attesting that also “the Dutchman believed it”, he assigns this magical account of the events a validity that competes and imposes over the worldview of the colonizers who, at their turn, are forced to adopt the perspective of magical thought. Returning to Ma Gedik’s tragic story, I want to stress its importance in the development of the plot and the symbolic interpretation of Indonesia’s historical processes imbued in the novel. The frustration and anger of losing Ma Iyang brings Ma Gedik to cast a curse on the family that prevented his marriage. We then learn that Dewi Ayu is a descendant of the man who stole his lover. The failure of the love story that was caused by the abusive practices of the Dutch Lords sentences her daughters and grandchildren to a century of misfortunes, violence, and death. By the end of the novel, the narrator reveals that it was the ghost of Ma Gedik that was responsible

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for all the disasters, calamities, and revenges that befell Dewi Ayu’s offspring. As the reader moves through the plot, it becomes clear that Kurniawan is tracing a parallel between the fate of Dewi Ayu’s family and the turbulent history of Indonesia. The narration follows the progeny of the Dutch colonial family to which the mixed blood female protagonist belongs. First, it focuses on her and the circumstances under which she gave birth to her four daughters. Later, it shifts to the stories of Alamanda, Adinda, Maya, and Beauty. Each one also struggles to reconcile with different family and national traumas. The multi-generational epic scope of this narrative work, as well as the allegorical construction of the characters, leads me to interpret BIAW as a novel of national formation written in the key of a family romance.

Dewi Ayu’s Family Story As Indonesia’s Romance of National Formation It is noteworthy that the tragic story of Ma Gedik is followed by a succession of ill-fated couplings, mismatched romances, and unrequited loves. But, before looking at the romantic constructions of the novel, I want to first draw attention to the central character. None of Dewi Ayu’s relations with men is mediated by love. There is desire, lust, domination, revenge, but no real affection. None of her daughters is born out of love. They are all begotten under difficult circumstances that symbolically coincide with definitive moments of Indonesia’s history. Her first baby, Alamanda, is conceived with a Japanese soldier in 1942, in a Bloedenkamp controlled by the Nipon army during Indonesia’s occupation.8 Adinda, the second child, is the daughter of an Indonesian guerrilla fighter who impregnates Dewi Ayu right after the Japanese troops withdrawal in 1945.9 The third child, 8  The Japanese occupation of Indonesia lasted from 1942 to 1945—during World War II, the Japanese were able to take over the territories formerly under the control of the Dutch empire. The Japanese arrival was received enthusiastically by some nationalist groups that believed that it would lead to their eventual national independence. This expectation went unmet and the Japanese exerted their harsh control over Sumatra, Java, and the eastern islands. Men were forced to work or to enroll in the army; women were often recruited to provide “comfort” to Japanese soldiers. Concentration camps were also built to better control the population. For a more detailed account of this period, see Vickers (85–92) and Ricklefs (187–199). 9  Although Indonesia declared its Independence on 17 August 1945, some guerrilla groups and nationalist fighters remained active in different areas of the newly configured

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three years older than Adinda, was born when she worked at the brothel of Mama Kalong—visited by locals and soldiers from different factions. Dewi Ayu was its most coveted woman as her striking beauty was legendary. As she appears as an object of desire that is wanted and abused by different actors who take part and profit from historical circumstances, I propose to interpret her character as an allegory of the Indonesian land that is fought over. Drawing from Doris Sommer’s analysis on the construction of family romances in nineteenth-century Latin American novels, I examine Dewi Ayu’s presence as an allegory of the land that becomes the ultimate object of desire. According to Sommer, in the stock of characters of romance novels in post-colonial Latin American texts women appear “rhetorically synonymous with the land” and, thus, need to be “possess[ed] in order to achieve harmony and legitimacy” (“Irresistible” 85). I believe this could also be an accurate interpretation of Dewi Ayu’s symbolic role in BIAW. Her beauty and charm embody the richness of a fertile land that different entities are trying to possess and control. They are, however, unable to do so. The territory that she symbolizes constantly resists the violent attempts to dominate it. Her daughters’ romantic stories follow a similar representative logic, but they unfold differently as their romantic involvements develop in dissimilar directions. If Dewi Ayu is the embodiment of the territory, her offspring appears as metaphors of the historical events that led to the formation of Indonesia as a modern nation. In order to proceed to the analysis of these symbolic relations of national formation, I return to Sommer’s interpretation of Latin American romance novels. Despite differences in style, narrative complexity, and ideological purpose, Kurniawan’s novel is, to some extent, quite similar to the works analyzed by Sommer. The novels that she studies symbolically thematize processes of national formation in the decades following Latin American countries’ independence.10 national territory. Before the government could raise a national army, many active militias pursued different nationalist as well as pro-Dutch agendas. According to Vickers, “at the beginning of the Revolution, being part of a struggle group was a matter of pride for many Indonesians, resulting in the formation of many militias…. Some militias grew out of Japanese-sponsored bodies…. Others were new. Some militias were rebranded versions of criminal gangs” (104). 10  The majority of Latin American countries declared their political independence during the early nineteenth century. Doris Sommer focuses her study in a corpus of novels that during the following decades, fictionalize the process of formation of the national states. The list of works she deals with includes, José Marmol’s Amalia (1851), Jorge Isaac’s María (1867),

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Written fifty years after Indonesia’s independence, BIAW also focuses on the struggles of a country that is in the process of achieving autonomy and modernization. More interestingly, like nineteenth-century Latin American writers, Kurniawan also decides to fictionalize the process of Indonesian national formation by resorting to stories of infatuations, love pursuits, and couples’ quarrels. Like Sommer, I would argue that the marriages and couplings of Dewi Ayu’s daughters represent the “need to reconcile and amalgamate national constituencies” and represent the attempts (and failures) to harmonize and unify “the previously conflicting parties, races, classes, or regions” as lovers who are attracted to each other (“Irresistible” 81). Let us consider the love triangle between Alamanda, Kliwon, and Shodancho. Alamanda, the first daughter of Dewi Ayu, is a teenager who, aware of her beauty, seduces and deceives men. Kliwon, the son of a communist revolutionary fighter, is also a young man known for his wit and handsomeness. When they fall in love, the town celebrates their union as a match made in heaven: “Alamanda and Kliwon were dating and everyone thought they were the most beautiful couple that had ever existed on the face of earth” (BIAW 189). The period that frames this union is the 1950’s decade. The country is led by Sukarno, a political figure who declared independence and held the presidency from 1945 to 1967. Sukarno’s plan for structuring and strengthening the developing of the country was to establish a “Guided Democracy” based on three pillars: nationalism, religion, and communism.11 At this point in time, the love Alberto Blest Gana’s Martín Rivas (1862), Cirio Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1839), Gertrudis de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), and Romulo Gallego’s Doña Bárbara (1929). For this article, I use the Chapter “Irresistible romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America” included in Homi Bhabhas’ edited volume Nation and Narration (1990), and “Not Just Any Narrative: How Romance Can Love Us To Death,” compiled in Daniel Balderston’s edited volume The Historical Novel in Latin America (1986). Doris Sommer`s extended analysis of foundational fictions was published in the book Foundational Fictions. The national Romances of Latin America (1993). 11  The acronym assigned by Sukarno to his plan was NASAKOM. Although he was trying to build a country based on democratic principles, he was also a strong believer in communism and established links with China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. As Kathleen M. Adams would say: Sukarno “was dancing between supporters of the ideologies of communism and liberal democracy during the Cold War” (87). During the 1950s, Sukarno’s Nationalist Party (PNI) and the Communist Party (PKI) became the most popular political parties in Indonesian. As Vickers notes: “The party that quickly reformed and emerged above a host of smaller parties was the Communist Party, the

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story between the beautiful “half-Japanese half-Dutch and a-little-bitIndonesian” teenager (BIAW 159)—who symbolically represents the racially mixed population of the country—and a promising Communist young man—who embodies the promise of a national project led by this ideological flag—is still a possibility. It is important to remember that during the years before the 1965 killings, Indonesia had the world’s thirdlargest communist party—after China and the Soviet Union—with an estimated three-million members. Politically, thus, the country held a bright future for the party’s ideals and promises. However, in the novel as in history, this promising future will end in tragedy. Kliwon leaves to study in Jakarta and they promise to meet again in five years. During his absence, another pursuer appears and tries to win over Alamanda. Shodancho, “the head of the military district who once led the most infernal rebellion against the Japanese” (BIAW 159) becomes infatuated with her. He represents the newly appointed officers who rose to power after having fought for independence. He courts Alamanda and displays his status by driving around in his official car and buying expensive gifts with government money. To maintain his attention, she keeps leading him on. When he finally proposes, she reveals that she already has a sweetheart. Confused and enraged, Shodancho takes her to the old cave hideout for guerrillas and rapes her. The next day, “Alamanda felt she was a cursed woman” (218) and, after writing a Dear John letter to Kliwon, “she had to reckon with Shodancho, get her revenge, and think about what she could do to satisfy her rage” (219). She forces him to marry her under the condition that she will never love him nor have sexual relations with him. Long after the wedding, she keeps wearing a device that she calls an “antiterror garment,” a chastity belt that she “ordered directly from a metalsmith and sorcerer” (225). On the outside, she and Shodancho lead a normal life as a couple but, on the inside, it was a turbulent relationship. This tripartite tragedy was a metaphorical rendition of what was taking place nationally. As such, Alamanda’s frustrated relationship with Kliwon may be interpreted as Indonesia’s thwarted opportunity to have had an administration whose ideology was embraced by the majority of its people.

PKI. It had a new leadership group at the core of its Central Committee, all of whom had been youth activists in the Revolution” (122). For more information on this subject, see Donald Hindley’s The Communist Party of Indonesia 1961–1963.

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Instead, the marriage that took place resulted in a union marred by government-­granted abuses of power.12 A few years after the marriage of Alamanda and Shodancho, the Communist massacres would take place in Indonesia and the vast majority of members and suspected-members of the Party would be executed in one of the most devastating tragedies of modern Indonesian history. The terror that started in October 1965  in Jakarta would quickly spread throughout the country, leaving millions of victims in its wake.13 An active communist, Kliwon became a most-wanted man in Halimunda. And, of course, the task of finding him fell to on the hands of Colonel Shodancho. After his capture and just before his execution, Kliwon is saved by an unexpected and peculiar transaction: Alamanda proposes “the strangest transaction ever to take place between a husband and a wife”: “Tell me Shodancho, he is scheduled to die at five o’clock this morning, right?” Alamanda asked from the darkness…. “I will recite the mantra [to open the chastity belt] and I will give you my love, if you will guarantee that the man will live.” (BIAW 320–321)

The accepted exchange that saves Kliwon’s life is most significant when read under the key of a romance of national formation. By protecting 12  As Vickers points out, during the period of the Guided Democracy (1957–1966) “the army and ministers around Sukarno were able to act almost arbitrarily. The military set up a new territorial system which involved assuming leading roles in regional administration” (145). In BIAW, Shodancho may stand for one of the officers who assumed a leading role. 13  Adams offers a brief summary of the events: “On September 30, 1965, a small group of military officers and palace guards killed six generals in an act framed as a defense of the revolution’s leader. The details surrounding these events may never be fully known … what we do know (via recently released US documents) is that general Suharto, with encouragement of the CIA, declared the coup attempt a Communist (PKI) plot, although there was no concrete evidence supporting this claim. With Suharto at the helm, and Sukarno effectively shoved aside, the military began to purge Indonesian Communists and suspected Communists … the purge soon spread beyond Jakarta to other areas of Java, Sumatra, Bali and beyond, with death squads targeting not only suspected Communists but left-leaning citizens and Chinese…. In all, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people were killed in purges, and many were brutally tortured, raped or imprisoned” (90). There is copious literature on the topic as well as popular documentaries that offer an indepth look at these events. For bibliography references see Robert Cribb (ed.) The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali; and Geoffrey B.  Robinson’s The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–1966 (2019). For films on the topic see Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014).

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Kliwon, Alamanda is saving “a man that was Halimunda” (BIAW 320) because he was loved and respected by its citizens. She symbolically prevents a fundamental part of Indonesian society from being eliminated; she safeguards the political beliefs, social convictions, and historical aspirations that were shared by an important sector of the population. Her sacrifice strives to make possible the future reintegration of the demonized “communists” into the political body. But, re-assimilation into the symbolic family of the nation will not be completed until, shortly after being pardoned, Kliwon marries Dewi Ayu’s second daughter, Adinda, who had been pining for him since childhood. Maya Dewi`s love story involves a third important social component regarding Indonesia’s nation-building process. Like her older sisters, she inherits her mother’s arresting beauty. But, unlike them, she does not get to pick who to marry. Dewi Ayu resolves this question in the most peculiar arrangement. After witnessing the bad luck of her elder daughters in finding good husbands, she starts to worry about the future of Maya. “[Dewi] did not want to see Maya Dewi grow up to face the same tragic fate that had befallen Alamanda and might yet befall Adinda” (BIAW 254). She comes up with this solution: “Dewi Ayu insisted that Maya Dewi had to be married off to somebody, and because there was no one else closer to her, the only man she could be married off to was Maman Gendeng” (BIAW 254). At the moment of Dewi Ayu’s decision, Maman Gendeng is her current lover. Reluctantly, thus, he accepts her strange proposal to marry the daughter of his present love interest. His only condition is the following: because Maya is only twelve-years old at the time of their wedding, he will not sleep with her until she turns seventeen. It is so that for five years, both behaved like husband and wife in all aspects, except for having intimate relations. Their relationship shows a stark contrast with that of her older siblings by presenting a more harmonic view of conjugal life. But the symbolic significance of their marriage cannot be grasped without knowing Maman’s background. Much like Shodancho and Kliwon, Maman’s life reflects the postcolonial transformation of Indonesia. His legendary exploits and supernatural force serve to connect the mythical origins of Halimunda with the country’s independence and formation. Kurniawan offers a brief account of his life: When he was still very young, Maman Gendeng was already a warrior in the last generation of grandmasters…. At the end of the colonial era he left to

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wander and seek his fortune but encountered not a soul … until the Japanese came. Then he fought for the People’s Army, and during the revolutionary war he awarded himself the rank of colonel. But during the restructuring of the troops he was one of the thousands of soldiers who got sacked, and was left with nothing except the glory of having fought in the struggle…. He returned to his wandering and spent the rest of the war earning a new reputation: that of a bandit thief. (BIAW 109)

His legend precedes his arrival to Halimunda: he is in search of the mythical beauty of Princess Reganis. After learning that the Princess had died hundreds of years ago, he falls for another woman whose beauty is comparable to that of the Princess: the prostitute Dewi Ayu. Maman encapsulates the connection of Indonesia’s mythical accounts with its historical transformations, particularly those of the twentieth century. His character embodies the transitions that connect mythical accounts with the historical transformations that have shaped Indonesia’s modern history during the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. Maya’s husband’s backstory illustrates how legend weaves in-and-out and articulates a complex view of reality where magical and positivistic worldviews intersect, complement, and modify each other. His life’s trajectory, set first in the realms of local epic accounts, is interrupted by war and political turmoil. By the end of the novel, however, he returns to a dimension of supernatural occurrences after the tragic event of the death of his child, and in his attempt to escape the soldiers who were searching for him. Much like in the classical Hindu narrative of the skilled warrior Arjuna, Maman retired to a cave to meditate. After he attained the transcendant state of moksha he “disappeared and dissolved into little orbs of light” (BIAW 440). In this passage, the reader is confronted once again with the fact that in the dialectic clash of two competing world views staged and, as we see, it is the local/magical perspective that gains the upper hand. The novels that symbolically stage fictions of national romance have a necessity to solve national divisions through the creation of difficult love relationships that represent the parties and factions in conflict. In BIAW the three husbands of Dewy Ayu’s daughters represent the historical factions disputing power in Indonesia during the conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century: Shodancho, Maman Gendeng, and Kliwon are opponents who fight to defend clashing political projects and views for an ideal nation. The only way for them to find a dialogue is through the recognition that they are part of the same family, as they are all married to the

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daughters of the same land. But the promise of a harmonious understanding is not fulfilled solely by the recognition of newly formed kinship. Instead, the task is deferred for the next generation to undertake. The children born to the three couples are given the mission of healing the wounds inflicted by their parents and, therefore, of establishing a new order of social understanding and national unity: Then, finally, Nurul Aini was born. Shodancho was impressed when Maman Gendeng said, “Congratulations Shodancho, I hope the cousins will become good friends.” That was an honest-to-goodness original idea, to let those two children grow up in friendship as a way to placate the secret hostility that had begun so long ago between their fathers. Shodancho agreed, saying they would enroll those two girls, Rengannis the Beautiful and Nurul Aini, in the same kindergarten once the time had come. And then, influenced by that idea, when Adinda finally gave birth to her son twelve days after the birth of Nurul Aini as Comrade Kliwon had predicted, Shodancho echoed Maman Gendeng’s sentiment of peace and hope in slightly different words: “Congratulations, Comrade, I hope that unlike us, your child and my child can be good friends—perhaps even a love match.” (336)

As Sommers remarks, “part of the conjugal romance’s national project, perhaps the main part, is to produce legitimate babies, literally to engender civilization” (“Not just any narrative” 59). This statement also holds true for BIAW, except for the fact that Nurul Aini, Rengannis, and Krisan were not given the responsibility of “engendering” a nation, but of reconciling its people. They were born to a country that, borrowing Vickers’ words, “having achieved sovereignty … was faced with the task of building a state” (113). To reach this objective, Indonesia met the challenge of successfully promoting and strengthening a sense of connectedness among the different ethnic and linguistic groups, religions, regions, and peoples that constituted its borders. Had Kurniawan’s novel stopped at this point (and had it been written a few decades earlier), it could have been read as a work of fiction that stood for national reconciliation. But this is not the case: both history and the plot of the novel would again fall into the depths of tragedy and social fragmentation. The remainder of the plot of the novel follows closely the historical events that unfolded in the second half of the twentieth century. The sister’s children are born in the late 60’s, after the events of the

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communist purge. By the mid 80’s, they have grown into teenagers who start developing sentimental and sexual attraction for each other. A love triangle develops between the three cousins, which ultimately leads to the death of Rengannis—killed by Kirin, her cousin and lover—and Nurul Aini—who is betrodden to Kirin and dies of despair after the disappearance of Rengannis. As the reader can observe, instead of offering a conclusive solution and setting the terms for a new social coexistence, BIAW devolves into a pessimistic succession of events that ultimately reveal the failure of the country in overcoming its historical traumas.

The Return of The Repressed And The Ghosts of History Close to the end, the narrator reveals that the tragedies assailing Dewi Ayu’s family have been instigated by Ma Gedik, a colonial-era ghost. Its appearance is of great interest for our interpretation of the novel. First, the curse of Ma Gedik illustrates the difficulty of overcoming the traumas left by centuries of Dutch colonialism. As Lois Parkinson Zamora indicates, the presence of ghosts in magical realist novels often points at the “return of the repressed” (498). These spirits that inhabit a liminal state (mediating between life and death, the magical and the real) are often reminders of crimes, crises, and cruelties that hunt the collective memory (497–498). Hart observes, on the same topic, that the repressed element signified by the presence of ghosts in magical realist novels could also “suggests the apparition of a colonial identity stranded in the netherland of subalternity” (8).14 The novel seems to show this element as the cause for the historical failure of building a successful and harmonious family/nation. Ma Gedik is not only a symbol of the oppression felt by the native communities during centuries of colonial rule; his failed love story with Ma Iyang also represents the truncated possibility of a native couple that would have hypothetically been able to produce a different model of family/nation. But, as this possibility was frustrated, the ghost keeps hunting the o ­ ffspring of those who dispossessed him of a land and a future. Since this is the 14  The presence of ghosts in Magical Realism has been studied by Stephen Hart in the article ‘Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicized Ghosts in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The House of the Spirits, and Beloved’;” Wendy B. Faris also observes that: “the fact that the cultural past and beliefs present in magical realism often include encounters with the dead takes on additional significance … readers and their societies strengthen themselves through narratives that bridge the world of living and eclipsed or dying cultures” (137).

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original fault that needs to be corrected, the task can only be performed by an agent that belongs to the colonial past, a direct descendant of the Dutch colonizers that inflicted the trauma. It is Dewi Ayu who must deal with this situation and confront Ma Gedik in order to break the cycle of violence. She comes back from her grave with this specific mission and, when she finally fights him, she stabs him and his “evil spirit died, turning into a dense cloud of black smoke and disappearing, swallowed by the atmosphere” (BIAW 452). Hoping that by casting the curse she opens the possibility for a positive transformation in the fate of her family, she also returns to the world of the dead, “changing into a beautiful butterfly who flew away through the window and disappeared into the yard” (452).15 What the novel seems to indicate with this intervention is that a symbolic resolution of the colonial past is necessary to ensure any possibility of building a national project that successfully brings together Indonesia’s diverse cultural, ideological, social, and historical components. It is dealing with past wounds that still burdens the collective memory that the country can possibly venture in the direction of a more harmonic romance of national construction. In this sense, BIAW not only appears as a retrospective examination of the country’s violent past, but also projects a symbolic resolution of the ghostly presences that haunt the cemeteries of history.

Conclusion In the previous pages, I approached BIAW from the perspectives of realismo mágico and family romances of national formation. These two critical lenses were originated in and have strong ties to the field of Latin American literary studies. It might seem odd to have chosen these tools to analyze an Indonesian contemporary novel, so I want to briefly justify this double path of interpretation. First, as it was explained in the introduction, the language and the narrative strategies of Magical Realism have been assimilated as literary currency that now circulates in different countries, languages, and cultural traditions. This narrative mode has provided 15  The association between the image of the butterfly flying up into the skies is hard to dissociate from the imaginary created around Latin American Magical Realism. It evokes Mauricio Babilonia’s character in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it also reminds us of Mackandal’s magical transformation in The Kingdom of This World. It is not completely clear whether Eka Kurniawan is winking at any of these two novels in this passage, but the resemblances make it possible for the reader to make this almost inevitable connection.

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postcolonial societies with the instruments to blend the asymmetric elements of their historical processes. This is precisely what we find in BIAW, where the town of Halimunda appears as a metonymic site for the entire postcolonial Indonesian culture and the clashing narratives that interweave the plot, thus offering a foreshortening the country’s modern history.16 This narrative language allowed a writer such as Kurniawan to “reflect the raw political tensions which accompanied the movement toward nationhood” (Hart 11). Secondly, taking into consideration that this novel is structured as a narrative of national formation and recognizing that the BIAW revolves around the destiny of a family, it is not too hard to see how this novel resonates with Sommers’s theorizations about nineteenth-century Latin American national romance novels. All contextual and historical differences considered, the embodiment of national destiny in the characters of Dewi Ayu and her daughters, the emphasis in allegoric romantic relationships, and the construction of a multigeneration epic tale that mirrors Indonesia’s history, allow us to read this novel against the background of Sommer’s theory on national romances. After all, BIAW is trying to fulfill a similar task as that of works so seemingly different as Amalia, María, or Doña Bárbara. That task is to fictionalize the formation and historical transformations of a national state. Finally, I want to point out that the cross-cultural reading that I layout in this study also aims to broaden the scope of world literature studies. The bridges of connection that I trace here make visible that, through literary appropriation and critical examination, it is possible to recognize spaces of dialogue between territories that, in spite of their geographic and historical separation, can be read in parallel or concomitance, reflecting and illuminating across the ocean the constitutive elements of both shores.

Works Cited Adams, Kathleen M. Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture. Association for Asian Studies, 2019. Aizenberg, Edna. “The Famished Road: Magical Realism and the Search for Social Equity.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 1995, pp. 25–30. Anderson, Benedict. “Introduction.” Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan. Verso Books, 2016. 16  I am using here two of the categories that Stephen Slemon identifies as components of magical realist narratives: “the metonymic” use of localities, and the “foreshortening of history.” A detailed explanation of these categories is offered in his article “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse.”

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Asturias, Miguel Ángel. Men of Maize. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993. Bhabba, Homi. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabba, Routledge, 1995, pp. 1–7. Bowers, Maggie Ann. “Magical Realism and Subaltern Studies.” Magical Realism. Critical Insights, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo, Salem Press, 2014, pp. 35–48. Caymad-Freixas, Erik. “Theories of Magical Realism.” Magical Realism. Critical Insights, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo, 2014, pp. 3–17. Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. Translated by Harriet de Onís. Gollancz Publishing House, 1967. Cribb, Robert. Editor. The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Monash University, 1991. Deb, Siddhartha. “Where the Dead Refuse to Vanish.” The New Republic. September 2, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/122675/where-deadrefuse-vanish. Accessed on August 8th, 2019. Domini, John. “Review: ‘Beauty Is A Wound’ by Eka Kurniawan.” Chicago Tribune, December 3, 2015. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-prj-beauty-is-a-wound-eka-kurniawan-20151203-story.html. Accessed on August 8, 2019. Duncan, Thomas. “Indonesia’s most unexpected meteorite”—Benedict Anderson on Eka Kurniawan.” Verso Books. December 15, 2015. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2396-indonesia-s-most-unexpected-meteorite-benedictanderson-on-eka-kurniawan. Accessed on August 8th, 2019. Faris, Wendy. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and The Remystification of Narrative. Vanderbilt UP, 2004. Faris, Wendy and Parkinson Zamora. Editors. Magical Realism. Theory, History, Community. Duke UP, 1995. García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Harper Perennial, 2006. ———. Seratus Tahun Kesunyian. Translated by Mahadi Helmi, Benteng Press, 2001. Hart, Stephen. “Introduction.” A Companion to Magical Realism. Tamesis, 2010, pp. 1–12. ———. “Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicized Ghosts in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The House of the Spirits, and Beloved.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, vol. 9 Issue 2, 2003, pp. 115–123. Hart, Stephen and Wen-chin Ouyang. Editors. A Companion to Magical Realism. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010. Hindley, Donald. The Communist Party of Indonesia 1961–1963. UC Press, 1966. Kurniawan, Eka. Beauty Is A Wound. Translated by Annie Tucker. New Directions, 2015a. ———. Cantik Ita Luka. AKY Press, 2002. ———. Kitchen Curse: Stories. Translated by Annie Tucker. Verso, 2019.

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———. La belleza es una herida. Translated by Carlos Mayor. Lumen, 2017. ———. Lelaki Harimay. Gramedia, 2004. ———. Man Tiger. Translated by Labodalih Sembiring. Verso books, 2015b. ———. O (Tentang Seekor Monyet yang Ingin Menikah dengan Kaisar Dangdut). Gramedia, 2016. ———. Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas. Gramedia, 2014. ———. Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash. Translated by Annie Tucker, Pushkin Press, 2018. Lyall, Sarah. “‘Beauty Is a Wound,’ an Indonesian Blend of History, Myth and Magic.” The New York Times. September 17th, 2015. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/09/18/books/review-beauty-is-a-wound-an-indonesian-blendof-history-myth-and-magic.html. Accessed on August 8th, 2019. The Act of Killing. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Final Cut for Real, 12 of September 2012. The Look of Silence. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Final Cut for Real, 28 of August 2014. Parkinson Zamora, Lois. “Magical Romance / Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke UP, 1995, pp. 497–550. Ricklefs, Merle Calvin. A History of Modern Indonesia. Macmillan, 1990. Robinson, Geoffrey. The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres 1965–66. Princeton UP, 2019. Slemons, Stephen. “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke UP, 1995, pp. 407–425. Sommers, Doris. Foundational Fictions. The national Romances of Latin America, UC Press, 1991. ———. “Irresistible romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America.” Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabbha, Routledge, 1995. ———. “Not Just Any Narrative: How Romance Can Love Us To Death.” The Historical Novel in Latin America, edited by Daniel Balderston, Ediciones Hispamerica, 1986, pp. 47–73. Terzis, Gillian. “A Writer’s Haunting Trip Through the Horrors of Indonesian History.” The New Yorker. October 2 of 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/ books/page-turner/a-writers-haunting-trip-through-the-horrors-ofindonesian-history. Accessed August 8, 2019. Vickers, Adrien. A History of Modern Indonesia. Cambridge UP, 2005.

CHAPTER 9

Representing History, Trauma and Marginality in Chinese Magical Realist Films Jie Lu

To Chinese writers of the 1980s, no influence was more profound than that of Latin American magical realist literature. The end of the Maoist period in the late 1970s brought repercussions in all aspects of Chinese society. China’s future development came to adopt global capitalism, precipitating a rupture between socialist and post-socialist China. Then, Chinese intellectuals experienced a crisis of representation and were in search of new theoretical frameworks and representational strategies to make sense of emerging reality. At a critical moment, the journal Foreign Literature and Art published “Four Short Stories of [Gabriel García]

The author wishes to thank Bob Benedetti for his valuable suggestions and careful reading of this article. J. Lu (*) Department of Modern Languages and Literature, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_9

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Márquez” (1980).1 The works of other Latin American writers were analyzed in later publications. The December 1982 Nobel Lecture by Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” was a groundbreaking cultural event.2 Many translations, critical studies, and literary associations followed. The rapid economic progress of Latin American countries such as Mexico and Argentina further fueled this trend. Latin American literature exerted a profound influence over two Chinese literary schools: “root-seeking” literature was inspired by Márquez’s magical realism, and the Chinese avant-garde by Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction. These works helped to fuel a debate over whether to pursue Western modernism or Chinese native traditions. The root-seeking movement advocated literary production grounded in traditional Chinese culture and sought to incorporate the national past into contemporary literature. Acheng, a well-known Chinese writer, concludes “a nation seems to be forgetful of its own past, yet it is not easy to forget” (qtd. in Duran & Huang 4–5). After having been shackled by socialist realism, root-seeking writers sought new literary forms to represent the traditional, the local, and the indigenous. Márquez’s magical realism was enthusiastically embraced because it could help to articulate contemporary anxieties without ignoring a realist perspective entirely; it could also help to address the role of Chinese tradition in the modernization project. The works of Mo Yan, 2012 Nobel Literature Laurate, embody the Chinese version of magical realism. Per Wästberg, Chairman of the Swedish Academy makes mention of this linkage in his presentation speech: “He [Mo Yan] is more hilarious and more appalling than most in the wake of Rabelais and Swift—in our time, in the wake of García Márquez.” In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mo Yan also mentions García Márquez: 1  The four short stories included in this issue: “Los funerales de la Mamá Grande” [“Big Mama’s Funeral”], “En este pueblo no hay ladrones” [“No Thieves in This Town)”], “La siesta del martes” [“Tuesday’s Siesta”], and “Rosas artificiales” [“Artificial Roses”], translated by Zhou Ziqin, Liu Ying, and Liu Xiliang. Foreign Literature and Art, No. 3, 1980. 2  The introduction/translation of Latin American literature between 1949–1965 (before the Cultural Revolution) focused on anti-American and anticolonial writers like Pablo Neruda, Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Amado, José Mancisidor, Agustin Cuzzani, Mariano Azuela, and others. The onset of the Cultural Revolution stopped the introduction of Latin American literature until the early 1980s. For details, see “The Translation and Publication of Latin American Literature in China for the Past Hundred Years” by Xiaomei Zhao in Studies on Publication and Distribution, Vol. 5, 2016, pp. 102–105.

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Acceptance into the Academy was a major turning point in my literary career. There I undertook a systematic study of Chinese and foreign literary histories and read many foreign novels in translation: works by Faulkner, García Márquez, and others inspired me to concentrate on my native home. Northeast Gaomi Township became my literary kingdom; childhood memories and the people from my hometown became the material for my fiction.

Discussing “Two Burning Furnaces,” Mo Yan notes that the temporal and spatial reversals, the overlapped life worlds, and the hyperbolic aesthetics of One Hundred Years of Solitutde deeply shook him (298). But he continues, “If I cannot create and develop an area that belongs to myself, then I will never have my own distinct features” (299). To accomplish this distinctiveness, he claims to “have retreated from Western influence and learned from Chinese folk literature and traditional writings” (qtd. in Duran & Huang 5). Chinese magical realist writings bypass postcolonial conditions, focusing instead on how to understand the Chinese historical past and cultural tradition in postsocialist/postrevolutionary conditions. These writings attempt to grasp Chinese mixed temporalities and spatialities and to make sense of the local/regional cultures at a time when these cultures were already felt as the Other in modernity. Following the “native soil” tradition in the early-modern writings of Shen Congwen, and inspired by Latin American magical realism, Chinese magical realists immerse themselves in the local and native traditions that include slangs, dialects, customs, habits, folk stories, legends, jokes, myths, folk songs, fairy tales, premodern and primitive life styles, memories, folk religious beliefs, ghost lore, traditional mysterious and supernatural tales, and elements of irrationality and inexplicability. Following root-seeking literature, Chinese magical writings foreground the rural as the site through which to reconstruct national cultural identity as they believe that the rural represents Chinese history and authentic cultural tradition. The countryside, claims Han Shaogong, “is the museum of our national history” (qtd. in FitzGerald 14). Related to rural centrality is an obsession with employing history to rediscover and replenish an otherwise empty sphere: the past is assumed estranged and erased by the official historical narrative. In rewriting history, Chinese magical realist writings demonstrate their debt to Márquez: both use long family histories with a multitude of characters to develop a long and complex storyline. These family narratives epitomize the nation’s past and its historical development. Such narratives combine multiple elements from

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tradition and contemporaneity, nativism, and universality as well as update old myths and traditional literary genres. The outcome is a new understanding of relationship to history. Chinese magical realists have turned a literary genre of postcolonial resistance in Latin America into a rethinking of Chinese tradition as it approaches modernity. This reformulation opposes the dominance of two grand narratives: the prevailing myth of progressive modernization/modernity and the myth of communist historical thinking.3 The Chinese magical realist fiction shares the hallmarks of its Latin American counterpart: a high degree of stylization, poetic excess, narrative convolution, and hybrid aesthetics. Mo Yan’s style and the narrative’s carnivalesque adventures are often regarded as part of Chinese avant-garde literature. However, Mo Yan’ fictional world can appear gory, grotesque, farcical, ironic, idiosyncratic, and as black humor. This is because he is picturing a world that is alienated and forgotten by modernity and the progressive perspective of history. For Chinese writers, Latin American 3  Other typical Chinese magical realist works include those by Han Shaogong, Jia Pingwa, Chen Zhongshi, Zhang Wei, and Zhaxidawa (Tashi Dawa, a Tibetan writer). Tang Xi and Wu Shuni’s article, “On Dissemination and Influences of Latin American Postmodernist Literature in China,” (Journal of Lanzhou Institute of Education, Vol. 31, No. 8, August 2015) discusses how magical realist techniques have profoundly influenced Chinese writers such as Mo Yan, Su Tong, Chen Zhongshi and Zhou Daxin. Interestingly, the opening sentence in One Hundred Years of Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”) is often imitated in their family sagas. The quotation is from One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2003, p. 1. Other studies in English on Chinese writers influenced by magical realism include: Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, “Memory or Fantasy? ‘Honggaoliang’s Narrator by G. Andrew Stuckey (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 18, No. 2, fall, 2006, pp. 131–162); “Gendered narrative of suffering in Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips” by Lanlan Du (Neohelicon, 43, 2016, pp.  26–44); Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg’s “Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and the Supernatural,” in The International Fiction Review, 32, 2005, pp. 21–31; Vivian Lee’s “Cultural Lexicology: ‘Maqiao Dictionary’ by Han Shaogong,” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 14, No. 1, spring 2002, pp.  145–177; Jie Lu’s Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization, Marshall Cavendish, 2005 (for Zhang Wei’s magical realist writings); Franz Xaver Erhard’s “Magical Realism and Tibetan Literature,” in Contemporary Tibetan Literary Studies: PIATS 2003: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, pp. 133–146; Yiyan Wang’s “The Politics of Representing Tibet: Alai’s Tibetan Native-Place Stories” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol. 25, No. 1, spring, 2013, pp. 96–130.

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magical realism may be more influential regarding its formal as opposed to its political elements. The root-seeking school already provided the Chinese a useful political perspective grounded in the native-soil tradition. Latin American magical realism, while not at odds with these Chinese political traditions, has been most influential in providing powerful representational strategies and approaches that suggest innovative language. Magical realism, whose most engaging phase was during the 1980s and 1990’s, may have lost its critical edge for Chinese and global audiences in the early twenty-first century. While the formal strategies are certainly not yet exhausted, there are other factors that may explain its decline. For example, changed sociocultural conditions such as  intensified globalization in China have yielded new issues and concerns. Moreover, magical realist works have been canonized; they have received globalized status, along with the internalization and popularization of their stylistic features. Still, magical realism has never disappeared from the literary scene and has expanded into cultural products such as films. Its unique and powerful mode of storytelling, its aesthetics of excess, “ex-centric” perspectives, and resistance have crossed national, social, and cultural boundaries. It remains an effective artistic form with which to confront new problems, issues, and anxieties. This chapter examines two Chinese films, The Sun Also Rises by (2007, dir. by Jiang Wen) and Hello Mr. Tree! (2011, dir. by Han Jie)4 in the context of the Chinese magical realist tradition. While representing the Mao’s socialist period and the post-socialist/post-revolutionary period of contemporary China, the two films maintain magical realist concerns with social marginality, the subaltern, and the suppressed but traumatic effects of contemporary oppression and transformation. The films contain a high degree of visual stylization, an aesthetics of excess, narrative gaps and fissures, and ontological confusion. They, however, do not rely on magical elements such as myths and legends, but highlight cinematic images and colors to symbolize the traumatic, uncanny, and repressed. The carnivalesque style of The Sun Also Rises, in the aesthetic tradition of Mo Yan’s magical realist fiction, captures the structure of absurdity, and a holistic 4  Jiang Wen (1963-) is the Chinese film director of In the Heat of the Sun (1994), Devils on the Doorstep (2000), New York, I Love You (2007), Let the Bullets Fly (2010), Gone with the Bullets (2014), and Hidden Man (2018). He started his film career as an actor and has starred and acted in numerous films and television dramas. Han Jie (1977-), the Chinese film director of Walking on the Wild Side (2006), Namiya (2017), and Unserious Hero (2018).

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sense of history for the high socialist period. Hello, Mr. Tree! with its subdued magical elements focuses on the contemporary rural China. However, the rural is thereafter reduced in its discursive centrality and is replaced by the city. The rural is not simply replaced, but it is in the process of displacement by urban and industrial life. The rural sublime typified by the root-searching literature turns into rural problematics in this film. As in other contemporary Chinese literature and film, peasants are pictured as gradually losing their distinctive culture and being merged with the deceng, the social bottom, or the subaltern.

Cinematic Magical Realism Amid theoretical debates, magical realism continues a controversial literary perspective. The oft-cited statement by David Young and Keith Hollaman that “in a magical realist story there must be an irreducible element, something that cannot be explained by logic, familiar knowledge, or received belief” (4) provides a preliminary definition. The key, however, is how to define magical. Are sociogeographic factors or specific textual features definitive? (Aldea 3). For Aldea the critical questions are, “is the magic understood as the supernatural, or merely a way of looking at reality? Is the magic inherent in reality or is it purely textual?” (2). Jameson then defines, “magic realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of pre-capitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features” (311). The genre relies on a “narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village [sic] or even tribal myth” (Jameson 302). He further defines magic realism, consistent with Carpentier’s conception of a “marvelous real,” as “reality already in and of itself magical or fantastic” (311). Jameson’s definition should not be taken to imply that magical realism is purely anthropological and that it may be applied to any circumstance. Rather, it is generally grounded in a historical and political situation, namely, the struggle against colonialism in the Third-world countries. Jameson differentiates magical realism from postmodern literature with its “consequent weakening of historicity” (Aldea 5). To Jameson, magical realism is clearly an alternative to “nostalgia film.” In addition to the content-oriented definitions of magical realism, there are definitions that emphasize representational features. For example, thematic and “stylistic hybridity” may be said to be at the heart of the politics and techniques of magical realism. While Hutcheon would term this

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aspect of magical realism “ex-centrality,” Aldea views it as a “synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism and magic and myth, political passion and nonpolitical artistry, characterization and caricature, humor and terror” (Aldea 9). In any case, magical realism makes consistent use of postmodernist devices such as matafictionality, linguistic playfulness, self-­ reflexivity, intertextuality, and carnivalesque (Aldea 9). These two definitional strategies do not adequately clarify the relationship between the real and the magical, however. The first definition does not make clear the distinction of magical realism from texts—including postcolonial ones—that treat different cultures. The second set of definitional strategies does not clearly distinguish magical realism from postmodernist writing. Magical realism still needs to be defined textually and technically. Aldea proposes that the appropriate way to describe the unique way a magical realist text works is the resolution of the antimony of both world views and realities through a matter-of-fact realist narrative (15). To her, the subversion of Western realism does not just lie in the magical elements, but rather in the factual or matter-of-fact tone and narration, and in the incorporation of the Other into what is real. The importance of both dimensions is also explained by Salman Rushdie: The trouble with the term ‘magic realism,’ el realismo mágico, is that when people say or hear it, they are really hearing or saying only half of it, ‘magic,’ without paying attention to the other half, ‘realism.’ But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere whimsy—writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has effect. It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real, because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected ways. (New York Times)

Key to an appreciation of cinematic magical realism is a clear definition of how magical elements are incorporated into films and the resolution of the antimony of the real and magical in cinematic terms. In “On Magic Realism in Film,” Fredric Jameson, one of the rare few who discuss cinematic magical realism, stresses the significance of uncanny images, display of psychological tension in cinematic objects, dynamic function of color, embedded structural tensions, and disruption of realist narrative and chronology.5 A film can encompass a lengthy historical time in its story; 5  Jameson’s discussion of magic[al] realism does not provide a systematic theorization but is based on his analysis of three films: Agnieszka Holland’s Goraczka [Fever, Poland, 1981],

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­ owever, due to its limited length (normally 120 minutes), the film relies h on visual aesthetics to signal the magical, strange and uncanny. Maggie Ann Bowers, in her analysis of film adaptations of magical realist novels focuses on “how the visual elements affect the narrative magical realism” (105). In other words, the magical narrative in literature is replaced by magical visual elements to amplify the irreducible elements. Yet, for the film that excels in special effects, it could be challenging to differentiate between magical elements and visual effects. Bower points out, for instance, that close-ups on objects could be part of montage shorts (105); special effects may easily develop into fantasy transcending their realist contexts. Thus, as indicated by Jameson, color and uncanny images must be contained by the “real” within the film, so that the magical is revealed to be within the reality, or part of reality, rather than beyond it. This echoes Rushdie’s stress on the real; herein lies the cinematic reconciliation of magical realism as discussed by many critics. This reconciliation occurs because the magical is made part of the real, rather than simply part of a special effect.

History and Trauma in The Sun Also Rises The Sun Also Rises tells the stories of six characters in four episodes subtitled: Madness, Love, the Gun and Dream. They are not chronologically arranged. The first section takes place in spring 1976. The mad mother loses a pair of brightly colored shoes embroidered in the shape of fish with long and yellow whiskers. She begins a series of crazy and incredible acts: climbs a tall tree with a sheep, talks to a cat, randomly hits her son, breaks his abacus, digs a hole, smashes things, uses a piece of grass turf as a raft, and makes a house of cobblestones decorated with pieced-together earthenware. The second section takes place that summer. Two male teachers and a female doctor are on a college campus. In an absurd incident, Teacher Liang is mistakenly accused of groping women during an outdoor movie showing. After his reputation is restored, he hangs himself. In the third story, that autumn, the mad mother disappears down a local river on the day Teacher Tang and his wife are sent to this rural village. Her son is seduced by Teacher Tangs’s lonely wife; he is finally killed by her husband because the former does not know what “velvet” is. In the fourth story, Francisco Norden’s Cóndores no entierran todos los días [A Man of Principle, Colombia, 1984], and Jacobo Penzo’s La casa de agua [The House of Water, Venezuela, 1982].

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the young (mad) mother and the fiancé (later wife) of Teacher Tang meet during the1958 winter in the Gobi Desert. The fiancé is traveling to marry Teacher Tang while the pregnant mother is gathering the  dead father’s belongings (the father of her incoming baby). In the eventual carnivalesque desert wedding, a strange train, whose passengers are playing ping pong and cooking, passes by. Simultaneously, the young mother gives birth to a boy whom she then finds on the train tracks surrounded by flowers. The Sun Also Rises, known for its formal complexity and its abundant ambivalent images, symbols, and objects, features improbable events and scenes, narrative gaps and fissures, an aesthetics of excess, and an allegorical carnival. It is an interpretative labyrinth that resists any thematic coherence. Adopting a magical realist paradigm, viewers may understand that the magical images represent two different forms of madness: the mother’s and that of an age filled with irrationality and absurdity. The mad mother’s trajectory, from her traumatic experience of romantic love to her disillusionment and death, evokes a parallel development at a historical level from a passionately idealistic 1958 to the absurdity, irrationality, and disillusionment of the Cultural Revolution at the apex of Mao’s socialism. The tragic endings of the mad mother, Teacher Liang, and the son reveal the violent tendencies of the age. Magical images/figures/events here mark the sites of Otherness and of excess that destabilized the hegemony and exposed the violence and irrationality already  embedded in communist idealism. As noted, to interpret a magical realist film, it is necessary to identify the Real so as not to be misled by special effects and the fantastic worlds these can suggest. Specifically, it is a priority of any interpretation to identify the dialectic between the Real and the magical in a film. This is so because, for a magical realist film to properly meet its objectives, the Real must contain the magical and the magical must expand the Real. The Sun Also Rises is set in two contrasting regions: a southern village and town, and the Gobi Desert. The diegetic world of a picturesque and fairytale-like rural village presents a familiar and known reality, structured by convergent series6 to ensure that reality is effectively based on a framework of authentication. Note that the mad mother and her son have a well-­ furnished house in the local style—a domestic space where their daily activities occur including her crazy behaviors. The house is situated in a 6

 This is a Deleuz’ term discussed in Aldea (33).

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rural village. The film details the village houses, the rural road, the basketball court, the office where the son works as an accountant, and a cultivated field. The village is separated by a river beyond which is a forest. This geographically configured rural world is anchored in time, the year 1976. The Chinese Cultural Revolution is suggested by a plethora of signs including Mao’s portraits and political slogans. The mad mother represents a central magical element in this diegetic world. She possesses incredible power, including the ability to climb a tall tree and to use grass turf as a raft to cross the river. Though grounded in reality, through her son and the villagers’ acceptance, her magical power makes her different. Her behaviors do not fit a natural world; rather, they are “deterritorialized.” In other words, they are not “directly referential” (Aldea 51), and have lost meaning in relation to an objective reality. In Aldea and Deleuze’s terms, the mother possesses “divergent element[s] in the otherwise convergent series of realism” (34). Detached from the dominant reality represented by the State, her magic power belongs to the unspeakable, that is, something that cannot be defined by reality or offical history. The mad mother’s various magical and extraordinary behaviors imply a search for her identity. She was an outsider to the rural village—the father’s hometown. These behaviors are part of a strategy to attain her lost identity caused by traumatic experiences related to the absence of the father. The father was a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier who fought in the Korean War. He was known as (one of) “the most lovable people”—a high accolade for a Korean War veteran. Yet, the father’s Russian name (Alyosha) unknown to the mother, three plaits of different colors, and a Russian novel, What Is to Be Done (by Nikolai Chernyshevsky) among his belongings given to the young mother suggest a betrayal. A subplot of this Russian novel is a triangular love relationship, which at very least implies the father’s infidelity. Her discovery of his betrayal, even after his death, becomes the unspeakable in an oppressed society, and must be ignored and thus cannot be properly addressed. Therefore, the father’s behavior surfaces in uncanny images. In other words, the irreducible, “difficult to grasp in formal terms,” is converted in the film “into the materiality of an image, the discursive excess of magic realism into the visual excess of the moving image” (Pieldner 109). A wild parrot keeps repeating “I know, I know,” the same words the mother keeps murmuring after she learns of the father’s death. The cave-like stone house is furnished with the pieced-­ together earthenware whose fragility—all broken by the son’s sneeze— recalls her broken relationship. Later, the mother’s clothes and shoes,

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flowing down the river in the well-ordered form without the body inside, is, as material objects, part of the diegetic world; yet the implausibility of their keeping the orginal shape in water addes a magical dimension. We may interpret these scenes as indicators of the mother’s rational understanding of her loss, her broken dreams, and her disillusionments; yet, these scenes are also empty signifiers in the real world. As signs of the magical they transcend objective reality and cannot be territorized in the diegetic reality. Indicating an absence and “something else” at the level of the “real,” they will need to be re-territorialized to gain definition. However, the disappearance of the mad mother, particularly after she claims to have regained her senses, indicates that it will be impossible to territorialize these magical elements in the sociohistorical reality of a China ruled through oppression. An individual, called Uncle Li by the mad mother and son, appears dressed in the army uniform and smoking a cigarette. He talks with mother and son with familiarity, explaining how he brought them to the village years ago. Later, the mad mother tells her son that Uncle Li died long ago and, therefore, this person is a ghost, thereby casting doubt in the individual’s identity. If he is indeed a ghost, then why can the son see him? Uncle Li’s resurrection in the diegetic world and his transition between life and death defy realistic logic and historical chronology and is transfigured into a magical event. Then again, according to Deleuze, what is significant about the ghost is the distinction “between the event as such and the corporeal state of affairs which incites it about or in which it is actualized” (quoted in Chen 237). Uncle Li who, like the father, is a PLA soldier and was associated with the mother’s early life, is invoked here to recall a traumatic experience. The mother finds this traumatic experience incoherent, inarticulable, and impossible to represent; she is unable to clearly tell her son what the father looked like and what exactly happened. Throughout the film, the absent father goes unseen—in the couple’s photo, the father’s image is cut out. If Uncle Li’s appearance is to be taken as haunting or returning in the traditional Chinese ghost lore, then his return does not signify some earlier event, but the mother’s current inability to overcome her trauma caused by the father’s departure and his betrayal. It invests the material world with palpable wonder or “something else” that connects disparate stories, private accounts and memories that are violently silenced by the official story. However, if her extraordinary and almost carnivalesque acts are signs of psychic effects caused by trauma and deep sufferings, they also

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serve as healers. Yet, these psychic expressions are inadequate in overcoming the full weight of her traumatic experience because it is also associated with her romantic impulse. She had fallen in love with a hero, the “most loveable” veteran of the Korean War; she held a “life dream” embodied by the magical stone cave-house decorated with pieced-together earthenware. Placing her son’s picture next to that of Li Tiemei, the heroine in The Legend of the Red Lantern,7 further symbolizes her romantic dreams. Her mysterious disappearance is the final act of her disillusionment and expresses her resistance to reality. As the story’s victim, the mother’s comical behavior is symptomatic of the times as represented in the film’s carnivalesque scenes. Teacher Tang’s wedding scene, set in 1958, includes a bonfire in the Gobi Desert. People are singing, dancing, drinking, eating, running, and waving to a passing train. A tent catches fire and is pictured flying in the air. According to Bakhtin, carnival, while it celebrates the senses, is “sharply distinct from the serious, official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials” (5). The carnival spirit is the reversal and defiance of commonly held values and hierarchical relationships. In the film, however, the carnivalesque celebration embodies the frenzied enthusiasm engendered by a 1958 utopian impulse, when all Chinese were wholeheartedly engaged in the Great Leap Forward Movement. As mentioned, passengers are playing ping pong and cooking inside the passing train. They are acting out their daily lives under collectivization, the hallmark of this period. Psychological dynamics are further expressed by Teacher Tang’s fiancé who, having traveled from abroad, seeks love in China’s Gobi Desert. A second example of this passionate but unbelievable age is captured by the young mother who gives birth on the train but magically finds the baby on the train tracks surrounded by many flowers. These happy, carnivalesque, and magical events highlight the passionate dimensions of the age, rather than its subversive and rebellious aspects. However, within this passion lies a hint of the blindness that leads to disillusionment. These hints are embedded in these scenes: where the pregnant young mother picks up the dead father’s possessions, where she realizes his betrayal, and where a sign with the 7  During the Cultural Revolution, no dramas, operas, or ballets could take place in theaters, except for so-called eight-model dramas approved by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, who controlled literary/art circles. The Legend of the Red Lantern, a Beijing opera, was one of them. Li Tiemei simultaneously represented the popular images of the iron woman and of the “super girl” idol.

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word “End” points toward the place where the fiancé is to meet Teaching Tang to wed. The beginning of the end of this passionate idealism is already embedded in the soberness of these scenes. Another carnivalesque scene in this section contrasts with the comical wedding in the first section. An audience is enjoying a film in an outdoor movie showing (as Teacher Tang self-indulgently hums a song in his room) when someone shouts “pervert,” because someone is groping several women in the dark. People with flashlights immediately start chasing the alleged offender. Here, the suppressed sexual desires within an oppressive society are released in an absurd and comical form. The effort to catch the molester creates a symbolic space for venting prohibited desires in a “politically correct” fashion. The revolutionary passion and romantic sentiment embodied in the wedding scene is sublimated by the violent release of libidinous desires. Another example of this transformation is found in the story of Teacher Tang and his wife whose marriage, though based on romance, ends by their adultery. Framed by the carnivalesque political movements of the Mao’s high socialist period, these characters act out the transition from a lofty revolutionary idealism and romantic emotions to disillusionment. Irreducible elements as a hyperbolic cinematic style, carnivalesque spectacles, symbolic overdetermination, narrative fissures, and circular chronology give this film a magical substratum. The historical reality on screen is deeply rooted in the Real, while the magical elements accurately capture an irrational period of Chinese history and its suppressed alterity. One of the key  thematic focuses, adopted by Latin American, Chinese magical realist literature as well as magical realist films, is the representation of the fates and marginal lives of anonymous individuals within their historical context.

Experiences of Marginality in Hello, Mr. Tree! The Sun Also Rises represents a mother’s traumatic experience during the high socialist period, while Hello Mr. Tree! records the traumatic impact of industrialization and urbanization on rural China and offers a critique of economic development strategies pursued at the expense of rural peasants. The penetration of a market system into rural areas is shown as creating stratification and fragmentation among local communities, which results in the reduced-to-superfluous marginality of peasants. While no longer

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working their fields, they are unable to develop a sense of belonging in the cities. Sharing themes of trauma and alienation caused by political suppression, Hello, Mr. Tree! is cinematically different from The Sun Also Rises. The latter is characterized by excessive embellishment and hyperbole, while the former adopts a documentary-realistic style à la Chinese Sixth Generation Films. Hello, Mr. Tree! echoes early Italian neorealism and Brazilian Cinema Novo.8 Its association with magical realism derives from a break with color and images and the expansion of reality through the interruption of its ontological continuum rather than through supernatural or magical intervention. Representing the plight of farmers whose houses are taken by a mining enterprise, the film tells of Shu (“tree” in Chinese), the eponymous protagonist, who is gradually marginalized by the socioeconomic changes in his village. The village is in the area rich with coal, and mining has caused the ground to sink and water to be cut off. As a result, villagers are being dislocated. Shu leaves for a provincial city to work as a school janitor. After a chance encounter with the beautiful but deaf-mute Xiaomei, he falls in love and decides to marry her. Shu’s father and older brother are deceased; he sometimes “sees” his father in hallucinations, but not his older brother who was accidentally killed by the father. The night before the wedding, he finally “sees” the older brother who, together with his fiancé, are performing a popular 1980s song for his wedding. After losing a brawl with his younger brother over a car, Shu goes mad but discovers that he can predict the future. When his premonitions prove true, he becomes a respected prophet who advises businesses. He is henceforth respectfully addressed as Mr. Shu (Mr. Tree). The truth of the matter, however, is that, after the fight, he has lost his connection with reality so that all ensuing events are hallucinations or fantasies. The film ends with Shu wandering along a sideroad between an empty village and distant apartment buildings. He is lost physically and spiritually between the rural and the urban, and the present and the future.

8  Although this film shares some features from Cinema Novo, there has been no critical discussion on the influence of Brazil’s Cinema Novo on Chinese films. Brazilian films were introduced to Chinese audiences via film festivals recently. For instance, eight Brazilian films were shown in the Beijing Film Festival in April 2015; the Brazilian Film Exhibition was held in six Chinese cities and featured sixteen films in November 2019.

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At the beginning of the film, a dulled, grey-brownish landscape dotted by rundown homes, broken window glasses, and uneven streets introduce a reality reminiscent of the pathos of daily life in rural China. This diegetic world is characterized by spare visual economies and dominated by greyish textures, ignoring the aesthetic beauty often applied to cinematic representations of rural scenes. This depleting rural chronotope is interrupted by an advertising van that is announcing a new apartment complex named New Sun City. It conveys a momentary sense of unreality in an otherwise dingy and oppressive environment. Yet this vision of a better life is built around the forced dislocation of villagers and the colonization of the rural by the industrial urban. What is evoked is a deceptive repetition of the enclosure movement that accompanied early Western industrialization. This forced dislocation and takeover of land along with its associated rural poverty has led to what may be the largest country-to-city migration in history. It has resulted in the creation of an abundant number of migrant workers who have supported China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization. However, under the dominant narrative of economic development, we find a history of rural fragmentation, or we can use what Jameson calls “other historical rhythms” (1981, 104). Having lost his land and home, Shu finds it difficult to work in the city; as a rural person, he is out of step with city life and modern systems. Pushed aside to the socioeconomic margin, Shu reflects on what Jameson calls the “[c]lassical psychic fragmentation … always a consequence of the division of labor in the social world” (1991, 370). Shu is ill at ease everywhere and is reduced to superfluousness, to a rural and urban marginality. This is the result of being cut off from his rural base. He lacks the skills necessary to survive in an urban setting; in particular, he lacks a true sense of relentless socioeconomic change. His pathetic life embodies, again using a Jamesonian term, the “other historical rhythm[s]” of rural fragmentation that, in turn. leaves him nowhere. While magical chronological disruption is a narrative approach of magical realism, this film is less compelled by an episodic chronology than by a linear one. Its plot connects real events in Shu’s life during the first part of the film and, later, connects his delusional occurrences in chronological order. Although certain fantasized events in the second part of the film correspond to or duplicate preceding true events, it is hard to identify the point that separates fantasy from reality. Delusional events follow true ones naturally, both in causality and realistic details. However, this temporal continuum between the real and the unreal, without clear transitional

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indications, works against the essence of realism. It blurs the boundary between two ontologically different worlds. In “On Magic Realism in Film,” Jameson emphasizes that blurring the line between reality and fantasy and disrupting temporal and spatial dimensions are characteristic of magical realism. The merging of the phenomenal world with an alternative fantastic one explores both trauma and desire. In this film, time is neither completely linear nor homogenous. It is populated with traces of tradition and return of a traumatic past. The realistic representation of Shu’s fantasy world can be viewed as a visual rendition of the psychic effect of a drastic, even violent, transformation brought about by industrialization in rural areas. The fact that Shu is “set aside” illustrates how economic and capitalist development brings about unstable temporalities. If Shu’s narrative embodies the “other historical rhythm[s]” suppressed by the nation’s industrialization and urbanization, then his fantasized predictions represent an alternative discourse within this “other historical rhythm[s].” In the film, Shu is rendered voiceless and becomes an object of ridicule and rejection. Whenever he tries to speak, he is either ignored, pushed aside, or forced to kneel apologetically. His inability to articulate symbolizes the loss of a coherent subaltern narrative, the deprivation of the discursive power of the rural, and the domination of industrial economics and urbanization. Shu never recovers his senses after the wedding, as indicated by his inability to open his eyes fully. However, in his fantasized world, he makes predictions such as the environmental damage mining will cause. Pointing to an abandoned mine, he suggests to the head of the mining company in a kind of mad and illogical language, “Take a look at the abandoned mine over there. It has polluted so much of our environment. Invest some money in scientific research, and we can use these coal residues to make atomic bombs; in this way we can immediately add the fifth invention to Four Great Inventions of our country.” Earlier in the film, Shu suffered humiliation when he dared to challenge Erzhu for having relied on the head of the village to take the village land for mining. Thus, in real life, Shu is not in a position to tell the truth without being humiliated but, in his delusional world, he doeos not need to worry. Deranged Shu gains respect, dignity, and even revenge in his imagined world. For example, he forces Erzhu to kneel by using Fairy He’s power to exorcise the ghost inside Erzhu. However, it is through the premodern discourse of prediction and superstitious belief that Shu has regained his discursive power and is able to speak the truth. The smooth temporal

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continuum, which runs through and connects both the objective and the fantasized worlds, nevertheless emphasizes the chronological disjunction between different historical developments and brings out the “other historical rhythms” suppressed by the dominant history. The private fantasy is connected to a subjective and unfulfilled desire within objective reality. These techniques complicate the film’s nominal commitment to realism through their interpenetration of different ontological realms and, through the representation of fantasies realistically, and align the film with stylistic tradition of magical realism. While Shu’s fantasized world invokes the historical rhythm of rural fragmentation, the flash-out of traumatic images calls up another concealed historical suppression. His older brother is beaten and accidentally strangled by his father for hooliganism.9 Thereafter, his father dies. These events leave deep and traumatic scars in Shu. The film never provides details about his brother’s hooliganism. Yet, based on images that appear to Shu in his delusions, the older brother seems to have been a hippie, dressed in fashionable style and seeking individual freedom during the conservative 1980s. The austere image of the father dressed in official garb embodies this conservatism; his son’s strangling is representative of the clash between an emerging modernity and a persistent traditionalism in the early stages of China’s economic reform. In discussing the concept of traumatic imagination, Eugene L. Arva uses “shock chronotope” to refer to the psychic effects of extremely violent historical situations such as slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war. Under such circumstances, each individual trauma is metonymic of the collective experience. Arva defines this shock chronotope as “time-spaces marked by events whose violence has rendered them resistant to rationalization and adequate representation” (26). To him, the magical realist text “might not … explain the unspeakable … [but] it can certainly make it felt and re-experienced in a vicarious way” (9). The sociopolitical oppressiveness in 1980s’ China cannot be compared with these events that Arva includes in terms of violence, intensity, and scope; however the concept of “shock chronotope” can be applied here to identify the larger historical time-space whose suppression has traumatically continued to affect the present. Thus, in Hello, Mr. Tree!, 9  The crime of hooliganism, based on Baidu Encyclopedia, first established in 1979, refers to a wide range of acts: fighting, trouble making, harassing women, molesting children, and destroying public property. It was revoked as a crime in 1997 (https://baike.baidu.com/ item/流氓罪/8436043?fr=aladdin). Accessed 20 March 2020.

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how historical oppression is experienced shows its traumatic seriousness. Shu’s haunting experience is personally traumatic and historically repetitive: past social oppression is reproduced by the current socioeconomic repression. A traumatic continuum is thus established between the older brother’s death and the socioeconomic condition that leads Shu to madness. The film uses ordinary articles of cultural and modern consumption to explore the physical and psychological effects of development and urban culture on Shu. For instance, before a blind date with Xiaomei, Shu forgoes a new outfit and hairstyling and instead buys a pair of glasses to look sophisticated. The strangeness of Shu wearing glasses is oddly fitting: it forebodes his deranged “critical insight” into the countryside’s actual living conditions and the destruction of its environment. At another time, Shu becomes angry with his younger brother for not being able to borrow a Toyota Crown vehicle for his wedding and, getting into fisticuffs with him, suffers a severe beating. Shu’s insistence on this model for a wedding car denotes his desire to be like those “successful” city people. Here, the object functions as an emblem of an urban lifestyle and represents Shu’s last effort to be urbanized; the ensuing disappointment leads to Shu’s break with reality. The material world (the car) has agency and power and Shu, by acknowledging it, tries to construct his own subjectivity and dignity through it. The spatial dimensions of the car are also reflective of Shu’s distance from the social status urban life offers. Time is spatialized in that the unattainable object implies existence outside progressive and modern temporality. This is underscored in the final scene in which the deranged Shu no longer gazes at the distant city, but turns inward and backward, drifting on the edges of both the country and city. The car is certainly not a magical or supernatural object; yet, its very materiality constitutes the uncanny invocation of the ontologically different world of the deranged. Its lack of magical dimension connects the real to the fantasized world in the most realistic of ways. In “On Magic Realism in Film,” Jameson analyzes three films (Fever, La Casa de Agua, and Cóndores) that feature realist diegetic details such as décor, costumes, customs, and settings of real historical settings. However, each film respectively depicts Poland, Venezuela, and Colombia as faded worlds that look unreal and even surrealistic. Here traditional realism gives way to the magical real through images of “intensity” that, according to Jameson, points to something personal, or of matters external to the films’ diegetic worlds. These three films are dominated by dark greens, dull

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yellows, and greys. They are all of sudden “intruded” by means of unexpected flashes of bright color, totally inconsistent with the background color palette. While defamiliarizing the diegetic world, this color interruption can be a manifestation of the uncanny or point to an “excised” temporality and buried memory. Jameson argues that the intensification or withdrawal of color from an image can have a magical affect if the object or the mise-en-scène is derealized sufficiently to cause a visual shock (305–306). Hello Mr. Tree! is an example of a film dominated by dull, drab and grey pictures of a gloomy and dreary rural world. Yet, there are moments when this greyish and brownish color scheme is broken by bright color. In two wedding scenes, bright red is used to contrast with a snow-covered, and dirty-white background. The bright red color is logical and cultural at the wedding, but the connection between the color red and Shu’s insanity is strangely significant. From the first wedding that Shu attends to the second, his own, Shu becomes increasingly delusional. He cannot consciously participate in his own wedding and starts to descend into a make-believe world. The contrast between the red color of happiness and that of derangement defamiliarizes the diegetic world, pointing to an ontologically different fantasy realm. According to Jameson, the application of color to particular images creates an effect that signals the materialization of repressed thought or unfulfilled desires (314). In Hello Mr. Tree! the application of the color red does not disrupt the narrative and its mise-en-scène, but highlights the suffering and injustice embedded in Shu’s fantasies—it is part of the psychic process that accentuates disruption and tension. While any association with insanity deprives the color red of its usual cultural connotations, its alienating effect is further intensified by its appearance toward the end of the film: a bloody and uncanny redness, in the entire frame, provides a background for people who are running forward as if attracted by something as Shu follows. After a few steps, he is halted by a tree that looks sinister; its size covers up the entire frame. Given its association with the death of Shu’s older brother who was strangled under a tree, the tree becomes a visual image of Shu’s repressed trauma. Consequently, the color red can be understood as a prelude to Shu’s further descent into a fantasied world or refer to this world itself and his subjective interiority. Jameson finds in Cézanne’s paintings that a “heightened exaltation” of bright colors are contrasted with “the contracting counterforce of ochre, which winds this excitement down and effectively recontains its energies”

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(2016, 263). In other words, the mutual containment of contrasting colors, while highlighting the tension between reality and the magical, ensures that the latter does not evolve into pure fantasy. In the context of this film, the interplay between bright red and the dully tinted greyish and brownish colors may demonstrate the structural tension characteristic of magical realism by revealing the fantasized as part of the real. According to Jameson again, color can be just a physical manifestation of the uncanny and is not necessarily coded or symbolic. Thus, the color red can be interpreted in multiple ways but, in any case, it draws attention to the film as both fiction and artifact. While following the documentary realist tradition of the Chinese Sixth Generation films, this film, with its unrealistic and inconsistent color schemes, stands out from the realist mode and becomes a point of departure toward magical realism. Hello Mr. Tree! forces the viewer to confront a reality taken as fantasized by cinematic magical realist aesthetics, to witness the psychic impact of the return of the repressed as part of a traumatic continuum, and to acknowledge the reality that rural life will become unhealthy in such a bleak landscape and rundown village, increasingly subject to industrial devastation and greedy entrepreneurs. Turning on the fantasized sense of unreality at the heart of industrial and capitalist transformation, cinematic magical realism in this film compels us to accept fantasy and its roots as part of the rational (diegetic) world. The film ends with the haunting image of Shu wandering along a side road, both physically and figuratively blind, a victim of a historical moment, and its resulting body of sufferings, visualizing the negative dimension of a historical development.

Conclusion In discussing the contemporary globalization of magical realism, Mariano Siskind indicates that “the historical determinations that framed the efficacy of magical realism to forge a sense, shared by writers and readers across the world, of the genre’s potential to create the necessary conditions to repair historical harms produced by different forms of oppression and exclusion” (85). Indeed, since magical realism was introduced to China/Asia and to other parts of the world in the late twentieth century, it has proven to be a powerful mode of storytelling and a critical approach to represent multilayered realities. The contribution of a new generation of artists in many countries has expanded magical realism’s aesthetic and political/ideological dimensions beyond its postcolonial critical mode and

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its Latin American roots. In China, Jiang Wen and Han Jie are part of this generation. Their innovative films have enriched magical realism in global cinematography; their focus on history, trauma, and marginality continues the Chinese magical realist preoccupation with their historical past, which includes those oppressed and silenced. Their films evince cutting-edge aesthetics and critical magical realist modes to deal with arising situations and problems in the twentieth-first century.

Works Cited Aldea, Eva. Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing PLc, 2011. Angelica, Duran & Yuhan Huang, editors. “Introduction.” Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller. Purdue UP, 2014. Arva, Eugene L. The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction. Cambria Press, 2011. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Indiana UP, 1984. Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. Routledge, 2004. Chen, Jianguo. “The Logic of the Phantasm: Haunting and Spectrality in Contemporary Chinese Literary Imagination.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 231–265. FitzGerald, Carolyn. “Imaginary Sits of Memory: Wang Zengqi and Post-Mao Reconstructions of the Native Land.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 72–128. Hellow, Shu Xiansheng/Hello, Mr. Tree! Diredtec by Han, Jie. Bona Film Group Limited, Shanghai Film CO., LTD, and XSTREAM Pictures. 2011. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1981. _______. “On Magic Realism in Film.” Critical Inquiry, Winter, Vol. 12, Issue 2, 1986, pp. 301–325. ———. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991. ———. The Modernist Papers. Verso, reprint, 2016. Mo, Yan. Nobel Speech: “Mo Yan: The Life of Myself.” https://www.nobelprize. org/prizes/literature/2012/yan/biographical/, accessed February 24, 2020. ———. “Two Burning Furnaces.” World Literature, Beijing, China, vol. 3, 1986, pp. 298–299. Per Wästberg. Nobel Literature Award Speech on10 December 2012. https:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/presentationspeech.html/, accessed February 24, 2020.

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Pieldner, Judit. “Magic Realism, Minimalist Realism and the Figuration of the Tableau in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Cinema.” ACTA University Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 12, 2016, pp. 87–114. Rushdie, Salman. “Magic in the Search of Truth,” New Your Times, April 21 2014; web: April 25, 2014. Siskind, Mariano. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2014. Taiyang Zhaochang Shengqi/The Sun Also Rises. Directed by Jiang Wen. Emperor Motion Pictue, 2007. Young, David & Hollaman, Keith, editors. Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology. Longman, 1984.

CHAPTER 10

Transcontinental Journey of Magical Realism: A Study of Indian Literatures’ Response Vibha Maurya

With its critical power and intensity, self-reflexivity, self-questioning, and keenness to experiment, Latin American literature has immensely influenced other literatures for over fifty years. By the mid-twentieth century, Latin America occupied a prominent geopolitical place in the world, and its literature began to travel across continents to be read and appreciated. Indian academic circles knew for years that Latin American’s literary canon included major writers such as Inca Garcilaso, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Martí, Andrés Bello, and Gertrudis Gómez del Avellaneda, et  al. Latin American modernistas consciously proposed and utilized wider geographical imaginaries. By doing so, they opened the possibility of intense engagement between Latin America and other regions, particularly countries from the Global South. In later years, writers from China, Japan, and India, as well as those from Africa, Canada, Australia, and Europe, felt the impact of the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García

V. Maurya (*) Department of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of Delhi, Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_10

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Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Vargas Llosa and, more recently, of Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Volpi, Laura Restrepo, Alejandro Zambra, among others. The literary works of these writers have led to discussions on a wide range of issues, from modernity, history, and language to aesthetics, the politics and power relations, and the varied nature of the human condition. However, as we begin to chart the Hispanic world, we soon realize that it is heterogeneous and complex. On one side of the Atlantic is Spain. On the other side, with its multinational geography once colonized by Imperial Spain, is Latin America. Therefore, artistic production faced the challenge of providing expression to an enormous variety of people who had for centuries been deprived of voice and written language. But writers did not shirk from this challenge; they understood the power of literature and artistic expression. Starting with the 1960s Boom, Latin American literary production began to give voice to subaltern aesthetic subjects that later proved to be important sources of representing alterity. This led not only to demand from the hegemonic international art scene aesthetic autonomy and freedom, but also helped destabilize the central discourse on rationality, aestheticism, and universality of European realism that had, until then, dominated. My aim is to examine Magical Realism as an aesthetic mode of a literary creation that situates literatures from decolonial spaces as alternative modes of expressing the subaltern voice, therefore challenges the centrality of Euronorthamerican discourses on literature and art. I also intend to show how the transcontinental journey of Magical Realism is a marker of Booming alternative art and literature; this I will do in parallel with a study of Indian and Latin American authors and their works.

Two Geoepistemic Spaces of Magical Realism With these objectives, I shall first place the mode and concept of Magical Realism in two geoepistemic spaces: Latin America and India. On receiving the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature, García Márquez explained the rationale for his writing mode: Latin America: I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not on paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable cre-

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ativity, full of sorrow and beauty…. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. (1982)

Writers like García Márquez and Carpentier were not only engaged in creative writing, but also reflected upon their forms and modes of expression. They pointed out that the issue before them was not to solve the ontological difference between Latin America and Europe or the Western world, but to evolve an authentic language that expressed the concerns and aspirations of their people. Different literary practices within Magical or Marvelous realism gave these writers the possibility of producing an original and mature form of literature. Boom writers were concerned about the place of their work in the world; they wanted to express an authentic voice that would create cultural treasure and foster a sense of identity across the heterogeneous continent. García Márquez’s pronouncement that his continent is more marvelous than any fiction clearly places itself in contrast to Europe’s understanding of the Latin American reality. It is notable that the arguments presented by the works of the Boom writers are, in a way, rooted in the writings of colonial thinkers who demanded political as well as cultural independence from Imperial Spain. Colonial masters’ imposition of metropolitan values, institutional structures, and conceptual understanding of economic and political systems led to colonies’ demand for freedom and autonomy. Rejecting the argument of similarities between Spanish colonizers and the local population, these colonies demanded their right to difference. Therefore, when Guamán Poma argued in the seventeenth century that Incas were already Christians before the Spanish colonial rule, he not only rejected the project of evangelization, but also pointed out that even before the arrival of the Europeans, Incas already had their own, perhaps superior, conception of life.1 By the nineteenth century, the Liberators of Hispanic America like

1  See Roger A. Zapata. Guamán Poma, indigenismo y estética de la dependencia en la cultura peruana (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literatures, 1989). As cited by Amaryll Chanady in “Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: SelfAffirmation and Resistance to Metroplotan Paradigms,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds., L.P Zamora and W.B. Faris, 1995.

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Simón Bolívar and José Martí2 reiterated the specificity of Latin American nations and what should be their characters. Simón Bolívar stated: Let us give to our republic a fourth power with authority over the youth, the hearts of men, public spirit, habits, and republican morality. Let us establish this Areopagus to watch over the education of the children, to supervise national education, to purify whatever may be corrupt in the republic…3 (239)

José Martí had a clear understanding of racial and cultural heterogeneity of the people whose continent he described as Nuestra América mestiza (or mestizo America). He was of the opinion that an indigenous system4 should be developed: To know the country and govern it in accordance with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny. The European university must yield to the American university. The history of América from the Incas to the present must be taught in its smallest detail, even if the Greek Archons go untaught. Our own Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours: we need it more.5 (1891)

He argued, “The struggle is not between civilization and barbarity, but between false erudition and Nature.”6 What he meant was that the liberators of America certainly had an idea as to what kind of society they wanted to build, and in their view there was a clear rejection of paradigms that were not adequate for their people. They viewed with a critical eye the universality of European reason and knowledge.

2  José Martí has been regarded by whole Latin America as their liberator even though he was not invovled in the fight for their liberations with arms. However, he led the battle of ideas for an independent Latin America. 3  As quoted in Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of their Liberators (1918) by William Spence Robertson, p. 239. 4  “Indigenous” is not used here in the sense of Indian native population. It is used to show how the thinkers and liberators of Latin America pronounced in favor of creating their own orginal system which would be based on the local needs and local knowledge. In fact, the historical processes had exterminated the Indians and their autochthonous cultures. 5   José Martí, Paginas Escogidas, English translation on https://writing.upenn.edu/ library/Marti_Jose_Our-America.html, Accessed on 13 June 2020. 6  Ibid.

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By the twentieth century, many Latin American writers reacted perceptively to the warnings of liberators such as Bolívar and Martí against the Northern neighbor that had emerged as a neo-colonial power. In his well known essay Ariel, published in 1900, Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and posits Ariel as a representation of the positive tendencies of human nature. In contrast, Calibán represented the negatives. The United States was compared with Calibán. However, in 1925, José Vasconcelos’ essay entitled The Cosmic Race (La raza cósmica) underlies the amalgamation of many races in Latin America. For Vasconcelos, the reason and rationality exemplified by North America’s progress and development had only led to spiritual barbarism. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the conclusion of this debate is aptly summarized by Roberto Fernández Retamar in his essay Calibán: Our symbol is therefore not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but Calibán. This is something we see with particular clarity in the mestizos that inhabit these same islands where Calibán lived: Próspero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Calibán and taught him his language to understand him: What else can Calibán do but use that same language to curse, to wish the “red plague” to fall upon him? I don’t know another more successful metaphor for our cultural situation, for our reality.

Furthermore, Retamar states: Assuming our condition of Calibán implies rethinking our history from the other side, from the other protagonist. The other protagonist of The Tempest is not Ariel, but Próspero. There is no true Ariel-Caliban polarity: both are servants in the hands of Próspero, the foreign sorcerer. Only Calibán is the rude and unconquerable owner of the island, while Ariel, an aerial creature…. (33–37)

To conclude, it is not strange that by the twentieth century, an increasing number of writers and philosophers challenged the superiority of rationality canon that had originated from Europe and the West as a whole. For instance, questions were raised regarding the rationale that fueled the barbarous extermination of the Indian population and the brutality against slaves. It is now clear that the so-called margins or periphery have asserted themselves, refusing to accept metropolitan concepts and knowledge without evaluating them. Amaryll Chanady, in pointing out the context of the resistance (as described above) from the Latin American

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subject, underlines in her notable article, “Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms,” that: It is against this complex background of the colonised subject’s rebellion against imposed models, the resistance of the newly independent Latin American countries to neocolonial domination and the European philosophical delegitimation of metaphysical and epistemological paradigms that we must situate certain twentieth century literary practices. Artists have frequently been considered subversive figures, challenging official dogma in spite of various mechanism of control. (136–137)

The above discussion shows the movement to reflect, in multiple ways, on how to create an authentic and alternative mode of representation to express Latin American concerns after independence. Now independent, the newly liberated countries were faced with the task of coming to terms with the ideas of modernity, progress, and nation building that they had inherited from their former colonial masters. For them, it was crucial to establish their own identity, separate from that of the Western world. Therefore, public intellectuals and leaders of freedom movements were discomforted by the prospect of adopting paradigmatic Western concepts—realism, rationality, etc.—without critical evaluation. Yet I would like to examine a third view as a vantage point regarding the connections between literature of the Global South and what modernity means to us. I will explore these connections by juxtaposing the magical narratives of India and Latin America because, as mentioned by Ángel Rama, there is a process of “narrative transculturation,” which shows the similarity of worldview in the writings of the global south. However, before examining Indian novels, I will shed some light on the evolving concept and mode of Magical realism as seen in the Indian context.

India  Magical Realism as an artistic mode of expression and stylistic device to describe the alternative reality emerging from the so-called periphery undoubtedly traveled to India from Latin America. Nevertheless, it must also be noted that India itself is rich with ancient cultural and aesthetic traditions, to which no craft or device seems unknown; this is also because the country has absorbed them all and presented them as her own. Thus,

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any discussion on Indian Magical Realism cannot be divorced from the understanding that it had already existed in our culture. Later, I will show how this mis-understanding came into being. If we have to use the Latin American yardstick to study the elements of Magical Realism in Indian cultural practices, we need not look at them through the European theoretical prism; interconnectedness between Latin American and Indian realities has already created enough ground to examine them in parallel. Contemporary Indian vernacular literature has witnessed a conscious application of the magical realist mode both as a craft and as a radical tool for linguistic innovation and experimental forms of writing. In this process, as I will discuss later, magical realist narratives have produced a discourse that challenges the literary realism dominated by the social realist elements of the early twentieth century European writings. Notably, this craft has been used to critique a social condition full of disappointments and disillusionments in post-Independence nations. In the Indian context, Western novels and short stories made inroads into Indian vernacular literature during the colonial period. Thus, these Western literatures replaced the indigenous form of shorter and longer narratives of the Panchatantra or the ancient Epics style. The genre of the novel began to develop throughout the nineteenth century, along with the short story. However, it was Premchand’s novels, published in the early 1920s, that shaped the modern form of Indian novel-writing. Premchand’s realist narrative moved away from the domain of fantasy, moralizing, and frivolous entertainment. Instead, it made literature a serious medium that reflected people’s problems and causes of suffering. In these works, the peasants, the workers, and the downtrodden became central figures and agents of change. Other parts of India appreciated and adopted this trend, bringing forth a “progressive” phase in vernacular fiction. This was a time that witnessed, as Palakeel from Kerala puts it, “the resurgence of the novel as the pre-eminent genre follow[ing] the social and political transformations taking place in response to Western humanist tradition, increasingly drawing its energy from Marxist philosophy and aesthetics” (Palakeel, 191). The social realists challenged the feudal-themed narratives and historical romances of the early twentieth century. In Kerala, located in the South of India (later I will discuss a novelist from this region), Basheer uses subtle humor to foreground the lives of villagers in a Muslim dominated area that bordered with modern cities. Other writers—Orissa, for example—whose works were inspired by social causes and realism, centered their attention on other marginal groups such as those who belonged in lower castes.

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However, by the 1950s to 1960s, Indian vernacular literature experienced a paradigm shift. On the surface, it appeared to depart from the old, decadent, over-romanticizing, emotional reality. In fact, it was a departure by “Progressives,” whose works use to contain themes of political and social inequality and who use literature to expose the failures of the state after independence. Now, even the Progressives’ literary style and craft took a turn towards a more avant-garde mode. They began to demonstrate an idiomatic sophistication that deployed such tropes as irony, satire, nonlinearity, and use of myth and history, all done with the aim of manipulating the parallel between antiquity and modernity. It is here that we compare the two magical realist modes of writing of Latin America and Inia. We should remember García Márquez, who often mentioned that while we are praised for our imagination, we ask very little of our imagination beyond what is narrated based on our reality (Nobel Lecture). The amusing factor is that our reality reassembles the wildest imagination of those who have not experienced it. Therefore, what seems to be magical imagery is actually a circumstantial reality of a particular time and space. We only have to glance around India, and a specific cultural element will pop up before us. We know hundreds of tales of ghosts and witches who are supposed to play a role in our daily life. The imagination of an Indian would not, in their daily life, separate from the ghost residing on the big peepol or banyan trees, or from the witches roaming around to harm the one who has been cursed for some reason. There are even prescriptions on how to overcome these ghostly creatures. For instance, one has to pray some specific deities to counter their effects. A true description of someone being cursed by a spirit or by an enemy, or a curse turning into a reality, may appear unreal to any rationalist. But in India it would not be considered such an unrealistic event. Rather, it would fit the idiosyncratic sphere as something perfectly usual. The idea that people cohabit alongside such marvelous realities is quite unrealistic. A story cannot separate these elements from the narrative situated in an Indian reality. If it attempts to do so, it would amount to distancing itself from something fundamental. We live in a country infused with a most varied mix of religions, cultural traditions, multiple ethnic groups, and a rich topography. In the prologue of his novel, The Kingdom of this World, Carpentier recalls ‘Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund

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racial mixing [mestizaje], America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies’(5). This can be directly applied to India. For thousands of years, Indian writers and critics have emphasized the existence of Indian magical realism. They claim that we have been telling magical and marvelous tales from time immemorial. Indian experiments with the long narratives like the novel have incorporated magic and realism together. The Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are quite fantastical. Many narrations have an extensive use of mythological characters with supernatural powers—demons who can burn someone just by putting his hand on their head, a woman who is turned into stone by the curse of a saint, or a snake that can curse a prince as revenge. These stories are told by the elderly grandparents of every household. Therefore, they are common knowledge, used as tropes and metaphors by contemporary writers. However, to consider Indian epics and other ancient stories only as Indian magical realism will be wrong as it will merely amount to looking at this mode in an ahistorical manner. This viewpoint is insufficient. Most ancient literatures have these characteristics. Thus, there is a need to differentiate between these forms of literature and modern Magical Realism. Magical Realism today is embedded in a time and space with specific history and a political aim. Its objective is not only to make the narration aesthetically strange and uncanny. Rather, it has an ideological motive: to make space for questioning the hegemonic discourse of realism that promotes singular/universal reality, whereas the reality is diverse and plural. It foregrounds a program that disrupts centralized discourse and puts forward an eccentric (Zamora and Faris 3) or de-centered discussion on the nature of reality and its representation. It also challenges the rationality and literary realism of a singular kind. We need not repeat the fact that the fictional world created by the writers includes characters for whom the magical world is real and the real is magical; they already draw upon a cultural system that is no less real than what the realist writers claim. I wonder, therefore, how one explains the event that took place in India several years ago, in which the idol of Ganesha (the deity with an elephant head) was made to drink liters and liters of milk as a sign of good omen and mark of reverence across the country. How did this superstitious event also cause the urban intellectuals to join the throngs offering the idol milk? Or why, if a child is born with a deformity in a village, he or she is taken as a divine avatar of some god or goddess, and the crowd begins to gather and pray to this strange creature? Even now, during a time when

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COVID-19 is spreading throughout the world, some politicians belonging to rightwing Hindu fundamentalism are calling upon the Indian people to take cow urine and use cow dung (in India, the cow is a sacred animal) to prevent and cure the deadly virus. It is as much bizarre as it is magical. Thus, our cultural practices privilege the use of myths, folktales, legends, rituals, and popular beliefs and wisdom over the realist system of narration. These are the modes of writing that bring together a collective that sees these systems as their own circumstantial reality. Indian vernacular literature self-consciously reclaims the indigenous (non-European) mode in order to express their social and political reality. It must be noted that the magical realist mode in India encourages the negotiation of local issues and social contrasts; it highlights the problems of the marginal and the oppressed. In what follows, I will focus specifically on Indian and Latin American cultural dialogue through the study of specific Indian vernacular novels. I will show how an intercontinental conversation has been taking place between writers of the global South. This conversation has been carried through the writers’ literary creations that are located in a particular mode of expression known in literary criticism as Magical Realism and lo Real Maravilloso. In an earlier article, I examined the process of entangling this dialogue among us which started from the 1930s and continues to this day. I mentioned that there were two very important moments of this intense engagement that we in India experienced. The first moment was the reception of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poetry (from 1930s onward). The second was Indian writers’ and artists’ overwhelming response to Magical Realism invoked by Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.7 On one hand, there has been an unprecedented response to and reception of Latin America writings across India in vernacular languages. On the other hand, Indian literary criticism has also been deeply involved in rereading older texts in the light of the debates on magical/marvelous realism. I have included both types of writings in the present study. My interest8 in examining this area is embedded in 7  See my article “Las demografías literarias y el encuentro sur—sur (América Latina e India)” in América Latina y la literatura mundial: Mercado editorial, redes globales y la invención de un continente, eds. Müller Gesine, Dunia Gras, Iberoamericana, Madrid, 2015, pp. 249–59. 8  My interest arose thanks to my long years of teaching Latin America and its literature to the postgraduate students at the University of Delhi. I would like to specially acknowledge

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the mass reaction to Latin American writings. Therefore, it is important to discuss the developing conversation between our writers and artists with those of Latin America, particularly in relation to the creative expressions and the use of alternative mode and style of writing.

Horizontal Dialogue Between Senapati and Márquez  Literary works produced during British colonial rule, or the ones being written today in India’s peculiar socio-political condition (i.e. a feudal-to-­ neoliberal society) can be interpreted as belonging to the magical mode of writing. One of the most well-known works amongst them is a novel by Oriya writer Fakir Mohan Senapati, entitled Six Acres and a Third. This text was originally serialized from 1897–1899  in the Oriya language. However, its 2005 English translation, published by the University of California Press, made it available to the wider global public. This late nineteenth century novel is often compared to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude despite the gap of over sixty years between their publications. I will briefly refer to this remarkable text, originally written in Oriya, to carry out a parallel reading of it along with that of Márquez’s novel. Jennifer Harford Vargas has also studied these two novels in an article entitled “Critical Realism in the Global South: Narrative Transculturation in Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (2011). It is quite a coincidence that the two novels, despite their different time frames, have found a common terrain for comparison. It is possible, as Vargas points out, that both respond to a colonial and neocolonial situation of exploitation, socioeconomic relations, and certain ideological positions. She states: ‘Colonial India and neocolonial Colombia share a position of economic dependence within a transnational system of capital that exploits the periphery and benefits the center in an uneven modernity’ (26). I would also like to allude to Aníbal Quijano, who, while discussing the relationship between time and history, argues: the intense interaction and exchange of ideas that I have had with my two research students Ravikant Sharma, working on contemporary writer Uday Prakash, who writes in Hindi, included in the present essay and Prasanna Deep, who has taken up writers of Telagu literature. In the course of my teaching and supervision I got insight in how deeply Latin American writers have been impacting contemporary Indian Literary circle.

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It is a different story of time. And from a different time in history. That is what a linear and, worse unilineal perception of time, unidirectional of history, like the one that characterizes the dominant version of Euro-American rationalism, under the hegemony of instrumental reason, fails to incorporate into its own ways of producing or to grant “rational” meaning, within its cognitive matrix, from its own perspective. (61)

It is true that, taking place in the colonial India of the nineteenth century and the so-called Banana Republic of the twentieth century Colombia, both novels do provide devices for examining ways of cultural intervention in the Global South, showing us how the peripheral subjects negotiate and challenge the colonial and neocolonial modernities. Fakir Mohan Senapati’s text is deeply rooted in Oriya’s colonial context, and it has an “autochthonous” quest of magic narration concerned with the class/cast that Senapati looks at. Six Acres and a Third narrates the exploitative relationship between feudal landlord Ramchandra Mangaraj and his poverty-stricken peasant workers.9 The text details and describes with humor the larger social landscape, switching back and forth between the main issue of land grabbing and the subsequent punishment of the landlord. This vast canvas lends itself to a variety of topics, including religious practices, people’s beliefs and superstitions, cast division, British land tenure law, and the British education system that aims only at preparing a subordinate class of English-­ knowing Indians. It vividly sketches an Oriya village life under the British Raj, as well as under a local despotic landlord. While minutely detailing all this, Senapati underlines the vested and economic interest that manipulates human relations. As the novel is written to give voice to the lowest strata of villagers, women, and the poor laboring mass of peasants, it contains a hard criticism of colonial rule and local political and social administration. All this is narrated by an omniscient narrator in a popular satirical 9  Ramchandra Mangaraj, is a greedy landlord who exploits the poor villagers, peasants and grabs their lands. Mangaraj along with Champa, someone who is more than a servant maid in his house, plots a heinous plan to grab from childless couple, Bhagiya and Sariya, their land property. Champa convinces Sariya that she would bear a child only if she built a temple and suggests to her that she take loan from Mangaraj for this purpose. The weaver family falls in this trap and ends up losing everything to Mangaraj. Unable to bear the loss, Bhagiya goes mad and Sariya starves herself to death. Her death brings the downfall of Mangaraj. This is followed by the death of Managraj’s wife, and every finger points at Mangaraj. The sad side of human nature reveals how nobody stands by you in your bad times and that exact thing happens with Mangaraj. Once respected and feared man is booked for murder charges.

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parlance, following oral storytelling in the Indian tradition. Satya P. Mohanty, translator of the novel, points out that the role given to the novel’s narrator is central to Senapati’s literary method.10 The narrator is “wily, loquacious, and often unreliable. The narrator challenges the reader to be on the toes, looking for subtle cues behind the humor and the garrulousness” (7). I would argue that it is about much more. It is about challenging the European realism and their notion of modernity by using native tradition as a tool to represent what is, according to them, the local rational institutions of law and governance. Therefore, criticism of the society is embedded in the narrative strategy itself. The story is told in such a complex manner that, along with exposing the corrupt deeds of the landlord Mangaraj, it tells us about the dozens of other issues that pervade people’s lives in feudal-colonial India. It is here that the text resonates with García Márquez’s mode of representation that emerged from Latin American imaginative writings. One Hundred Years of Solitude is also about transforming realism under the local Colombian neocolonial modernity. Even though Márquez’s novel was published several decades later, it is still possible to place these two works in one conversation due to colonial/neocolonial periphery’s relation to the metropolitan masters. The two works attempt to write realist novels, but their intent produces a kind of realism that, grounded as it is in geopolitical and social reality of the respective countries, paints a canvas that looks magical and extraordinary. Vargas points out that: …both are produced under conditions of sociocultural domination and economic dependency as well as the oppositional narrative tactics marshaled in response. Both authors reimagine colonial society from below, and construct an alternative way of telling and seeing. They employ underground types of storytelling—mainly oral, ironic, dialogic, parodic—developed by those on the underside of power to resist, negotiate, and transform relations of oppression. (27)

10  In the introduction of the English translation of the novel Satya. P Mohanty describes the narrator as touter (a bit like a Fool in European drama) ‘who has indisputable wit and he inhabits lower rung of the society and is always a bit unreliable. Senapati transforms this rather unsavory type into a new kind of social agent (…) is the only one who can survive Mangaraja’s oppression and chicanery’. (Six Acres and a Third, trans. Satya P. Mohanty et al. Penguin Books India, Mumbai, 2006, p. 6).

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It is true that two cited texts by Mohanty and Vargas emphasize different aspects. However, in my view, the two writers’ narrative strategies and magical modes of expression differ to some degree. I would place García Márquez more in the ontological version of magical narration, while Senapati seems more inclined towards epistemological narration. García Márquez imagines and evolves original “schema of our own.” Senapati depends more on indigenous knowledge percolating down from Indian mythical and mythological traditions. For example, in Six Acres an a Third, the sly, clever, intelligent narrator describes: There was only one pond in Gobindpura, and everyone in the village used it. It was fairly large (…). We are unable to recount the true story of who had it dug, or when. It is said that the demons, the Asuras, dug it themselves. That could well be true. Could humans like us dig such an immense pond? Here is a brief history of Asura Pond, as told by Ekadusia, the ninety one year old weaver. The demon Banasura ordered that the pond be dug but did not pick up shovels and baskets to dig it himself. On his order hosts of demons came one night and did the work. But when the day broke, it had not yet been completed: there was a gap of twelve to fourteen arm-lengths in the south bank, which had not been filled. By now it was morning and villagers were already up and about. Where could the demons go? They dug a tunnel connecting the pond to the banks of the River Ganga, escaped through it, bathed in holy river and then disappeared. (77–78)

Senapati makes use of the legends and narrative tradition of oral history through the mouth of a village historian. In fact, the so-called narrative-­ historian makes use of parody to question the official source and its epistemic value. That is why he depends more on unauthoritative sources that emanate from people’s beliefs and practices. Thus, the narrator’s role in Six Acres and a Third makes him an oral historian who is very mobile, roams around from place to place, and spreads sometimes real incidents and sometimes rumors about the landlord and other upper strata of people, thus sharpening the social critique of that time and producing a political subtext by giving perspective of the subaltern subject. In this process, the narrator makes extensive use of superstitious belief, folktales and mythical elements, religious scriptures, hearsay gossips, etc. His articulations allow people from the lowest rungs of society to take the central stage in the novel. In contrast, García Márquez uses a completely different set of resources: peculiar natural incidents, such as a deluge lasting several

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years, people suffering from an epidemic of amnesia, showers of yellow flowers from the sky, cups of chocolate that make a character levitate, outsized humans, etc. My parallel reading of the two authors and examination of their narrative tools and geoepistemic convictions demonstrate that their indigenous forms and techniques of narration facilitate access to the archives of knowledge preserved and produced by the subaltern subject. The writers do not underestimate epistemic significance of the expression of the marginalized. On the contrary, they consider the subaltern, as Ileana Rodríguez points out, “as political, social, and heuristic agents” (Vargas 36). Therefore, what Márquez calls our own schema is now extended to other locations. Together with Senapti, the two produce a translocal (Vargas) effect, reaching out to larger community of Global South that naturally produces a conversation between theses creative expressions.

Narrative Transculturation in Uday Prakash Now I will move on to a more contemporary writer, Uday Prakash (1952–) who is considered one of the most acclaimed and original storytellers of Hindi literature today. I will discuss two of his shorter narratives, as even though he claims that his inspirations fundamentally came from such writers as Hazari Prasad Dwividi,11 he has been closely reading and following Latin American writers such as Borges and García Márquez. In my opinion, Uday Prakash’s stories are undoubtedly written during a time when translations of Latin American writers were available in India, and when the Indian literary world had animated discussions about their narrative modes. Therefore, Uday Prakash, as an informed writer, would not have remained unconcerned about it. Central to his writings is a total exposure of the post-independence India’s failure to bring about any change to the life of the downtrodden and ordinary people. Therefore, his main concern is to articulate social critique in such a way that it will represent the lower strata of the society. Critics consider his works “unbearable” for being grotesque, psychic and direct. Some have dubbed 11  Hazari Prasad Dwivedi (1907–1979) was a novelist, literary historian, essayist, critic and scholar. He wrote in Hindi numerous novels, collections of essays, historical research on medieval religious movements of India, and as also history of Indian Literature. He served as professor and was contemporary of Rabindranath Tagore. His writings influenced a whole generation of Indian writers.

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them as chaotic and terrorizing. This type of criticism is unfair to an author who is grounded in his milieu and who possesses political views and has developed a narrative style of his own. He is considered an unusual storyteller, as neither his characters nor his plots are written to give emotional or aesthetic joy to the readers. Instead, it forces us to think about the society we live in. The condemnations of the exploitative people and class almost serve as a statement on the material world. Prakash’s narrative form emanates from indigenous oral and written traditions; it aims at giving agency to the subaltern by exploring subtle expression of common usage at a very local level. Sanjiv Kumar, a leading critic of contemporary Hindi literature, underlines the fact that Uday Paraksh’s stories break traditionally inherited form of narration; that is why they do not seem to fit in the usual frame. Sanjiv further states that these texts are abound with minute details of the life of poverty stricken peasants and workers, and for that, the author has created an ever alert and candid narrator who uses extremely passionate language. The author is also fond of directly addressing his reader in second person narration (Kumar 2012). Uday Prakash mainly writes short stories, but even his shorter narratives adopt multi-generic form that facilitates the presentation of rural and urban life. I will examine two of his stories that have important impacts: Hiralal’s Ghost (Hiralal ka Bhoot) and Tirichh. Both stories, published in 1999, deal with the very bottom of social strata. Hiralal is a protagonist with some extraordinary qualities, such as being born with all his teeth. He was also born laughing. Even as his mother dies during his birth and the family cries out of grief, he continues to laugh. However, in the later part of his life, he adopts a complete silence that remains until a day or two before his death. The plot is encrypted with unbearable human miseries and incomprehensive practices of exploitation and torture. It portrays parochial rural life, its miseries, and superstitions in most vivid manner. Hiralal is the poor of the poorest and works for a landlord. The landlord and the village administrator grab Hiralal’s lands and regularly abuse his wife. Unable to suffer anymore, Hiralal and his wife die in most abject conditions. After Hiralal’s death, his ghost starts taking revenge on the landlord, ultimately bringing about the complete devastation of the landlord’s family. The landlord’s palatial house soon becomes a ruin and is considered haunted. The village administrator also runs away. Exploitation of the peasants reaches such heights that Hiralal is left with no alternative but to rebel

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after his death. It is notable that the author creates these grotesque and gripping situations to shake readers’ conscience deeply. Similarly, in Tirichh, the protagonist is a victim of social belief and the human indifference to peoples’ pains. Tirichh is a reptile who bites humans to death. However, the death can occur only after a certain behavior of the reptile; if the bitten person can avoid that situation, then their life can be saved. The condition is this: if the victim’s vision meets directly with that of the reptile, then the victim can no longer escape. Now it is obvious that this is a complete nightmarish fantasy of the villagers. A villager comes across the reptile, and by chance stares directly in his eyes, which becomes the moment when reptile chases him. To save his own life, he runs in zig-­ zag (that way, reptile may lose his way), but he is still bitten. There are other prescribed measures that must be adopted to save life. The protagonist has done all that, but still could not be spared. The villager dies when he is in the nearby town where, despite his miserable condition, no one comes to help him. The entire narrative is a lament on the prevailing condition of the rural as well as urban society. This story once again is a powerful narrative, rich in both content and form. Uday Prakash’s stories and its forms are interpreted as an Indian version of magical realism, which can be accepted as such by popular understanding. However, in the Indian critique that encodes him as magical realist writer, what is completely overlooked is the epistemic dimension of literature. As Mohanty points out, a literary text is a continuation of prevailing social, moral, and epistemological theories and practices. In fact, it is a revision of the prevailing ideas and ideologies of the space from where it has emerged. Therefore, I would argue that the author is simply not borrowing and copying a literary strategy from other literatures, which will indeed unjustly undermine the creativity of the author. Uday Prakash’s stories are embedded in an organic manner in the social reality that feudal India, even after independence, faces. His endeavor is to achieve a suitable form of narrative that represents the most naked subalternity. Therefore, social critique and narrative forms of his works are not only closely linked but are located in certain histories and geography. As for the magical element in Hiralal ka Bhoot and Tirichh, I would draw attention to the fact that the unusual and magical are weaved into the normal and ordinary life. In Hiralal ka Bhoot, as the title itself suggests, Hiralal’s ghost is used to make his absence present. As an oppressed and exploited subject, Hiralal can take revenge only in the form of his specter that empowers him to act. His ghost embodies an extended reality that reappears after his death,

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allowing the impossible to happen and thus filling the time gap. It also makes us look beyond the limits of knowable reality. At a socio-political level, the narrative corrects the wrong and becomes the weapon of the weak to fight against injustice. Tirichh deploys the myth of the reptile to critique not only the false belief of the villagers, but to show the helplessness of a peasant before the urban monster. One may take the reptile as a metaphor for the feudal lord who continues to exploit the poor peasant. Uday Prakash’s powerful narrative is directed to expose the machination of the upper class. Therefore, he self-consciously selects a particular strategy and technique of narration, wherein magical elements (Hiralal born laughing with all his teeth) de-familiarize the common and usual. In this part of my essay, I am not comparing Uday Parkash’s narratives with those of Márquez or any other Latin American writers. Nevertheless, this narrative strategy is definitely adopted to make a strong and loud political statement that will not fall on the deaf ears of the rulers. By using this mode, Uday Prakash undoubtedly shares with García Márquez his political view and representational technique. That is how they establish a conversation. It also serves as a means to question the Indian State (which now has replaced the colonial rule) as to their form of modernity, borrowed as it was from European political and social practices of the idea of equality, liberty and fraternity. The story about a village folk’s life in free India is told by adopting a particular narrative technique aimed at revealing the reasons for the failure of the historical process that was supposed to bring radical change. The power relation between different social classes remains static, and at the end of the day, the ordinary people’s struggles continues. What Uday Prakash’s narrative form is unfortunately missing is humor. As I mentioned earlier, he adopts a more grotesque technique of narration than humor that would provoke laughter.

Marvelous Realist Novels of Vijayan and Carpentier in Conversation In this part, I shall discuss a South Indian novelist from Kerala, O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005), an author of six novels, nine short-story collections, and many collections of essays, memoirs and reflections in the Malayalam language. His best known novel, The Legends of Khasak, was written in Malayalam in 1969. Its English translation was published in 1994. These days, Kerala is celebrating the 50th year of its publication. Like Senapati’s

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Six Acres and a Third, The Legends of Khasak was first serialized in a literary weekly. It was subsequently published as a book in 1969. Notably, this work remains to this day the bestselling novel of any Malayalam writer, marking the highest popularity ever achieved by a Malayalam writer in terms of intense narration and the inventiveness of the Malayalam language. I believe that Vijayan’s novel can be read parallel with Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo, 1949) because it is closer to the mode of writing of lo real maravilloso, thus finding much common ground with not only Carpentier’s form of writing but also with Carpentier’s subject of narration, conceptual understanding of history, and myth, facts, and fiction. I am not aware if O.V. Vijayan ever read Alejo Carpentier’s writings. However, I presume that he  had  read García Márquez’s novels. It is noteworthy that he made available to us a text that can be certainly considered written in the marvelous realist mode. Thus, I look at the two novels (Vijayan’s and Carpentier’s) in conversation. The Legend of Khasak was written two decades after the Kingdom of This World, but the Malayalam text is as much rooted in the local incidents and history of Kerala as is the Kingdom of This World in nineteenth century Haitian history. Carpentier, as we know, travelled to Haiti in 1943, where he witnessed and experienced all of what he later called in his 1949 prologue of The Kingdom of this World marvelous reality. The novel relates the story of the late eighteenth century slave rebellion in Haiti. The ruins of the Sans-­ souci and the fortress la Ferreire built by the black king Henri Christophe was, to him, an extraordinary architectural marvel. He finds the presence of the marvelous in every corner of the country, and in every moment of his journey, so he describes, “I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, monarch of incredible efforts, much more surprising than all the cruel kings invented by the surrealists (…). At every step I found the real marvelous. But I also thought that this presence and validity of the marvelous real was not the only privilege of Haiti, but the heritage of the whole of America, where it has not yet been established, for example, a count of cosmogony” (4–5). Thus, Carpentier first coins the term that describes the Haitian reality and later, as a metonymical expression, extends to Latin America entirely. The major part of the story is narrated from the perspective of the slave laborer Ti Noel, who directly witnesses all the dramatic historical events of the Haitian revolutionary struggle for independence. In fact, all the events are witnessed by the internal gaze of a Negro slave through the narration of his personal and

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local history. Therefore, lo real maravilloso is also inspired and produced by the internal reality of Haiti. Carpentier’s prologue serves not only as a guide for the readers of the novel in question, but also for as a guide for understanding the term itself. Colonizers’ imposition of catholic religion on the colony did meet resistance of the slaves; nevertheless, the intermingling of religions also happened. On one hand, there is the practice of voodoo rituals in the slave community; on the other, catholic religion. Thus occurs a syncretic mixing of faith. King Christophe imitates the European and practices Christian faith, while black slaves have a different practice. That is why they believe in the lycanthropic power of Makandal, who is their leader and whom slaves repose their faith for liberation in. The combination of different cultural practices, incredible topography, existence of various races, and people’s beliefs in extraordinary phenomena that are part of their life moved Carpentier to term it marvelous. The interesting aspect of this understanding is that Carpentier underlines “the feeling of the marvelous presupposes faith.” And he sees this alternative reality of the Haitian people as a miracle. Therefore, the inclination, disposition, and faith of the subject who gazes and perceives all this in a particular way is central to Carpentier’s statement. Yet, his final sentence— “but what is the history of all of America if not a chronicle of marvelous reality” is so ontological that seems to question it. O.V. Vijayan’s Legends of Khasak is considered a remarkable piece of writing in Malayalam because it uses new aesthetic expression and narrates the story of a remote village where modernity attempts to step in, but is instead subsumed by the powerful existence of local tradition, myths and belief. Renowned poet and critic of Malayalam literature K Sachidananadan has described it thus: Its interweaving of myth and reality, its lyrical intensity, its black humour, its freshness of idiom with its mixing of the provincial and the profound and its combinatorial wordplay, its juxtaposition of the erotic and the metaphysical, the crass and the sublime, the real and the surreal, guilt and expiation, physical desire and existential angst, and its innovative narrative strategy with its deft manipulation of time and space together created a new readership with a novel sensibility and transformed the Malayali imagination forever. (Mohan, 2012, 116)

The story of The Legends of Khasak starts when the protagonist Ravi, who is an outstanding student of astrophysics, possesses groundbreaking

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ideas and brilliant knowledge of scientific discoveries but is disenchanted with the urban life, decides to quit all that, and instead take a very long journey that ends in a small village, “a kind of a nowhere land,” named Khasak. The novel is set in the backwaters of southern India in the middle of the twentieth century. In the village, the District Board has established a single teacher school in an effort to give the local children access to basic education. Ravi is to be their first teacher. The author in his Afterword describes the protagonist entering the village as “atonement,” and finds himself unable to return to the city… “Ravi, my hero, liberation’s germ carrier… would no longer be the teacher… he would learn… and stay” (204–208). The novel has many narrative plots related to the ways that myths and superstitions are valued in Khasak. Vijayan also explores encounters of the past through myths and stories as recounted by the people, all of which in turn enable Vijayan to have a unique view of social and cultural milieu of the place across time and space. There is a confrontation with the scientific and rational world outside that is trying, without success, to make inroads into the Khasak through Ravi’s single-teacher endeavor. Innumerable myths are related to nature, mountainous landscape, and backwaters, and other locale secrets are passed down generations through oral narratives. Ravi learns from the children in his school these legends of Khasak—“of those who had come back from the far empty spaces, of the goddess on the tamarind tree, of Khasaks ancestors, who, when their birth cycles ended, rose again to receive the offering of their progeny…” (135). In the school when Ravi tells the tale of the earth, moon, sun, and sky in scientific manner, he is interrupted and is told a counter story about Khasak and its creatures, as Khasakians believe that their village is the whole universe. Thus, Ravi finds a vast collection of marvelous tales, like how dragonflies fluttering over the hills are planes of Khasak that are believed to be the memories of the dead. No child in Khasak, except Apukili, dares to catch them. The crows in Khasak also possess mystic powers; they are offered food in ancestral pacification rites. The silver-­ crested fish that hibernate in the cracks of Chetali Mountains is the messenger of the Sheikh. The palm-trees of Khasak are the resting places of flying serpents journeying through the mysterious skies. In earlier times, the toddy-tappers did not climb the tree; instead the palm bent down for them. It was when a tapper’s women lost her innocence that the palm stopped bending down. The religious convictions of Khasakians are entwined with these fabulous stories. They follow mainly two

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religions—Hinduism and Islam. The Hindu community of Khasak consists of caste and tribal groups worshipping numerous deities and guardian spirits in their local mythology. What is also remarkable about Khasak is that many of the local deities are worshipped equally by both the Hindus and the Muslims. Thus, the history of Khasak is presented as a collection of various legends about the local deities. It revolves around the myth of Sayed Mian Sheikh, whom the Hindus and Muslims of Khasak worship as their protector. Khasakians learn their history from Alla-Pitcha, the illiterate Muslim priest of Khasak. He narrates it to the children gathered around him in the Madrassa. Thus, the Muslim tradition and beliefs are percolated down to the common people, even as Hindu myths and beliefs are also told by other groups of people like the tribal etc. Vijayan obviously shows the miserable failure of the protagonist Ravi, a revolutionary, who is supposed to transform Khasak. Instead, it is Khasak and its inhabitants who act upon him and succeed in transforming him. Ravi also carries the guilt of his incestuous relation with his stepmother. This guilt forced him to skip his examinations and leave Madras. In Khasak, Ravi leads quite a liberated life. Any moral or ideological questions do not discourage him. He visits prostitutes and drinks illicit liquor. He shares a bed with Maimoona, the village beauty, and Padma, his live-in lover. So much so that he becomes indifferent to the rising currents of peasant insurgency in different parts of Khasak and the “class war” that is looming over the horizon under the leadership of revolutionary groups. One witnesses how modern ideas are constantly brushing with the age old mythical beliefs. The remote world of Khasak, with its enigmatic life and legends, myths and superstitions and a rich topography, has given Ravi unlimited possibilities of perceiving things differently and paradoxically, and of rationalizing the secrets of life. What Ravi actually finds there is an archive of amorphous knowledge and native wisdom. Even though he sees Khasak barter system and strange tribal practices, hearing stories of ghosts and witches, he finds that they have their own logic and rationale for existence. This immense epistemic location overpowers his scientific knowledge that Western modernity has brought about. The enduring narrative of Khasak could only be incongruous and absurd to the modern world.12 Ravi is an astrophysics scientist equipped with modern knowledge; nevertheless, all 12  For more discussion on native wisdom and knowledge in O.V.Vijayan’s novel see https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/64056/11/11.chapter%205.pdf.

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that knowledge seems to fail him. It shows how the eternal journey in search of knowledge continues. Ultimately, Ravi leaves Khasak to return from where he has come. But he never reaches there, as the novel ends with “Ravi lay waiting for the bus” (203). Thus, it turns out that he is not a hero of this social realist novel. He is neither a builder of a new place nor a romantic hero who dreams of change. In fact, he succumbs to the traditional way of living and believing. As critics and many research papers suggest,13 Vijayan is challenging the universal claims of Western rationality and the scientific knowledge based on it.14 The author also argues that modern science is incapable of explaining all the mysteries of life and existence. The logic and mathematics constituted by Western science have meaning only in this solar system. This system of knowledge and rationality is invalid in a different cosmic system where the speed of the particles is greater than light. As for writing its history, Vijayan presents the history of Khasak as an antithesis of the conventional Western practice of writing history as a linear narrative. He challenges the modernist notions of history by invoking the indigenous mode of depiction in terms of legends and myths. O.V.Vijayan’s Legends of Khasak is as complex and as challenging as The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier. Both are based on fictionalization of real historical events. However, both texts portray places where memory, myth and history coexist, therefore producing stories that are as much marvelous as real. This strategy has shown the limits of the realist depiction and has enabled the subaltern voice to be heard.

13  See Mohan, Anupama. The Country and the Village: Representations of the Rural in Twentieth -Century South Asian Literatures, A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Program in South Asian Studies University of Toronto, (2010) 14  In fact the author had also argued that modern science is incapable of explaining all the mysteries of life and existence. The logic and mathematics constituted by Western science have meaning only in this solar system. This system of knowledge and rationality will be invalid in a different cosmic system where the speed of the particles is greater than light. The Afterwords written later by the author explains how he was disillusioned by socialism after the incidents in Hungary in 1954 and his faith in Marxism was shaken. That’s why though he set out to write a revolutionary novel but half way through his work he completely changed the plot of his story and what finally came out was The Legends of Khasak. Kerala is one of the most progressive and advanced states of India where Communist party has been winning elections and forming a state government.

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Conclusions In examining the impact of Latin American magical realist writings on Indian literature, I have found the emergence of a third perspective on the connections between literatures of the Global South that is rooted in their similar world views. These writings and the cultural practices critically evaluate shifting meaning of modernity by privileging the use of myths, legends, folktales, and rituals as their narrative device, thus not only crafting an original and mature literature, but also making available the archives of knowledge of the subaltern subject. Senapati’s novel is a vivid example of this technique and repository, while Uday Prakash shares with García Márquez the representational techniques as well as political discourse. Therefore, Uday Prakash’s stories are hard-hitting critiques of the post-­ independence Indian State where nothing changes for the poor, and exploitation of the mass in India continues. Vijayan and Carpentier have based their novels on historical events that are fictionalized. Myth and history, legends and reality survive together and enable the subaltern voice to articulate their side of the stories. Therefore, the epistemic dimension of literature challenges the dominant line of criticism that literary texts are “incapable of serving as epistemically reliable conduits of ideas and values” (Mohanty 5). Literatures from the Global South represent a self-determining project that is creating ever new modes to narrate their stories. Therefore, reading them across cultures, nations, and even historical periods can reveal deeper meaning and develop transversal conversations. As Enrique Dussel shows, the centrality of European modernity is just two centuries old. This fact allows what has not been subsumed by modernity to stand chance of emerging strongly. And from this omitted potentiality and alternative exteriority emerges a project of transmodernity, a “beyond” that transcends Western modernity and will have a creative function of great significance in the twenty-first century (221). This “beyond” (“trans-”) indicates the take-­ off point from modernity’s exteriority (…) that is, from what modernity excluded, denied, ignored as “insignificant”, “senseless,” “barbarous,” as a “nonculture,” an unknown opaque alterity,…” (234) are in the end not so.

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Works Cited Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. Collier Books, 1970, pp. 1–5. Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. “Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke UP, 1995, pp. 136–137. Dussel, Enrique D. “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity.” Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 3, issue 2, 2002, Duke UP, pp. 221–244. Faris, Wendy B. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke UP, 1995. pp. 163–190. Kumar, Sanjiv. “‘कहानी’ में न अंटने वाला कहानीकार उदय प्रकाश.” Jankipul, 24 Apr. 2012, https://www.jankipul.com/2012/04/blog-post_24-13.html. Accessed on 13.03.20. Márquez, Gabriel García. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982.” NobelPrize.org, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture. Accessed on 10.03.20. Martí, José. Published in El Partido Liberal (Mexico City), January 20, 1891. Nuestra América (versión inglés) | Portal José Martí. www.josemarti.cu › publicacion › nuestra-américa-version-ingles, accessed on 13.03.20. Maurya, Vibha. “Las Demografías Literarias y El Encuentro Sur—Sur (América Latina e India).” América Latina y La Literatura Mundial: Mercado Editorial, Redes Globales y La Invención De Un Continente, edited by Muller Gesine and Dunia Gras, Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2015, pp. 249–259. Mohan, Anupama. The Country and the Village: Representations of the Rural in Twentieth—Century South Asian Literatures, A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Program in South Asian Studies University of Toronto, 2010. https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/64056/11/11.chapter%205.pdf. Mohan, Anupama. Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Mohanty, Satya P., editor. Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India. New Delhi: Black Swan, 2011. Müller, Gesine, and Dunia Gras. América Latina y la literatura mundial: Mercado editorial, redes globales y la invención de un continente, “Las demografías literarias y el encuentro sur—sur (América Latina e India), Marid: Iberoamericana, 2015. Quijano, Aníbal. Modernidad, Identidad y Utopía En América Latina. Lima: Sociedad y Política Ediciones, 1988. Retamar, Roberto Fernández. “Caliban.” Casa De Las Américas, No. 68, Sep– Oct, 1971, pp. 33–37.

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Robertson, William Spence, 1872–1955. Rise of the Spanish-American Republics, As Told in the Lives of Their Liberators. D. Appleton & Co., 1921, pp. 239. Satchidanandan, K. “A Sage and an Iconoclast: O.V.  Vijayan, 1930–2005.” Frontline, 12 Mar. 2005. Palakeel, Thomas. “Twentieth Century Malayalam Literature.” Handbook of Twentieth-century Literatures of India, edited by Nalini Natarajan, Westport: Greenwood, 1996, pp. 180–206. Senapati, Fakirmohan. Six Acres and a Third. Translated by Satya P.  Mohanty, Mumbai, India: Penguin Books, 2006. Vargas, Jennifer Harford. “Critical Realism in the Global South: Narrative Transculturation in Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third and Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2011. Vijayan, O.V. The Legends of Khasak. Penguin Random House India, 1994. Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Faris, Wendy B, editors. “Introduction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Duke UP, 1995, pp. 1–11.

Index1

A Aesthetics, 10–12, 14, 15, 24, 31–33, 38, 41, 52, 152, 191n6, 192, 211–213, 216, 217, 223, 228, 229, 232, 236, 237, 246, 250 Ananata Toer, Pramoedya, 189, 193 Anderson, Benedict, 103, 189, 189n4, 190 Apushana, Vito (Miguel A. López), 125, 139, 146 Arenas, Reinaldo, 72, 77, 78, 84–87, 87n13 and Antes que anochezca, 72, 84, 85, 85n12 and Arturo, la Estrella más brillante, 77 Asian studies, 2, 6, 11, 253n13 B Babaylan, 79, 79n6 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 220

Bakla, 70, 79, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94 Balmori, Jesús, 12, 13, 21–42, 45–65, 105n2 and Los pájaros de fuego, 21, 22, 29, 29n5, 35–39, 41, 48 and Rimas malayas, 21, 23, 45n1 Bernabé, Manuel, 13, 45, 45n1, 47, 48, 50, 51, 63 Binabae, 79, 79n6 Body-geography, 136, 139, 150 Boom, 72, 73, 89, 123, 124n1, 127, 157, 162, 232, 233 Latin American Boom, 104n2, 129n3 Butler, Judith, 78, 80, 81 C Carnivalesque, 212, 213, 215, 217, 219–221 Carpentier, Alejo, 187, 195, 214, 232, 233, 238, 249, 250, 253, 254

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Lu, M. Camps (eds.), Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7

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INDEX

Carpentier, Alejo (cont.) and The Kingdom of This World, 187, 195, 205n15, 238, 249, 253 Caste War of Yucatán, 108 Center-periphery relations, 4 Central America, 152, 153n15 China, 2, 3, 7–9, 9n5, 11, 14, 34, 49n8, 50n10, 107, 123–157, 198n11, 199, 209, 210n2, 212n3, 213, 214, 219–221, 223, 225, 228, 229, 231 China poblana, 55, 61 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 218 Chinese culture, 210, 211 Chinese film, 15, 213, 213n4, 222n8 Chinese magical realism, see Chinese magical realist tradition; Chinese magical realist literature Chinese magical realist literature, 221 Chinese magical realist tradition, 213 Chinese visual culture, 138 Chucho, 54, 54n14, 64 Cinematic magical realism, 15, 214–216, 228 Cognitive mapping, 175 Collective memory, 163, 204, 205 Colombia, 14, 113n11, 123–125, 124n1, 128–130, 132–134, 140, 145–148, 216n5, 226, 241, 242 Colonialism, 6–8, 36, 39, 41, 104, 171, 193, 195, 204, 214, 225 Colonialist discourse, 172 Comparative literature, 3 Contact zones, 14, 104–106, 119, 120 Contemporary art, 135 Continental Colonization Company, 107 Cult of Marianism, 76 Cultural dislocation, 75

Cultural identities, 11, 14, 163, 164, 173, 180, 181, 211 Cultural production, 11, 13, 71, 157, 163 Cultural shock, 54 Cultural studies, 1–16 D Dalaga, 40 Darío, Rubén, 1, 22–25, 28, 32 De-colonial thinking, 6 Decolonization, 6, 7 Deimperialization, 7 Deterritorialized identity, 105 Diaspora, 72 Displacement, 14, 72, 106, 125, 129–133, 214 Donoso, José, 13, 23, 37n6, 71, 72, 74, 75 and El lugar sin límites, 74, 75, 81, 82 Double-vision, 193 E El Cerrejón, 125, 145, 147n13 Ellis, Roberto Richmond, 76–78, 83n9, 92 Emancipation, 106 Ethics of critical syncretism, 6 F Fan, Lixin, 125, 150, 154–156 and Last Train Home, 125, 154, 155 Filipino identity, 36 Filipino literature, 22, 22n3, 51, 72, 73 Filipino Modernismo, 42 Filipino national identity, 36

 INDEX 

Foucault, Michel, 76, 117 Fuentes, Carlos, 104n2 Fukunaga, Cary, 125, 151, 154, 155 and Sin Nombre, 125, 151, 152, 155

Global South literatures, 236, 254 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, The, 34 Great Leap Forward Movement, The, 220

G Ga, Qin, 124, 135–137, 136n6, 139, 142–145 and Grassland Fence Project, 124, 143–145 and The Miniature Long March Project, 124, 136, 137 García Márquez, Gabriel, 10, 72, 104n2, 111–113, 112n10, 129, 129n3, 129n4, 187, 191n6, 209–211, 231–233, 238, 240, 241, 243–245, 248, 249, 254 and One Hundred Years of Solitude, 10, 106, 112, 112n10, 187, 191n6, 194n7, 204n14, 205n15, 211, 212n3, 240, 241, 243 Gay culture, 69–72, 94 Gay liberation, 13, 92 Gay sexual identity, 92 Gay writing, 73 Geisha, 26–29, 31, 39, 40, 49n7, 52 Gender, 69, 73, 75–81, 84, 88, 90n15, 91, 105n3, 130, 153 Genderfucking, 79–81 Ghost, 112n10, 142, 145, 191, 195, 204–205, 211, 219, 224, 238, 246, 247, 252 Phantom (see Ghost) Globalization, 2, 3, 12, 13, 72, 162, 181, 213, 228 Global North, 5, 113 Global South, 2, 2n1, 5–7, 8n4, 11, 14, 16, 68, 113, 148, 157, 171, 173, 181, 231, 236, 240, 242, 245, 254

H Hacienda system, 109, 110 Hagedorn, Jessica, 13, 72, 88, 89, 90n15, 91 and Dogeaters, 73, 88, 89, 91 Hallyu, 162, 165, 180, 181 Hermaphroditism, 90n15, 91 Heteronormativity, 82, 83, 87 Hindi literature, 245, 246 Hispanic-Filipino literature, 45 Homoerotic, 70–74, 76, 77, 86 Homosociality, 76 Hybridity, 12

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I Ibero-American Modernismo, 105n2 Imagined community, 89, 119, 189n4 Imperialism, 40, 41, 52, 63 India, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 231, 232, 236–242, 243n10, 245, 245n11, 247, 248, 251, 253n14, 254 Indian Literature, 231–254 Indian Magical Realism, 237, 239 Indian vernacular literature, 15, 237, 238, 240 Indonesia, 11, 15, 192, 193, 195–206 Indonesian literature, 189, 191n6 Inversion, 70, 73, 75–81, 83, 91, 94, 95 psychosexual inversion, 70

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J Jameson, Fredric, 214–216, 215n5, 223, 224, 226–228 Japan, 2, 3, 13, 23, 33–35, 39, 41, 45–65, 105, 107, 110, 111, 116, 127n2, 128, 231 Japanese occupation, 22, 35, 40, 46n1, 48n4, 49, 50n10, 190, 196n8 Jie, Han, 213, 213n4, 229 and Hello Mr. Tree!, 213, 214, 221–228 K Kabaklaan, 70, 73, 90n15, 92, 94 Kim, Young-Ha, 14, 103–120 and Black Flower, 103–107, 111–113, 120 Korean popular culture, 163, 167, 180 K-pop, 165, 166, 175, 176, 180 Korean War, 14, 103–105, 113–119, 162, 180, 218, 220 Kurniawan, Eka, 15, 189, 189n3, 189n4, 190, 190n5, 191n6, 192–198, 201, 205n15, 206 and Beauty Is a Wound, 15, 187–206 L La Bestia, 154 La Guajira, 125, 140, 145, 146, 147n13, 148 Latin America, 1–16, 22n3, 46, 57, 72, 73, 76, 77, 104, 104n1, 104n2, 111, 112, 119, 123–157, 162–174, 180, 181, 188, 188n1, 212, 231–233, 234n2, 234n4, 235, 236, 238, 240, 240n8, 241, 249 Latin American-Asian connections, 2, 10

Latin American influence, 10–12, 15, 22, 24 Latin American literature, 1, 9, 10, 15, 76, 187, 210, 210n2, 231 Latin American Modernismo, 12, 13, 21–42 Liang, Zhao, 125, 141–143, 145, 216, 217 and Behemoth, 125, 141–143, 141n11, 148, 152 Locas, 78 Locations of knowledge production, 11 Long March Project, The, 135, 138, 138n6 M Machista, 71 Magical realism, 10–12, 14, 15, 104, 104–105n2, 111, 112, 112n10, 119, 129n4, 187–206, 210, 211, 212n3, 213–216, 222–225, 228, 229, 231–254 Marcuse, Herbert, 84 and Eros and Civilization, 84 Marginality, 12, 15, 209–229 Maricón, 77 Martí, José, 1, 9, 22, 231, 234, 235 Meireles, Cildo, 134 and Inserções em circuitos ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola, 134 Mexican Revolution, 14, 51, 64, 103, 105 Mexico, 9, 9n7, 13, 14, 46–51, 46n2, 48n3, 49n9, 54–57, 54n13, 61–64, 79n6, 103–111, 105n4, 110n8, 111n9, 113, 114, 118–120, 123, 151, 152, 153n15, 153n16, 166, 174–180, 210 Migrant experiences, 13, 153 Mimicry, 75, 80

 INDEX 

Mirror images, 178, 181 Miscegenation, 56, 153 Mobals, 6 Modernismo, 12, 13, 21–42, 105n2 Modernista aesthetics, 24, 31–33 Modernity, 10, 15, 16, 92, 139, 140, 142, 147n13, 157, 193, 211, 212, 225, 232, 236, 238, 241–243, 248, 250, 252, 254 Musmés, 51, 52 N Narrative transculturation, 236 National construction, 205 National identity, 36, 38 Nationalism, 8, 35, 46, 48n4, 64, 87, 103–120, 198 National romance novels, 15, 206 Neocolonialism, 6–8 Neoimperialism, 7, 89 Neoliberalism, 14, 125, 151 Nervo, Amado, 50, 57, 62 Nomadic life, 142–144 O Orient, 23, 27, 39 Orientalism, 38, 39n9 Orientalism from the East, 38 Orientalist gaze, 171 Other, the, 6, 10, 75, 173, 174, 177, 179, 211, 215 Otherness, 104, 171, 217 P Pacific War, the, 12, 22 Pájaros de Verano, 148, 149 Panopticon, 117, 119

261

Performance, 13, 48n3, 75, 80, 82, 124, 124n1, 127, 130, 135, 136, 166 Performativity, 75 Peru, 14, 124n1, 129, 163, 166–174, 180, 181 Philippines, 11–13, 21–42, 46, 46n1, 48, 48–49n4, 49, 52, 53, 54n12, 57, 61–65, 67–96, 105n2 Polar, Cornejo, 194 Posada, Libia, 124, 129–134, 139, 142 and Cuadernos de geografía, 133, 134 and Lección de anatomía, 134, 135 and Signos Cardinales, 124, 131–133 Postcoloniality, 15 Postmodernist praxes, 11 Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 114, 119 Power relationships, 5 Prakash, Uday, 241n8, 245–248, 254 and Hiralal’s Ghost, 246 and Tirichh, 246–248 Pratt, Mary Louise, 104, 105, 174 Production of knowledge, 4, 5, 69 Puig, Manuel, 13, 71, 72, 75, 76, 76n4, 82, 82n7, 84, 89, 95 and El beso de la mujer araña, 75 Q Queering, 13, 67–96 Queer narrative, 80 Queerness, 72, 73, 77, 88, 89 Quemada-Díez, Oscar, 125, 153, 153n15, 153n16, 154 and La jaula de oro, 125, 153, 153n15, 155

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INDEX

R Rama, Ángel, 236 Realuyo, Bino A., 13, 67, 72, 92–94 and The Umbrella Country, 67, 92n17 Resistance, 11, 36, 71, 73, 84–87, 91, 212, 213, 220, 235, 236, 250 Revueltas, José, 14, 103–120 and Los motivos de Caín, 103, 113, 114, 117, 118 Rushdie, Salman, 10, 215, 216 Russo-Japanese War, 105, 107 S Sarduy, Severo, 80, 81, 90 and De donde son los cantantes, 80 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofski, 68–70, 75, 76, 79, 80 and Epistemology of the Closet, 68, 69 Senapati, Fakir Mohan, 241–244, 243n10, 248, 254 and Six Acres and a Third, 241, 242, 243n10, 244, 248 Sex tourism, 89 Sexual identity, 75, 83n9, 84, 92–94 Simanca, Estercilia, 125, 147 and “Los niños Wayúu,” 147 Sino-Japanese conflict, 49 Sok-Yok, Hwang, 112n10 and The Guest, 112n10 Sommer, Doris, 15, 197, 197–198n10, 198, 203, 206 and Foundational Fictions, 198n10 South Korea, 2, 3, 14, 104, 112n10, 161, 162, 164–166, 165n1, 174, 181 Spanish-language, 12, 22, 36, 37, 37n6

Spanish Tremendismo, 37 Subaltern, 11, 16, 72, 139n8, 171, 188, 192, 213, 214, 224, 232, 244–246, 253, 254 Subalternity, 204, 247 Subject, 49, 61, 71, 73, 80, 82, 91, 104, 117, 125, 129, 131, 132, 140, 142, 150, 152, 154, 156, 173, 174, 179, 181, 199n11, 228, 232, 236, 242, 244, 245, 247, 249, 250, 254 Subjectivity, 6, 156, 178, 226 Sward, 88 Syncretism, 6, 56, 80 T Third-World consciousness, 10 Third World, the, 2n1, 6–10, 88, 112, 124n1, 125, 172, 214 Transnational identity, 5, 106 Transpacific, 2, 4, 13, 14, 61, 67–96, 162, 181 Transpacific influences, 74 Transvestitism, 68, 79, 81 Trauma, 11, 13–15, 112n10, 113–119, 129, 130, 139, 194–196, 204, 205, 209–229 V Vargas Llosa, Mario, 72, 76n4, 104n2, 111, 232 Vasconcelos, José, 111, 235 and La Raza Cósmica, 235 Vijayan, O. V., 248–254 and The Legends of Khasak, 248–250, 253n14

 INDEX 

W Wayúu, 125, 139, 140, 146–148, 147n13 Welcome, First Time in Korea?, 166, 167, 174–181 Wen, Jiang, 213, 213n4, 229 and The Sun Also Rises, 15, 213, 216–222 Western centrism, 12 Western gaze, 28

263

Western modernity, 252, 254 West, the, 2, 4, 6, 9, 52, 79, 107, 128, 142, 151, 162, 164, 172, 173, 181, 235 Y Yan, Mo, 15, 129, 129n4, 210–213, 212n3 Youth Over Flowers, 166–174, 180