Title: Latin America and Asia: Moments in TransAreal Literature-History and A Buried Tradition

Abstract: The relations between China, the Asian world and Latin America are centuries old, rich in tradition and intense at all times. Yet, in many cases, they are buried tradition that need to be brought back to the light of day and raised to consciousness. This article attempts to prove this thesis by means of four historical moments in different epochs and in different parts of the Latin American subcontinent. In the 19th century, the famous school of painters of Cuzco drew not only from indigenous and European traditions, but also from Asian ones, which can be traced in the form of biombos to Japan and further back to China. Already in Neo-Spanish texts of the early 16th century, for example in Chimalpahin, there is a lot of evidence for the presence of Asian delegations, which also stood for artistic traditions that can be traced through the entire colonial period. At the end of the same period, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, in the first Hispano-American novel El Periquillo Sarniento, sketches a utopia for the nascent nation of Mexico that leads not to the Caribbean, as in Thomas More, but to the Pacific, and whose main character is a Chinese. Towards the end of the 19th century, the future national hero of the Philippines José Rizal, the descendant of an immigrant from Fujian province, becomes with his novel Noli me tangere the great and last representative of a Spanish-language Filipino literature in which Chinese cultural elements are strongly represented. And toward the end of the 20th century, Anna Kazumi Stahl, born in New Orleans and the daughter of a German-born US American and a Japanese woman, wrote a volume of stories about Buenos Aires and in Spanish that focused on relations between Asia and America and on “natural disasters.” Her “natural disasters,” however, are really disasters of living together, disasters of conviviality.

Keywords: intercultural communication, international cultural relations, world literature, China-Latin America relations, literary history

Author: Ottmar Ette, Professor, Institute for Romance Studies, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany.