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Luso-Hispanic archipelagos: the imaginary of Asia in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual culture

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Luso-Hispanic archipelagos: the imaginary of Asia in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual culture

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Content ! !! ! Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos: The Imaginary of Asia in Brazilian and Cuban Literary and Visual Culture by Ana Paulina Lee A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) June 2014 Copyright 2014 Ana Paulina Lee ! ii For my adventurous grandmother CHAO CHENG HSIEN ! iii Acknowledgements It gives me immense joy to dedicate these pages to friends and colleagues who have supported the growth of this dissertation. First and foremost, I express my deepest gratitude to sage and dissertation chair Roberto Ignacio Díaz, and committee who have become dear friends through the years, Dominic Cheung, Macarena Gómez-Barris and Erin Graff Zivin. I can only aspire to be the kind of intellectual force and mentor extraordinaires that they have been to me and continue to be daily to those around them. I feel so lucky to have been able to spend a summer teaching the humanities in Hong Kong and Macau with Roberto and Dominic, and the Problems-Without-Passports undergraduate class of 2013, in which we sailed on sampans and explored Portuguese architectural ruins as just another day of class. The sincerest appreciation must be given to João Adolfo Hansen for first exposing me to the presence of chinoiserie in colonial Brazilian architecture, and then for encouraging me to spend time at the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto to pursue the Pós-Graduação Lato Sensu em Cultura e Arte Barroca. The program’s unique structure pairs site and archive visits with seminars across disciplines that include baroque poetics, architecture, music, literature, sculpture, history, urban planning and the philosophy of art. That experience was fundamental to the development of this project. My gratefulness extends to Panivong Norindr and Peggy Kamuf for their unwavering commitment and guidance, having both served as department chair and director of graduate studies during my time at USC. The research for this project involved visiting archives on three continents, and I am grateful to the William J. Fulbright and Fundação Luso-Americana for supporting the ! iv research in Lisbon. I am grateful to Nuno Senos and the Centro de História de Além-Mar at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa for being excellent hosts and for all of the dynamic lectures and programming held at the Center. It was a dream to have been able to spend a year researching and writing with the breeze of the River Tejo. In Lisbon, many thanks to the staff and archivists at the Biblioteca Nacional, the Arquivo-Histórico Diplomático, the Museu Nacional de Etnologia and the Biblioteca da Ajuda, and in São Paulo, the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros at the Universidade de São Paulo and the Biblioteca Mário de Andrade. The scope of this project developed among an exhilarating intellectual atmosphere at USC, thanks to all of the interdisciplinary opportunities made available through the hardwork of many people. I am deeply grateful to the leadership of Duncan Williams, Sunyoung Lee, Viet Nguyen, Janet Hoskins, Maria Elena Martínez, Nomi Stolzenberg, David Myers, Ariela Gross, Hilary Schor, Susan Lape, Brian Bernards, Karen Jungblut, Tara McPherson and Steve Lamy. Many exchanges with Jack Halberstam, Akira Lippit, Daniela Bleichmar, Alexandar Marr, Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla, Kate Flint and Vanessa Schwartz provided me with rigorous approaches to the study of visual and material cultures. At the Center for Brazilian Studies at UCLA, or affectionately, “the other school,” many heartfelt thanks to José Luiz Passos, Anna More, Isabel Gómez, Inês Dias and Michelle Medrado for always welcoming those of us from “the other, other, school.” In particular, I am grateful to the work of Diana Taylor and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics for tirelessly creating and sustaining platforms for new dialogues to emerge. Micol Siegel, Jeff Lesser, Juana Maria Rodríguez, Ignacio López- Calvo, Reiko Hillyer, Elliot Young, Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, Yolanda Martínez-San ! v Miguel, Ben Cowan, Hélio de Seixas Guimarães and Walter Mignolo provided invaluable comments and feedback during different stages of this project. My research gained much life and energy from arduous intellectual exchanges and earnest encouragement of so many dear friends. Nightly Skype-meetings with Zach Blas during the final weeks of revision filled me with laughter and also pushed me to ask tougher questions of my scholarship. I am confident that I have the best writing partners around with Nadine Chan, Celeste Menchaca, Yunji Park and Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye who have been wonderful academic and fitness buddies, keeping me in check on methodological and core alignment. Many thanks to Debbie Bernstein, Kim Vinson, Katherine Guevarra, Jennifer Ann Bayan, Irfan Elahi, Rebekah Garrison, Olivia Sánchez, Evy Martínez-Vu, Luciana Miranda, Ana Teles, Gabriel Rocha, Miranda Featherstone and Maya Smith. Anny Yen, and my family in São Paulo for all of the help in sending books and other research materials from Brazil to different parts of the world. I am especially indebted to Da Jo Jo for all the car rides to the archives, always done with love and a homemade lunch. Of course, the very possibility of higher education, and this project, could not have been possible without the love and support of my parents and sisters Eileen and Vitoria whose indefatigable determination and extraordinary life experiences are a constant source of motivation for me. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my rock and my home, Aaron David Smith, for his ability to see art in the most unexpected places. ! vi Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Table of Contents vii List of Figures viii Abstract ix Preface Luso-Hispanic Archipegalos 9 Introduction Shards of China in the Formation of the Americas 15 Chapter One Ironic Orientalisms of 43 Machado de Assis and Rubén Darío Chapter Two Waging Mandarins and Coolies in Arthur Azevedo 80 and Sampaio Moreira’s O Mandarim (1883) Chapter Three Vanishing Mandarins and Coolies in Eça de Queiroz, 102 Machado de Assis and José Martí Chapter Four Exclusionary Practices of Citizenship 135 in the Writings of Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz Conclusion Diasporic Imaginaries 154 Bibliography 163 ! vii List of Figures Figure 1 Carlson, Ellsworth C. “Táng Jǐngxīng.” The Kaiping Mines: 1877-1912. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971. Figure 2 Revista Ilustrada 13 October 1883, No 8. IEB, USP Figure 3 Revista Ilustrada, 20 October 1883, No. 558. IEB-USP. Figure 4 Revista Ilustrada, 17 November 1888, No 523. IEB, USP. Figure 5 Revista Ilustrada, 17 November 1888, No 523. IEB, USP (detail). Figure 6 Revista Ilustrada, 17 November 1888, No 523. IEB, USP (detail). Figure 7 Revista Ilustrada 11 November 1888, No 522. Rio de Janeiro, IEB, USP (detail) Figure 8 N/A. “Eça com a cabaia chinesa.” 1893. Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa Figure 9 Ilustration by Gameiro, Rachel Roque. O Mandarim. 1927. Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa. PDF File. Figure 10 Lee, Ana. “Portuguese Carrack at Museum of Macau.” 2013. JPEG File. Figure 11 Lee, Ana. “Chinese Junk Vessel at Museum of Macau.” 2013. JPEG File. Figure 12 Lee, Ana. “Rua dos Cules (detail).” 2013. JPEG File. 2013. JPEG File. Figure 13 Lee, Ana. “Rua dos cules.” 2013. JPEG File. 2013. JPEG File. ! viii Abstract This dissertation analyzes a series of representations of Chinese culture and immigration in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual cultural production. The dissertation begins in the last half of the nineteenth century during the transition from slavery to free labor, when the trans-Pacific coolie trade became a viable means of filling the shortage of labor in Brazil and Cuba. As I trace the presence of the “mandarin” (Qing dynasty government officials) and “coolie” (Asian indentured servants) in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual culture, I argue that these figures enable writers and visual artists to contemplate new forms of citizenship and freedom. I contend that Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, and its offshoots in what we may call Luso-Hispanic Orientalism, insufficiently account for representations of Asia and Asians in the hemispheric Americas. This is due to the economic and historical gap between slavery and abolition via the trans-Pacific coolie trade, a fact that is often neglected in scholarship that deals with the literature of this period. I argue that depictions of Asian Otherness must be understood as part of a larger discourse concerning the exclusionary practices of modern citizenship in Brazil and Cuba. ! ! 9 Preface Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos This project begins during the transitional years in Brazil and Cuba from colony to independence and slavery to abolition. Although legal abolition occurred in 1888 and 1886 in Brazil and Cuba, respectively, the long process of social and cultural change that occurred during and after emancipation is much more difficult to demarcate. Such transformations involved a process of adaptation, erasure and modification of colonial forms of racial labor to new systems of wage labor that included Chinese contract labor-cum-indentured servitude. My investigation concentrates on the discourse produced in literary and visual cultural depictions of historical bodies (Qing dynasty officials and Chinese contract laborers) that became fictional figures (mandarins and coolies). Tracing this genealogy in the literary and visual imaginary produced during the transition period from slavery to abolition allows me to examine the cultural and social inheritances of race and labor as they enter into discussions of citizenship and national belonging. Examining different moments in which historical bodies become fiction allows me to delineate the discourse of racial labor in which the deployment of racial laboring bodies is renegotiated for the new terms of national belonging. Making apparent the discursive genealogy of nineteenth-century racial labor in relation to discussions about the consolidation of the modern nation-state, I argue, provides a critical understanding into how racial labor discourse underlies the exclusionary practices of modern citizenship. The textual corpuses that compose this study traverse a number of boundaries across literature, poetry, theatre, chronicle, epistolary exchanges and visual cultures. Crossing these borders allows me to piece together the succession of racial labor discourse. The authors and artists that form the basis of this study comparatively fashion national narratives dialogically across ! ! 10 geopolitical borders. For this reason, literary and visual studies critically contribute to current understanding of modern citizenship from the perspective of rhetorical and visual constructions of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, literary and visual studies methodology aid in shedding new understanding on citizenship status as an investment in maintaining the racial boundaries of the modern nation-state. Indeed, as much as the exclusionary pratices of citizenship are formed in defining citizens against non-citizens, the operations that configure legibility and belonging are historical, and based on the materiality of a spatial and temporal body politic. This investigation examines the way that nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and artists transformed historical figures such as Chinese immigrant laborers (coolies) and Qing dynasty officials (mandarins) into figures of emancipation. By situating nineteenth-and twentieth-century representations of Chinese labor immigration and culture within a historical frame of questioning and its medium specificity, this study argues that the contradictory deployments of these figures invents them as both the obstacle and possibility of a societal emancipation, thereby making apparent the exclusionary and genocidal tendencies within racial labor discourse as a direct inheritance of chattel slavery that is passed onto new forms of racialized immigrant labor. First, this investigation examines literary and visual production as providing a textured understanding to colonial configurations of African and Chinese racial labor as intellectuals and artists took up their pens against what many viewed as new forms of colonialism and slavery. What might this line of inquiry about the racial distinction between African and Chinese slavery in distinct, yet connected, Luso-Hispanic imaginaries reveal about the processes of racialization and labor? Second, this project examines the representational medium in which the figures of coolies and mandarins are portrayed. How does racial labor discourse extend or redefine these figures across borders that demarcate medium specificity? What might those extensions reveal about the ! ! 11 relationship between aesthetics and politics in the staging of citizenship? Does the prescription of representational form that determines allocation to distinct academic provinces create inherent modes of erasure in such disciplinary measures? I propose an emphasis on strategies taken from across disciplinary fields to examine literary and visual pieces that exhibit the transformation of imperialist and Orientalist orders of representation within the discursive space of coloniality in order to recast citizenship in independent terms. Detecting rhetorical and visual representations of mandarins and coolies across media and genre conveys racial labor discourse as a series of traceable ellipses. Following such dialogical trails across borders discloses new information about the social configuration of historical racial bodies in relation to labor and provides a genealogy of the dynamic relationship between race, labor and citizenship. Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos Under the spatial imagining of what I term Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos, this study brings together the imaginaries of Brazil, Cuba and Macau, to formulate a triangulated relationship among three former Iberian possessions that are often thought of as separate. Accordingly, this triangulated configuration emphasizes the necessarily global history that links the Luso-Hispanic worlds as archipelagos to conceive of these locations as points on connected circum-Oceanic circuits. The term circum-Oceanic builds on Joseph Roach’s concept of the circum-Atlantic. 1 The racial discourse produced from the brutal practice of chattel slavery and colonial exploitation that underlies Roach’s intervention is a critical notion in my formulation of circum-Oceanic circuits. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Roach examines public spaces and festivals in New Orleans and eighteenth-century London, as circum-Atlantic cities, to argue that performances in urban spaces transform these cities into embodied memory and make visible its spatial logic of power (14). ! ! 12 Studies surrounding the processes of globalization and transnational flows must ruminate on the punctures made to the histories of Africa and the Americas in the creation of the culture of modernity. I want to extend the metaphor of the circum-Atlantic to the global history of the slave trade that did not end with the abolition of African slavery, in order to take into account the succession of the passage of bodies for labor that flowed through the seamless currents of multiple oceans. The configuration of Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos compresses the temporal and spatial coordinates of geographically distant places that became linked through the impact of Iberian imperialism. This formulation is a critical factor in understanding the exclusionary practices of modern citizenship. Likewise, Gary Okihiro’s perspective of a trans-Pacific America focuses heavily on Asia and North American interactions, so it is also insufficient for this project’s Latin American focus on the succession of colonial racial labor discourse as it shifted to racialized immigrant labor. 2 Because the evidence suggests we must extend the geopolitical spatiality of the circum-Atlantic to include the trans-Pacific and vice versa, a term like circum-Oceanic implicates the global network that traded material objects and trafficked in human commodities. The cultures of modernity include histories of diaspora that permanently transformed the relationship of the local to the global. This developed a longstanding exchange from which new cultural products and practices were born from contact among local and diverse diasporic imaginaries. The chapters of this dissertation trace volatile figures of emancipation in literary and visual cultural production during the transition to abolition to examine how artists and intellectuals !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Okihiro’s discussion disrupts Euro- and Asia-centrisms (81) and racial binary between black and white in his shift to the circulation of people, ideas and cultures along the Pacific Rim that includes voyages between the U.S. and the diverse ethnicities of Asia. That is also a deliberate shift from the dominance of East Asia. ! ! 13 asserted autonomous practices of reading and looking that oppose imperialist and Orientalist orders of representation between self and other. The first chapter of this dissertation comparatively examines the politics of irony within the Orientalist imagery in the poetry of Machado de Assis and Rubén Darío written in the context of abolition and the trans-Pacific coolie trade. An ironic reading, I argue, of their Orientalist references brings forth the critical tone within the poems. These writers’ use of irony critiques the material objects that often symbolize the idealism of French Orientalism. Rather, they suggest new strategies of representation that developed through the very routes of circulation on circum-Oceanic circuits among European and Asian empires, and took new form in the Americas. That multiplicity and simultaneity of different temporalities colliding creates the contradictory multivalency of meaning within a single image or word. In this sense, the poems demand a different paradigm to analyzing so-called Orientalist depictions. Instead of conveying European modernity, they speak to coloniality in developing forms of agency that undermine multiple and often conflicting forms of imperial authority. The second chapter examines the play O Mandarim (1883), co-written by Brazilian playwrights Artur Azevedo and Sampaio Moreira. This play marks a pivotal moment in Azevedo’s popular theater style, yet it has not been analyzed within the historical context of the visit from Chinese merchant Táng Jǐngxīng to Brazil. His visit inspired the main character and title of the play as well as numerous caricatures that appeared in illustrated magazines during the same period. This theatrical revue offers the perspective that the trans-Pacific coolie trade in Brazil would lead to the racial assimilation of Chinese with Brazilian “races,” namely indigenous, African, and European groups. In my third chapter, I analyze the volatile depictions of mandarins and coolies in the fiction O Mandarim (1884) and diplomatic correspondences from Cuba (1872-1874) by Eça de Queiroz, the chronicles of Machado de Assis, and the fiction and prose of José Martí. In my view, historical figures such ! ! 14 as mandarins and coolies became the subject of literary realism as a means to convey the hyperbolic and contradictory reality of the writers who had taken up pens to envision a state of freedom independent from slavery. Literary representations of mandarins and coolies unexpectedly convey new forms of exclusion that were built on colonial practices of racial labor. My final chapter moves into the twentieth century to the essays of Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz in which the figure of the Chinese immigrant rhetorically conveys exclusionary practices of citizenship through a racial discourse evinced through culture and gender. Finally, I conclude with the belated contribution of fiction in twentieth and twenty-first century Cuban writers Mayra Montero and Cristina Garcia’s depictions of Chinese culture and immigration as recuperating the place of China in Cuban identity. ! ! 15 Introduction The Shards of China in the Formation of the Americas As Macau legend has it, Luís Vaz de Camões wrote sections of the epic poem Os Lusíadas during a short stay in the former Portuguese possession in China. 3 Today, after the 1999 return of Macau to China, when it became a Special Administrative Region under the rule of “one country, two systems,” the presence of Camões is still ingrained in the city. Portuguese ex-patriots gather at the colloquially named Camões Grotto each year on June 10 th to celebrate Portugal Day and commemorate the death of the Portuguese poet by reciting lines from his work in front of a stone statue sculpted in his likeness. The Portuguese celebration in Macau, a Chinese city but with a separate economic and special legal system, reflects a contemporary situation, yet symbolically conveys the narrative of Portuguese imperialism in Asia that began when Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in Macau in 1511. Soon thereafter, in 1557, a Portuguese settlement developed and eventually led to agreements between the Portuguese Empire and the Ming dynasty to lease the port to Portuguese merchants. 4 The first and last European !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 The following works examine debates, archival documents and Camões’ own poetic works to provide a series of speculative examples to attest to his mythical presence in Macau. See Rui Manuel Loureiro’s “Camões em Macau: um mito historiográfico.” Review of Culture. 7 (July 2003): 108-125 and Eduardo Ribeiro’s Camões em Macau: Uma verdade historiográfica. Lisboa: Labirinto de Letras, 2013. 4 Initial attempts by the Portuguese to establish themselves in the South China Sea had failed partly due to mismanagement and partly due to the reluctance of Ming imperial bureaucracy against “barbarian intruders from the Great Western Ocean.” Nevertheless, clandestine trading developed off the coast of the Guangdong and Fukien provinces. This eventually led to the Portuguese establishing a colonial settlement in Macau, which the Emperor in Beijing unwillingly accepted after he discovered the settlement 20 years later. Furthermore, due to tensions between Japan and China, Portugal entered into an important role as a liaison between the two countries, and thus it secured an ! ! 16 colony in Asia, today Macau sits in Hong Kong’s shadow and is known mainly as a popular day- trip for tourists visiting Hong Kong, or as a weekend getaway for Mainlanders from China. Taipa’s coastline proudly upholds the moniker “the Vegas of Asia.” It is lined with casinos such as the MGM and Venetian that mimic their counterparts in Las Vegas, which in turn, in the case of the latter, mimic actual cities in Europe. The Macau Fisherman’s Wharf located at Freguesia da Sé is a theme park of the world. It is composed of Dutch façades, a Roman amphitheater and even a Vasco da Gama Waterworld show. The city has transformed empire into a theme park, a rather ironic twist on the nineteenth-century World’s Fair exhibits that brought the colonies to the empires for display. This version, set in the grey economic matter between communism and capitalism, transforms old empires into sites of consumption for China’s rising middle-class. Macau, the city that profits from creating theme parks and casinos out of mimicking the phallic remains of fallen empires, proves that imperial nostalgia can take on many forms, especially in the era of post-modernism and late-capitalism under a communist rule. This comparative study of the imaginary of Asia in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual cultural production argues that Macau, Brazil and Cuba became related through circum-Oceanic coordinates that united Iberian imperial imaginaries. The itineraries of colonial trade and human commodity as well as the ideological stretches of Iberian theologico-political, racial and gendered systems of colonial govenmentality linked the imaginary of such distant places as Macau, Brazil and Cuba. These imperial imaginaries shifted in accordance with the difference of locale as well as with the diasporic imaginaries that came with the flow of people, ideas and objects that circulated !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! official monopoly between the Japan and China, trading Japanese silver bullion and Chinese raw and manufactured silk products (Boxer 63). ! ! 17 on circum-Oceanic global circuits. My investigation is first and foremost an inquiry into how nineteenth-century writers thought about and responded to the end of hemispheric slavery and the transition to economic liberalization vis-a-vis the trans-Pacific coolie trade. This study is invested in underlining the visual and rhetorical processes that depict, contest and refashion racial labor and citizenship through the creation of new forms of political and social belonging within or in spite of the legal terms of the modern nation-state. Remapping Brazil, Cuba and Macau as forming part of Luso-Hispanic Archipegalos, emphasizes the tripartite combination and the triangulated trade between these places. Accordingly, this investigation begins with the observation of the successive impact of the African slave trade on Chinese indentured servitude (coolie labor) during the transitional period from abolition to wage labor in Brazil and Cuba, which I mark roughly as the period from 1847 to 1888 to signal the beginning of the coolie trade in Cuba and the official end of African slavery in Brazil. 5 How racial labor discourse in relation to medium specificity expresses and adapts colonial configurations of racial labor to the bodies of immigrant laborers is the concern of this project. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5 Historian George Reid Andrews observes that war and revolution in the Caribbean opened the markets for planters in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico and other colonies. Sugar production began to pick up ground in Brazilian northeast, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Cuba. From the years 1750 to 1780 between 16,000 and 17,000 Africans per year arrived in Brazil. The numbers rose to 18,000 per year in the 1780s, to 23,000 per year in the 1790s and 24,000 per year in the first decades of the 1800s. Andrews contends “rates of increase were even sharper in Cuba. Up to 1760 the island had received annual imports of less that 1,000 slaves per year. Between 1764 and 1790 that more than doubled, to 2,000 slaves per year, and between 1790 and 1810, by which point Spanish authorities had opened the slave trade to foreign national, more than 7,000 Africans arrived each year” (19). ! ! 18 Along this line of inquiry, this project is also concerned with how to approach the imaginary of the histories of Asian immigration and culture in the Americas. As such, it points to a disciplinary gap between Asian American and Latin American studies. Situated between Asian American studies and Latin American studies is the emerging subfield of Asian Latin American studies, or Asian hemispheric studies. However, there is a disjuncture across these fields and in the subfield in the examination of the imaginary of Asian immigration histories to the Americas. Scholarship that has worked to bridge these gaps tend to focus on the Spanish empire and the historical linkages created by the Manila Galleon Trade (1565-1815). 6 My study expands this work to a comparative analysis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires to examine Iberian coloniality with my focus on the imaginary of racial labor. Indeed, historians and anthropologists have paved the way to such dialogues in conducting rigorous research on the histories of Asian immigration labor to the Americas. 7 This project builds on existing research about Chinese contract labor immigration (also known derogatively as the coolie trade), which is dense in the U.S. Caribbean and Peruvian historical context, by connecting it to a similar phenomenon in Brazil. Linking Asian indentured servitude, or coolie labor, as a transnational history, Moon-Ho Jung argues that anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 actually originates in Caribbean sugarcane fields where Chinese immigration labor-cum-indentured servitude began. Coolieism formed an integral part in US Congressional discourses over nation, race and citizenship during Reconstruction. In Cuba, the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 See Koichi Hagimoto “A Trans-Pacific Voyage: The Representation of Asia in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento” in Hispania (2012); John D. Blanco "Bastards of the Unfinished Revolution: Bolívar's Ismael and Rizal's Martí at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004). 7 Pioneering this scholarship is Evelyn Hu-DeHart who has conducted over thirty years of research on Chinese immigration and diaspora to the Caribbean and Latin America. See selected works in bibliography. ! ! 19 question of Chinese immigrant assimilation was also a discussion about what the slave, freed and mulatto population would mean for the Cuban nation in order to have a coherent independence movement from Spain. Coolie labor in Brazil did not reach the heights that it did in Cuba or Peru, yet Brazil faced the largest shortage of plantation labor being that it had the highest and longest duration of slave labor in all of the Americas. 8 Jeffrey Lesser has demonstrated that nineteenth and twentieth-century debates over Chinese and Japanese immigration to Brazil could never be separated from discussions over nation, ethnicity and labor. Chinese immigration signified a means towards freedom. Regardless of which side of the argument was being debated, the question of national identity was intimately tied to Brazilian views of the Chinese. Moreover, building on the work of Doris Sommer’s theory of Brazil’s “two-faced indigenism,” Lesser has observed that the attitude towards Chinese immigration was similar to its treatment of indigenous culture and population in which integration occurred at the sake of eradicating non-European populations. A similar paradoxical attitude of exclusion and inclusion occurred with African slaves and Chinese coolies. The latter would provide the solution to the labor crisis, but would be assimilated to the point of eradication as with what occurred with the indigenous population (Lesser 15). Luso-Hispanic Orientalism Latin American literary and cultural scholarship regarding the imaginary of Asian culture and immigration begins and departs from the theory of Orientalism towards what we may term Luso-Hispanic Orientalism. Moreover, scholars often begin the discussion of the imaginary of Asia in the Americas by pointing to the fact that Edward Said does not mention the Iberian powers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8 Arnold Meagher’s investigation into the history of the coolie trade in the Caribbean and South America estimates that between from 1847-1874 about 250,000 men went to the Americas as contract laborers. Contract laborers were to receive wages for a period of five to eight years, but the laborers were expected to use their wages to pay for the exorbitant cost of their voyage thus resulting in a system of indentured servitude (21-25). ! ! 20 in his study of Orientalism. Indeed, Said referred mainly to representations of the Middle East in the French and British imaginaries. Additionally, Said only briefly considered the special cases of Portugal and Spain. This makes sense if one considers the fact that these countries were to some extent intermediate territories. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in Raízes do Brasil (1936) observed that Spain and Portugal were bridge-territories that connected Europe to other worlds since Arabic and Jewish people lived alongside Christians on the Iberian Peninsula for 800 years, resulting in an inseparable fusion of these cultures. In several important studies, Américo Castro too underscored the ties that bound Christianity in Spain to both Islam and Judaism. Furthermore, since the sixteenth century Spain and Portugal had set up a complex network of maritime relations and exchange with the “Orient,” a word that has more political and economic implications than any geographical signification. Extending Said’s theory of Orientalism to the context of the Americas, writer Juan Goytisolo in the prologue of the Spanish translation of Said work, Orientalismo argues that Hispanic Orientalism is much more respectful and tolerant of the Other in the sense that it promotes unstable relationships between East and West. Goytisolo states “Quiero precisar aquí que España es un caso aparte: nuestra anorexia cognitiva y asimiladora tocante a otras culturas nos distancia también irremediablemente de Europa” (7). Likewise, scholars have argued for a more fluid conceptualization of identity in Hispanic literature. Julia Kushigian has suggested that Latin American Orientalism does not present the Orient as a static place. Concentrating on the literature of Severo Sarduy, Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, she contends that the Orient is presented with an openness that promotes an unstable relationship between East and West. Kushigian contends: ! ! 21 “[Hispanic Orientalism] also infers an absence of condescension toward the other culture that other nations disguised in a veil of teaching ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’ Hispanic Orientalism comprises a generosity toward, and respect for, diversity” (3). Such an argument maintains a problematic definition of the Orient that reinscribes the binary between self and other in terms of openness rather than confrontation, which upholds and essentializing and fundamentally hierarchical distinction between imperial self and the colonial other. Providing a more complex and nuanced understanding of Hispanic Orientalism, Ignacio López-Calvo’s comprehensive study of the rhetoric of Chinese-ness in Cuban literature points to the social constructedness of Cuban identity built against Asian otherness. He contends “The analysis of the (mis)representation and erasure of the Chinese presence in Cuban cultural production inevitably disrupts the official black-and-white discourse of the nation by underscoring alternative notions of ethnic difference” (19). Likewise, Araceli Tinajero’s Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano (2004) critiques Kushigian’s argument in stating that it does not depart from analyzing the Orient in terms of escapist/exoticist models that are common in discussions of Spanish American modernismo. Tinajero extends a hermeneutic and materialist approach to contesting Said and Kushigian. Her historicist reading of Orientalist references in modernista literary production examines the relationship between the Spanish-Iberian world and Asia. Latin American writers inscribed the approximation and appreciation of Asian artifacts into literary form, bringing to the forefront historical moments of interaction between the Americas and Asia that formed apart and inspite of contact with Europe (100). Tinajero’s analysis repositions the concept of the Orient onto the material object, which becomes the place of contemplation, approximation and appreciation from the perspective of one peripheral Other onto another ! ! 22 periphery --the Other gazing at the Other. In premising Orientalism as an imperial model of representation, such studies provide a solid platform from which to interrogate the hegemonic trappings that inadvertently reinscribe relations of power within the conceptualization of Otherness, even if it is otherness in multiplicity. Moreover, Orientalism, in my understanding, is a theory of representation that seeks to describe the discourse of imperial fantasies of conquest imposed onto the colonial subject and colonial space. Accordingly, framing literary and cultural production of the Americas in this way wrongly imposes a theoretical precept that describes imperializing forms of representation without accounting for the discursive space of coloniality. Such paradigms inadvertently reinforce difference and contribute to the dearth of understanding of artistic expression that developed in resistence or opposition to such discursive violence. These studies have provided a solid and necessary platform for building dialogue between Asian American and Latin American studies. I build upon this scholarship by shifting from what I see as a unidirectional movement of transnational studies within both Asian American and Latin American studies. My focus shifts from the imperial imagining and colonial reimagining of Orientalism toward the materiality of corporeality. That is, I analyze how imperial imaginings constructed race, gender and ethnicity, and how these configurations collided with corporeality and materiality of locale. Rather than taking Orientalism as a point of departure, I reconsider formulations of occident/orient; self/other; other/other and center/perirphery through interrogating the regimes of representation that configure alterity. Shards of China in the Formation of the Americas The central image in the title of this introduction, “Shards of China” refers to the fragmented history among China and rising European empires that began with the porcelain trade ! ! 23 during the early modern period. The story of china, with an uncapitalized c, actually refers to the capitalist history of the porcelain trade and the first instances of cultural exchange between China and Europe. As we shall see, this is also a history that concerns Brazil and Cuba. Although China was not interested in global expansion in the same way as the European empires with which it traded, China dominated European markets through the sale of porcelain, silks, teas and other items that associated luxury with the Orient. Through the aid of Portuguese carracks and Spanish galleons that transported Chinese visual and material consumable culture, the imaginary of China entered faraway shores and opened markets for Chinese merchants without the need for them to leave China. The trade with Asia, along with the colonization of the Americas, allowed Spain and Portugal to enjoy unparalleled success and wealth during the sixteenth century. Due to its exorbitant value, material culture from Asia was available only to European royalty and aristocracy. Porcelain had been prized and admired both throughout Chinese imperial history (each dynasty has a specific style) 9 but also among European empires that would also develop imperial motifs. The earliest example of a porcelain motif made for a European empire, dates to 1509 with the armillary symbol of Manuel I of Portugal who reigned from 1495 to 1521. Manuel oversaw the fleets of Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) that opened the first sea routes between Europe and Asia (1497-8) as well as the route to Brazil in 1500 led by Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467-1519). The armillary symbol is now part of the Portuguese national flag. Portuguese royalty and aristocrats began to commission familial coat-of-arms on porcelain objects. The blue-and-white color scheme was a particular favorite of the Portuguese, which would influence now famous blue-and-white !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 See Dominic Cheung in bibliographic references for studies on the expression of dynastic style as porcelain motifs. ! ! 24 tiles of Portuguese architecture. During the sixteenth century, the royal commissions of motifs emblematized onto Chinese porcelain the Portuguese standard of the cultured and military man. During the transition period between the Ming and Qing Dynasties in the mid-seventeenth century porcelain production in China halted. Political turmoil in China led to an economic halt in Europe. This is a significant moment that reveals how material culture such as faience, developed in Europe as the direct result of the halt to production in China. Because a key ingredient of the hard-paste clay that composes porcelain is the kaolin mineral richly abundant in places like Jingdezhen, China but not in Europe, a type of crude, soft-paste imitation of porcelainacau (faience) developed in the Netherlands in the period that coincides with suspended porcelain production in China. Partly due to the fact that the Dutch could not imitate the materiality of Chinese porcelain, or artistic techniques of Chinese art, the Dutch began to develop an imitation, or chinoiserie, of actual Chinese porcelain. Eventually Dutch scenes of seascapes and windmills replaced Chinese motifs of pagodas, lotus flowers and philosophers. Although Dutch manufacturers eventually developed their own motifs, they retained the blue-and-white color scheme. The Japanese embraced the exotic Hollandware (Orandaware) and imitated it back (Hochstrasser 46). In turn, distant European lands became exotic to Asian consumers. Moreover, taste for porcelain differed greatly among Asian and European consumers. When the Qing dynasty reestablished the main center of porcelain production in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, a new genre of export porcelain developed called kraakporselein, which is a type of blue-and-white porcelain made only for export to Europe, but considered barbaric to Chinese consumers. The material cultural history of porcelain, export porcelain and chinoiserie asserts the complexity of how the reality of China and Europe was made exotic by both Chinese and European imaginaries thus becoming foreign to all who looked at these objects. Furthermore, this ! ! 25 history of trade and cultural mimickry arguably demonstrates that chinoiserie and the “idea of the Orient” developed as business ventures between European and Chinese artists and merchants. 10 In some instances, they were enterprising alliances, and in others, they were competitively driven. 11 Additionally, this history complicates Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism in its situation of Europe at the center of knowledge and cultural production, always viewing how non-European countries enter into European hegemony. Said examines cultural exchange within a Western paradigm that neglects the plurality, inconsistencies, accidents and mutual acts of exploitation that have occurred from encounters. To understand the complexity of these relationships, it is necessary to analyze the way that the East and the West mutually profited from and exploited the other in order to expand and reach larger markets. Gustavo Curiel establishes that the trade histories that linked the Spanish empire to Asia, including Nagasaki, Japan, Macao, China and Manila, Philippines resulted in the development of a uniquely American creole identity and art. This study bridges an important, yet overlooked aspect in the historiography of the Spanish viceroyalty that often neglects the role that the trade with Asia had on the Spanish colonies. Curiel remarks that these exchanges led to Chinese mimicry where artists and artisans copied Asian art, and developed a hybrid Asian-influenced art, but the new style of art could not be categorized as merely being Asian-influenced or as chinoiserie. Doing so risks losing sight of the “complex codes of identity” of a “particular tripartite nature” that came into existence (Curiel 20). By tripartite, Curiel refers to a mestizo identity that is composed of European, indigenous and Asian. Furthermore he comments that it is anachronistic to code objects !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Andrew Madsen has remarked that Chinese export porcelain and its scattered presence in archeological sites across attest to its crucial role that inextricably linked the global economies of Europe and China (8-11). 11 Hugh Honour’s study of material culture of Louis XIV’s court argues that French craftsmen began to produce chinoiserie as an attempt to compete with the high prices for Asian material culture from Asian markets (57). ! ! 26 of Asian origin as “exotic” since that is a term that originates under the Romanticism of the nineteenth century under a different global order where British and French imperialism overshadowed the Iberian powers. Rather than exotic objects, “they were referred to as precious, rare, unusual, strange, exquisite, curious, beautiful gorgeous (adjectives that influenced the prices of the goods)” (Curiel 20). Curiel’s study makes a compelling argument about the formation of a distinct American creole identity that was composed of the tripartite hybridity between European, indigenous and Asian, and focuses his study to Mexico. I would like to add that African influences were also part of this complex coding of identity. Furthermore, this complex coding was reflective of a particular kind of attitude that transformed material culture into cultural imperialism. Paul Gilroy has discussed the conflation of culture and political power in the context of nationalism in what he calls cultural insiderism to refer to the processes in which culture is configured into nationalist projects that claim essentializing definitions over ethnic difference. Thereby eliding social, historical and lived experiences in terms of master narratives in which “culture” substitutes “race” in the construction of national identity (3-4). Identifying the metaphoric value of Chinese immigration and culture underlines the way in which the imaginary of the Orient, as opposed to Orientalism, was an invention created by both Asian and Europeans. This process found new expression during the emergence of national identities. I maintain that the imaginary of Brazilian and Cuban writers were linked as archipelagos – insular formations that may be configured as one – that shared in common the traces of Iberian imperialism where hierarchical categories of race and sexuality acted as persistent stains within the exclusionary practices of citizenship and nationalism. The coloniality of power expresses the legacy of hierarchical power regimes that persist after the decolonization process and become the normative criteria of constituting citizenship in ! ! 27 nation-states. In 1989 in an article titled "Colonialidad y modernidad-racionalidad," Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano developed the concept of the coloniality of power that linked the spheres of the political and economic with the intellectual and artistic. Through aggressive power, European empires and then the United States asserted a paradigmatic image onto forms of knowledge production and systems of representation that sustained the global expansion of capitalism. One of the fundamental structures that maintain the coloniality of power is the configuration of racial social classification and the geo/body political division of race and labor under the Euro-centered world order. Therefore the emergence of the idea of the "West" in opposition to the "East" or "Latin America" admits a relational identity that has formed as a result of the struggle for hegemony and domination of the global economy. Political economist Michel Chevalier created the idea of Latin America and Anglo American through separating Europe between Protestants and Catholics thus in the Americas, the North was Anglo-Protestant the South was Latin-Catholic. He observed that the nineteenth century would be marked by confrontations between the Orient and Occident and viewed the Americas as the privileged place where East and West would meet. Walter Mignolo’s thesis put forth in The Idea of Latin America (2005) remarks the distinction between continental divides, not as cultural differences, but in terms of the redistribution of imperial power during the second half of the nineteenth century. Mignolo refers to the colonial power differential of the Americas as a translation from the European. He states: It is precisely the differential of power that permits us to see that what are more generally understood as ‘cultural differences’ are indeed ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’ differences that have been dictated by leading imperial designers. It was in France, Germany, and England that the distinction between the South and the North of Europe was imaged (imperial difference). And it was in Spain and Portugal, first, ! ! 28 and in England, France, and Germany, later, that the differences between Europe and the two Americas were defined, described and implemented (colonial difference) (79). Due to the colonial difference, references to Oriental luxury cannot be read under the rubric of Orientalism, which obscures what I contend is a hemispheric and trans-Atlantic dialogue among writers and intellectuals including Machado de Assis, Arthur Azevedo, Eça de Queiroz, Rubén Darío and José Martí, among others, who were all similarly expressing the hemispheric anxiety towards new forms of colonialism. Expressions of Chinese labor immigration and culture signify the fear of a new era of slavery and colonialism. Due to linguistic and national divisions, this hemispheric literary current has not been sufficiently explained in scholarship. I propose that through showing the establishment of a dialogue among these writers, new readings of this period’s literary production is possible. I argue that writers, artists and intellectuals living in Brazil and Cuba took up their medium against Chinese immigration as a mode of eliminating new forms of slavery. That was believed to be a necessary path to establishing these early republics. Makings of Mandarins and Coolies In October 1883, Táng Jǐngxīng (1832-1892) a Qing dynasty official of the genteel class arrived in Rio de Janeiro (see figure 1) to examine the prospects of opening trade routes for labor emigrants from southern China to Brazil. ! ! 29 Figure 1. Carlson, Ellsworth C. “Photo of Táng Jǐngxīng.” The Kaiping Mines: 1877-1912. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971. Táng was the director of a China-based shipping company that intended to bring 21,000 contract laborers from China to Brazil to offset the shortage in labor anticipated by abolition. In tracing the way that the man Táng Jǐngxīng becomes a fictional mandarin, this project follows the recurring figure of the mandarin across aesthetic, rhetorical and geopolitical spaces. Representations of mandarins and coolies scattered across the corpus of texts that compose this study, relate the double meaning of the word, makings. On the one hand, they portray the earnings or profits that would accompany the trans-Pacific coolie trade. On the other hand, they refer to the fictional expressions that created the idea of mandarins and coolies as a trope during the emergence of economic liberalism. 12 Moreover, in doing so, it reveals the similar understanding of the mandarin and coolie as figures of emancipation. The mandarin and coolie may at first appear to be antithetical, but these figures are really two sides of the same coin. The mandarin and the coolie directly refer to the business of the trans-Pacific coolie trade that became !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 Ericka Beckman has argued that “capital fictions” written during the Export Age (1870-1930) expresses the fluctuating utopic and depressed hopes for Latin American integration into the global market during the emergence of economic liberalism (Beckman xxiii). ! ! 30 a possible solution to the labor crisis anticipated by abolition. In the trans-Pacific coolie trade, the mandarin had the role of negotiator or protector, and the coolie was the leased commodity, and often forced to enter the trade through deceptive means. Moreover, the deployment of the mandarin and the coolie portrays the transference of colonial systems of racial labor in the transitional moment whereby discourses about race and nation became intricately tied to debates over immigration labor. At least linguistically, the imaginary of the Qing dynasty official is a Portuguese invention in the sense that it originates as the Portuguese word mandarim (1580-1590). The word might have been derived from the Portuguese mandar meaning to command or to order. The addition of the “im” to the verb mandar exaggerates the verb and even suggests the sense of bossiness. One could playfully imagine that this derivation might have been created by Portuguese voyagers who interacted with Qing governors during early modern period exchanges that officially began in 1557 when Macau was leased to Portugal. 13 Etymologically, the word mandarin conveys a range of different and even contradictory meanings, including Qing governor or senior-ranking official; a dialect of Chinese; a variety of citrus fruit; a Marvel Comic Supervillain, and refinement and class. In Chinese, the word mandarin does not actually exist. Qing governors have different names according to their ranking as determined by the imperial government civil service examination; the Chinese dialect of Mandarin is translated to guan hua “official speak” or guo yue, language of the nation, as well as Putonghua, the common language. Furthermore, there are no citrus fruits in the Chinese language that are called mandarins nor does there exist even a hint that it is a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13 Portuguese local government in Macau paid an annual fee of 550 taels ($750) annually to the magistrate of Heung-shan district. However, Macau was under the sovereignties of Chinese and Portuguese officials who jointly administered the peninsula for nearly three centuries (Meagher 117). ! ! 31 transliteration of any word in Mandarin. Arguably, all these definitions of the mandarin and friction of unstable definitions give a nod to the economic, political and social history between the Americas, China and Europe that began when Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal around the Cape of Good Hope onto Goa and then Guangdong and Macau (1511-1514), eleven years after Pedro Álvares Cabral and his fleet landed in Brazil. Incidentally, the Chinese (Mandarin) word for Portugal is phonetically translated to English as “Grape Tooth” and Portuguese people in Mandarin translates to “Grape Tooth People,” so we could also just as playfully imagine that rather than a mere phonetic transliteration, this translation might instead reflect how the Chinese imagined the lot of Portuguese mariners in southern China with grape teeth, that is to say, teeth stained by cheap wine. Tensions between China and Japan secured Portugal’s privileged trade position that was officially established in 1557. Since it was illegal to trade between China and Japan, Portuguese galleons made quite the profit acting as mediator and enriching both the ports of Macau and Nagasaki. The fact that the Portuguese leased Macau makes this a history that did not begin as one of colonization. Portugal and China depended on each other to expand to larger markets. The Chinese produced goods that Portuguese ships would carry to Europe and the Americas. Portuguese and Chinese merchants and artisans participated in creating the idea of the Orient that Europeans could sell, trade or keep as souvenirs. Arguably, literary and visual representations of the mandarin are always linked to discussions of the trans-pacific coolie trade, positing that such representations became a form of contemplating new terms of freedom, nation and citizenship during the transitional period between the end of slavery and the beginning of free labor. The word coolie may have first appeared in India to denote Tamil laborers from Madras. Later it was used to describe male laborers from China (Meagher 25). The expression did not exist ! ! 32 in China until the beginning of the coolie trade, which then caused the term to enter into the Chinese language to distinguish between voluntary and illegal emigration in which coolie traffickers kidnapped and sold people to one of five barracoons in Macau. Ports in China including Amoy, Hong Kong, Macau and Shanghai were also included onto the routes of circum-Oceanic circuits. Although Luso-Chinese relations officially began in the mid-sixteenth century in 1557 when China leased Macau to Portugal. Portuguese sovereignty was never fully recognized there, which gives Macau a morphous status during the five hundred years of history between Portugal and China. In 1845, Macau became a free trade port. Incidentally, that was the same year that the coolie labor began in Amoy. Likewise, Shanghai also became a place in which laborers were kidnapped and forced into indentured servitude or slave-like work conditions. According to historian Douglas Harper, the verb “to shanghai” came about in 1854, and means "to drug a man unconscious and ship him as a sailor," from the practice of kidnapping to fill the crews of ships making extended voyages, such as to the Chinese seaport of Shanghai” (Online Etymology Dictionary). The word coolie in Mandarin ( ) denotes a kind of harsh, and even punishing, labor that produces no capital. And since Mandarin is a language that loves homonyms, the characters and also have a number of associative meanings. For example, can be defined in English as harsh, suffering or pain. Survivors of the Nanking Massacre often use the word to describe the indescribable experience of living through war. As I have mentioned, can mean labor, but it also means strength, force and power, so in Mandarim might be better defined into English as a phrase: “cruelty inflicted with strength.” Illegal kidnapping and smuggling of Chinese led to anti- coolie placards to warn people of the dangers of the trade. These placards suggest that the ! ! 33 expression “coolie” refers to a verb rather than a noun, since the placards condemn the action of kidnapping and those associated with illegal smuggling. 14 This pronounced slippage between the act of human trafficking and the people inflicted with the effects of this action is apparent in the discourse surrounding the coolie that conflates the exploit of the coolie trade with its victims. Whereas most studies on the coolie trade have been historical investigations or framed within Luso-Hispanic Orientalism, my research focuses on the discourse of the mandarin and the coolie that appears with frequency during the period that coincides with Spanish American modernismo. Studies on Spanish American literature of the late nineteenth century during the period known as Spanish American modernismo rarely bring it into relation with late nineteenth- century Brazilian literature. This is due, of course, to the perception that Brazil and Spanish America have separate literary traditions that often results in their division into separate provinces in the academy, thus hindering the potential for comparative readings. In fact, even the term modernismo refers to different movements in Spanish America and Spain, on the one hand, and Brazil and Portugal, on the other. Many associate Spanish American modernismo to have begun in the early 1880s with the publication of Azul by poet and diplomat Rubén Darío, born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (1867-1916), and to have ended in 1916 with the death of Darío. Although primarly an aesthetic movement and often described as expressing an attitude of “art for art’s sake,” Darío also played the important political role of diplomat, and so it is arguably difficult to completely separate his poetics from his political sensibility. Blurring politics and aesthetics, my reading of Spanish American modernismo is principally concerned with its departure from colonial and cultural ties to Spain. Overlapping in years with Spanish American modernismo, the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 See “Translation of a Chinese Placard in Canton respecting Coolie Barracoons at Macao” in FO 97/102A (1856): 88a-88b (Yen 77). ! ! 34 modernista movement in Spain, or the Generación del 98’ arose as a reaction to the loss of the Spanish empire, marked by the Spanish-American War (1898), in which Spain lost possession of its last colony Cuba, thus symbolizing the end of the Spanish empire. Whereas Spanish American modernismo is largely concerned with breaking ties with empire, the Spanish modernista movement is principally an expression of the ruins and decadence of the Spanish empire. Although Brazilian modernismo occurs during a different political context, it shares an underlying goal with Spanish American modernismo in the desire to rupture with aesthetic traditions from Europe. Brazilian modernismo officially launched during the week of February 11 through 18 in 1922. Called the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art), the weeklong debut of art, poetry, music, sculpture and literature took place in São Paulo’s opera house, the Teatro Municipal. Amidst the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930) in which plantation wealth from coffee and milk maintained an oligarchical political structure, the Semana de Arte Moderna exhibited an artistic and intellectual attempt to rejuvenate language, art, architecture and music to address colonial seepages in the First Republic. From 1924-1928, Oswald de Andrade inaugurated the concept of cultural cannibalism in “Manifesto Antropófago” and Revista de Antropofagia that proclaim that Brazilian culture ingests and resignfies all forms of foreign influences into a Brazilian context. Seemingly contrary to Brazilian modernismo, Portuguese modernismo begins in the early twentieth century with the publication of the Journal Orfeu in 1915 with contributions from Fernando Pessoa and Mario de Sá Carneiro, among others. To a great extent, Portuguese modernismo attempts to rupture with the past that is overshadowed with saudosismo that expresses imperial nostalgia, the collapse of the Portuguese empire, and engages new ideas surrounding language and nationalism. Similar to the Generación del 98’, Portuguese modernismo conveys ! ! 35 longing for the imperial past whereas Spanish American and Brazilian modernismos assertedly break from bygone colonial thinking. Although, these different forms of modernismos apparently express distinct literary movements, their inconsistency might also be understood as representing the end of empire and the persistence of coloniality. In the literary production of the writers that this dissertation focuses on, it could be argued that Oriental objects symbolized luxury, modernity and European imperialism. I am persuaded that, when transplanted to the space of the Americas, the same objects undergo a permutation in the new discursive context of the coloniality of power within what Walter Mignolo has referred to as the colonial difference. Symbolically, their cultural value shifts, and enables a reading that conveys a transforming discourse of racial labor. In doing so my dissertation observes a politics of irony that depicts a hyperbolic reality to awaken a sleepy public. In the following poem published in the abolition journal Revista Ilustrada on August 3, 1878, a writer under the pseudonym “Toby” describes a new school of modern poetry that embodies cynicism, corruption and barbarism in ironic exultation: Realismo A poesia moderna é isto –o barbarismo A fórma ataviada –e a idea torpe e nua Como a Canalha vil que tripudia e estua A’s obscenas canções de alvar funambulismo Chama-se á nova escola o grande realismo. Celebra-se a loucura em phrase giria e crua. E o amor do lupanar e os ideas da rua Cantão a embriaguez e exultão de cynismo ! ! 36 Fenece o amor da lar? –Triumpha o hospital. A nova seita cresce? –Avulta a impureza. O bom senso desvaria? –Incensa-o a flôr do mal. A nova inspiração emana da torpeza De um veneno subtil –a Idéa –podridão, Que cospe a rôxa escara –a Strophe—corrupção 15 (Toby Revista Ilustrada August 3,1878). This poem expresses a style in which the writers’ imagination would aggrandize the already exaggerated reality of the period’s actual ideological contradictions. According to Toby, grande realismo expresses a school of modern poetry that confronts societal ills in aesthetic form. In this description, Toby refers to a blurring of literary genre in which fiction is published as news in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 15 Realism Modern poetry is this –barbarism A well-adorned form –a naked and indecent idea As the vile scoundrel, living in crime and boil Obscene songs of naïve funambulism The new school is called grande realismo. To celebrate madness in crude slang and phrase And the love of brothels and knowledge of the streets They sing in drunkenness and exalt cynicism Cease hospitality? –Triumphant hospital A new sect grows? Increase impurity. Good sense vacillating to delirium? The flower of evil’s aromatic scent The new inspiration emanates from turpitude A subtle poison –idea– rotten, That spits purple scars –a strophe– corruption. ! ! 37 journals and journals literally become characters in fiction or enter into the imaginary of fictional works. Furthermore, visual culture ironically contradicts literary text in such that the image shows is not the same as what the texts states. This project is concerned with uncovering the processes of mediation and adaptation that transmit or disrupt the coloniality of race and the sociality of labor. Even after the fall of the Iberian powers, the regimes of racial labor persisted into the rhetoric of nation building albeit within the context of free labor and immigration. In the Americas, the metonymic associations that linked Oriental objects and people to luxury, eroticism, exoticism and excess represented the imperial excess that depended on exploitation of the resources and labor of colonial possessions. Chinese material culture and immigration transform into literary symbolism represented an imaginary that was linked as archipelagos of the Iberian imperialism that had to be rewritten or expulsed from the project of nation building. On one level, I comparatively study the imaginary of Asia in the aesthetic production from Cuba and Brazil due to the parallel histories of the African and Chinese slave trade in these two former Iberian colonies. Cuba and Brazil were the last two places in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1886 and 1888, respectively, and looked to the possibility of Chinese migrant labor as a solution to the labor crisis anticipated by emancipation. Throughout the colonial period Havana and Rio de Janeiro were the largest ports in the Americas to receive slave-ships as well as material goods from Asia that departed principally from Spanish galleons from the Philippines and Portuguese carracks from Macau. Historian Gervase Clarence-Smith observes that the driving force behind Portuguese imperialism was the search for markets, which led to the need for constant and renewed mercantilism. Moreover, contraband was a significant part Portuguese trade so it was not a surprise that Portuguese merchants would partake in slave trading negotiations (vii-2). ! ! 38 Portugal had the largest slave markets in the world in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia, and it also contributed to the Cuban trade, making Havana a leading port as well. After the British declared the end to the trans-Altantic slave trade starting in 1807, clandestine smuggling and kidnapping increased significantly during the second half of the century throughout the African coast (30-32). At this time, Chinese immigration labor also became a viable means to offset the crisis in labor anticipated by abolition. Of course Brazil and Cuba have very different historical trajectories. Brazil is an empire for most of the nineteenth century while Cuba is a colony. However, Brazil became a colonial empire once the Portuguese royal family settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1808 after escaping the Napoleanic invasion of Portugal. Indeed, the royal family moved to the colony with nearly 15,000 members of the court and many royal possessions. The aristocratic presence in Brazil transformed local laws to allow for the formation of educational and cultural institutions. Nevertheless, the economic structure of Brazil was still fundamentally based on slavery and colonial exploitation. Admittedly, this economic and political infrastructure made Brazil the only place in the Americas where a European empire became its own colony, an empire in the tropics. 16 On another level, how intellectuals and artists imagined these figures of emancipation as entering or exiting discourses surrounding national identity allows me to trace the contours of how bodies became negotiated in debates over national identity. As such, this dissertation collapses the dichotomous site of knowledge/power between a European center and the colonial periphery. Instead, I examine multiple sites that include Luso-Chinese alliances and tensions, the Brazilian !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16 Elsa Peralta calls attention to the fact that Portugal was an imperial-nation at the same that time it was a subaltern European nation among stronger European colonial powers (207). ! ! 39 Empire, as well as the expansion of Asian imperialism that impacted new forms of immigration to Brazil and Cuba, thus complicating Said’s theory of Orientalism, as well as its offshoots in Luso- Hispanic Orientalism, which I argue provide only a unilateral examination of how the Orient came into the European imaginary. Rather than a rubric that is constructed on the theory of Orientalism, which refers to European imperialism of the “Orient,” and accounts only for the hierarchical relationship of Europe over the Orient, or a multiplicity of relationships between peripheral Others, I prefer a discussion that takes into account the topographies of empires that have used racialized bodies and racial cultural objects as the battlefields to negotiate and convey power. Along this vein, this project also argues that studies about the imperial struggles among European nations must also situate them within the context of conflicting imperialisms between “East,” “West,” “North” and “South.” Unstable political and economic turmoil within China enabled ships displaying European flags to engage in the illegal smuggling of Chinese contract immigration labor to the Americas to offset the shortage of labor anticipated by abolition. The majority of the contracts created situations of indentured servitude that replicated slave labor conditions. Such concerns over the return to a slave-based economy and new forms of colonialism instigated widespread debate over the question of Chinese labor immigration. Furthermore, due to the exploitative terms of this contract labor, many Chinese laborers could not return to China at end of their contractual period. Without economic means and without legal contracts, the notion of undocumented arose to describe their wavering status between citizenships. In both Cuba and Brazil, Chinese immigration meant a move towards abolition for some and a continuation of the slave trade for others. On one side of the debate was the belief that that coolie trade, and Chinese immigration, would produce a new type of slavery under the guise of a different name. Newspapers such as London-based Anti-Slavery Reporter protested against coolie ! ! 40 labor, accusing that it hid under the guise of contract labor and immigration. These publications also reveal the international dialogues that occurred between intellectuals such as the Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco and an English-reading public. The following is an excerpt of a speech made by Nabuco that was translated into English and published in the Anti-Slavery Reporter. On December 1879, quoting Nabuco, the newspaper asked: “Is the Chinaman necessary? Who wants him? The noble president made an agricultural congress. What the members of the congress wanted was Chinese obtained through contract, a system called the coolie traffic, and not the spontaneous immigration of Chinese to Brazil. Fortunately, however, China has had this traffic stopped for humanity’s sake. We have inherited slavery, which unfortunately cannot be done away with suddenly. But, even so, would it not be better for the statesman to whom are committed the fortunes of our state and the future of our race, to endeavor to develop and protect free labour instead of trying to prolong slavery by means of the Chinese, the more so as their defenders confess that the coolie element is immoral, low, servile, and will serve only to contaminate our population and degrade our country?” Is there a lack of labourers? If such a want exists,” it is not because they cannot be found in the empire, but because the good ones, those capable of work, do not go to agriculture. Is it not because slavery impedes this development of the character, energy and individual qualities in the countries where it exists, on the part of those who are subject to it, and keeps them from those kinds of labour that are considered servile? You cannot have free and slave labour at the same time, nor slavery and immigration. We must choose between them. Are we to put our trust in slavery or in free labour? Being so, ! ! 41 gentlemen, the substitute is not the Chinese; it is a much more tolerable lot and an easier one which should be meted out to the slave family. It is, on the other hand, the education of the freeborn children (The Anti-Slavery Reporter n/a). In this speech, he accepts Brazil’s inheritance of slavery as something that the new nation must face. In making the statement, he aligns the word nation with ideas of race. The discourse of race was inseparable from the articulations of inheritance, nation and immigration. For Nabuco, to be part of the nation and race of Brazil meant facing its inheritance of slavery. He viewed Chinese immigrants as emblematic of coolie labor, a specific kind of exploitative and contractual form of immigration labor. Allowing Chinese immigration meant prolonging slavery and questioning if the Chinaman was necessary made the issue of immigration inseparable from slavery. Rather than substituting slave labor with coolie labor, Nabuco urged the nation to educate freeborn children, implying that Brazil should deal with the inheritance of slavery and imperialism. Nabuco’s stance is clearly for denying immigration, which arguably signified expulsing new forms of imperialism. Discussions over the coolie trade made the question of laboring bodies inseparable from the rhetoric of freedom. During this time, to be free meant a state of not being enslaved. With the abolition of slavery, intellectuals had to imagine new terms of freedom that were not contingent on the condition of slavery or labor. Even though the coolie trade did not succeed in replacing African slavery, the imaginary that depicts this history gives a glimpse into the way that discussions over the coolie trade made the question of laboring bodies inseparable from the rhetoric of freedom and citizenship. Immigration became a way to imagine the nation outside of the inheritance of slavery and colonialism by extending Brazil’s two-faced indigenism to new racial laboring bodies. ! ! 42 On the one hand, this is a study about the mobility of the discourse of racial labor that moves across political and economic borders during the transitional periods of governmentality from colonial state to nation state. Understanding processes in which historical bodies are renegotiated during this period sheds new perspective on the relationship of racial labor to the constitution of modern citizenship. On the other hand, this project also analyzes the medium specificity of racial discourse in which literary and visual depictions of Chinese immigrant workers across various genres and linguistic boundaries reveal translocal ties among writers and artists on different Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos. This inquiry allows me to explore the mobility of form across different modes of media to examine how the actual participants –Qing Dynasty officials and Chinese contract laborers– of the trans-Pacific coolie trade enter into the literary and visual imaginary and take the form of mandarins and coolies. Indeed, as the presence of Chinese immigrant laborers in the Americas blur ties to national belonging, figurative mandarins and coolies journeying through the genres of the chronicle, poetry, visual images, material culture, photography and theater revue have their own stories to tell about how migratory characters traverse media and connect archipelagos carved by circum-Oceanc circuits. ! ! 43 Chapter One: Ironic Orientalisms of Machado de Assis and Rubén Darío Influenced by Judith Walter’s French translations of Chinese poetry in her Le Livre de Jade (1870), Machado de Assis published “Lira chinesa” in the collection Falenas in 1871. 17 During that same time, in the political and legal sphere of Brazil, two significant laws passed that would change the economic structure of Brazil from a slave-based economy to wage labor. In July 1870, the ten-year labor importation plan attempted to hire Chinese laborers to offset the labor shortage anticipated by abolition. Then, one year later, in 1871 the passing of the Lei do Ventre Livre, or the law of free wombs, undoubtedly marked the end of slavery as an inherited legacy. The turn to Chinese laborers, or the trans-Pacific coolie trade, became a viable option for agricultural tycoons in Brazil and Chinese businessmen alike. How Chinese businessmen, immigrant laborers and Chinese culture became the subject of hyperbolic realism, or what I discuss as grandes realismos, as a reaction to legal and economic societal shifts is the focus of this chapter. I contend that an ironic reading reveals a critical tone that relates a specific discursive space of coloniality. After analyzing specific aspects of Machadian irony, I comparatively examine Rubén Darío’s “La emperatriz de la China” in the 1888 collection of poetry titled Azul and “La sinfonía en gris mayor” in Prosas profanas (1891) to argue that Darío similarly utilizes irony in the architectonics of the poem to convey what may be termed a poetics of diplomacy. I suggest that Darío’s poems are an early example of his vision for hemispheric solidarity in which he used Orientalist symbolism differently inform the practices associated with French Orientalism. To begin, I would like to discuss how I view Orientalist poetry differently than the grandes realismos of Machado and Darío. Orientalist depictions convey a position of power between the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 Judith Walter was the pen name of Judith Gautier, daughter of famed French Orientalist Théophile Gautier. ! ! 44 one producing the representation to the represented. In this sense, the nuances and cultural specificity of what is represented is not important since the object merely becomes a vessel through which to project imperial desires. So-called Orientalist references in Machado and Darío are not deployed homogenously as in French Orientalism nor does there exist a relation of domination over the Orient. Rather than depicting the Orient as the imaginative space to project imperial fantasies, the authors imagine the Orient as conveying new forms of oppression, slavery and colonialism. Their critical stance against such figures as mandarins, coolies and Oriental material culture, I argue, express a critical, yet complacent, stance towards emancipation and racialized labor. The Orientalist dimension of Judith’s Le Livre de Jade emanates from the fictionalization of an actual person named Tin-Tun-Ling and the claim that Judith learned enough Chinese from him that she was able to translate a book of Chinese poetry. When Chinese scholar Tin-Tun-Ling entered into Judith Gautier’s life, her eyes opened towards the direction of Asia, and in particular China. The true story (and name) of Tin-Tun-Ling’s arrival in nineteenth-century Paris wanders in and out of a larger narrative about the rise of French Orientalism. The accounts of his life in Paris, told mainly through the filters of the bright-eyed and infatuated perspective of Judith, read very much like a literary version of chinoiserie. A process of fascination and imitation may be observed, but the original object is now lost. According to Joanna Richardson’s biography of Judith Gautier, Monseigneur Callery, Bishop of Macau, sponsored Tin-Tun-Ling's trip to Paris to produce a Chinese-French dictionary. Soon after arriving, Callery died, leaving Tin-Tun-Ling unemployed until he received an offer from Theophile Gautier to teach his daughter, Judith, Chinese as well as give her the opportunity to —in the words of Theophile— “study a country that is still unknown, and seems prodigious” (Richardson 23). Another account of Tin-Tun-Ling’s ! ! 45 arrival in Paris reveals that he was to be an assistant teacher to Stanislas Julien at the Collège de France. One day, an argument broke out when Tin-Tun-Ling accused Professor Julien of not knowing any Chinese, leading to Tin-Tun-Ling’s dismissal. Tin-Tun-Ling is a minor character who made a major impact in the backstory to the publication of Judith Gautier's Le Livre de Jade, and to the larger history of French Orientalism. However, accounts of his life are known only as told through the pens of others. The fact that his actions are understood through the curious, lost- in-translation, descriptions made by Judith and her contemporaries convert the actual man Tin- Tun-Ling into a fictional character based on a historical figure. Reference to the Chinese scholar gave Judith credibility and placed her in a prominent position that gave validity to the book. Yet, the actual Chinese scholar is displaced and exoticized, appearing more as bright shadows in Judith’s light. Le Livre de Jade is dedicated to "Tin-Tun-Ling Poète chinois" and some of the poems are written by him but filtered through Judith's hand. None of the other poems in the collection can be traced to any known Chinese literati, including the poem "L'empereur," which was allegedly written by Thou Fu, who could have been the poet Tu Fu (712-770 AD), but it does not match with any of the known works of the Tang Dynasty intellectual. Since none of the poems in Judith's works evidence actual Chinese poetry, it would be safe to assume that they were original contributions to French literature. Diasporic Mandarins Literary scholarship has rarely investigated the influence of Le Livre de Jade on the poetry of Machado de Assis. Some of the few examples include Edgar C. Knowlton Jr., who conducted a comparative study of Judith Gautier’s poems and Machado de Assis’s translations of them into Portuguese. He found that Gautier and the Chinese scholar, Tin Tun Ling, wrote all of the poems ! ! 46 in the collection, a fact that Machado acknowledged with a measure of skepticism in the note to the “Lira chinesa”: Os poetas imitados nesta coleção são todos contemporâneos. Encontrei-os no livro publicado em 1868 pela Sra. Judith Walter, distinta viajante que dizem conhecer profundamente a língua chinesa, e que traduzo em simples e corrente prosa. (Emphasis mine. Machado de Assis, 204). In L.C. Ishimatsu’s study of Lira chinesa she situates the collection within the literary trajectory of Brazil and France. She asserts that the structure of the poems is pre-Parnassian. Rather than examining the poems from an evolutionary or chronological point-of-view, I analyze them in the historical context of the trans-Pacific coolie debate in Brazil in order to understand the type of intertextual dialogue in which Machado was engaged. In Portuguese, the title Le livre de Jade has a deferred meaning that moves from the linguistic boundaries of French to Portuguese. Since Machado was fluent in both languages, it is possible to imagine that he could have read the word “livre” in Le Livre de jade as simultaneously meaning the book and the freedom. Furthermore, the title of the book of poems, Falenas, demonstrates another play on double meaning. As a master wordsmith, Machado might have known the etymological differences between falenas and borboletas --moths and butterflies-- when he chose to name his 1870 collection of poems Falenas. Comparable to the obscurity of the word Casmurro that became the title of the novel Dom Casmurro, Falenas also conveys a number of possibilities. The Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa simply states that falenas means "borboleta nocturna." According to the Michaelis Portuguese dictionary, the word designates "todas as borboletas da família dos Geometrídeos, cujas larvas atacam toda a sorte de árvores e plantas, comendo-lhes as folhas." Accordingly, falenas are a type of moth that belong to the ! ! 47 Geometroid family. They are known to be nocturnal pests for feeding off the lot of trees and plants. Although falenas could translate to butterfly in English, it seems more accurate to refer to it as a species of moths that attack the sorte, meaning group or type, but also lot, fate, or circumstance of trees and plants. In another definition, the word nocivo is used to describe the species. Nocivo is an adjective that means harmful, noxious and also morally deleterious. The word falenas, then, implies a metaphor for an unfavorable physical and moral infestation from a species that must prey on certain types of life to survive. When Machado chose to title his 1871 collection of poems Falenas, he did not merely create an analogy between metamorphosis and the maturation of his style, as L.C. Ishimatsu has argued: “It is obvious that by calling the volume Falenas Machado intended to emphasize his maturation as a poet, and indeed, in Falenas one can detect the further development of pre-Parnassian as well as Machadian elements” (74). Rather, if taken as a metaphor for a physical and moral infestation, Falenas and the small section titled “Lira chinesa” could very well have referred to debates of the day that referred to Chinese immigrants as a moral infestation on Brazilian society. In a parliamentary address, abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco referred to Chinese immigration to Brazil in these terms, “morally…why introduce into our society this addictive leprosy that infests all cities where Chinese immigration is established?” (Lesser 28). Machado de Assis's ironic Orientalisms reorient the reader from an Orientalist and imperialist position towards one that faces coloniality. His irony allows a double meaning to emerge that could simultaneously be read as simply a poetics of detachment, but also as a critical space through which to contemplate the constant deferral of language as a form in which to contemplate freedom as independent to the relation to slavery or labor. Machado’s translations of Judith’s poem, “L’Empereur” describes an oblivious Emperor (Son of Heaven) who pays more attention to personal urges and desires than to his kingdom. His ! ! 48 government officials who act as advisors to the throne (mandarins) express deep preoccupation with the kingdom. However, the prince is more focused on the empress and his concubines than the serious matters of the court. The translated poem begins with the imperative, “Olha.” By beginning with a command, it sets up a temporality of immediacy. Whereas this poem could be read as an imitation of French Orientalism, the imposition of the imperative to begin the poem calls attention to an occasion of immediacy. Rather than reading the figure of the mandarin as mimicry of French Orientalism’s tendency to exoticize this Chinese gentry class, Machado’s mandarin turns the view – and the reader’s eye – towards coloniality. The fan blows the scent of seduction that draws the prince away from his duties towards his wife in the porcelain pavilion. The mandarin, when read within the context of Machado’s legal and political context, and the intertext of his chronicles on the matter of Chinese immigration labor, might very well convey a critique of Qing imperialism as an inseparable anti-colonial sentiment. Machado’s ironic Orientalism speaks to the occasion of his historical moment yet also plays with literary ambiguity and intangibility. It is in this constant deferral of language that he invents a new literary space through which to contemplate new forms of freedom that would transcend his historical moment. “O Imperador” (Thu-Fu) (Machado de Assis) Olha. O Filho do Céu, em trono de ouro, E adornado com ricas pedrarias, Os mandarins escuta: —um sol parece De estrelas rodeado. Os mandarins discutem gravemente Cousas muito mais graves. E ele? Foge-lhe O pensamento inquieto e distraído ! ! 49 Pela janela aberta. Além, no pavilhão de porcelana, Entre donas gentis está sentada A imperatriz, qual flor radiante e pura Entre viçosas folhas. Pensa no amado esposo, arde por vê-lo, Prolonga-se-lhe a ausência, agita o leque... Do imperador ao rosto um sopro chega De recendente brisa. "Vem dela este perfume", diz, e abrindo Caminho ao pavilhão da amada esposa, Deixa na sala, olhando-se em silêncio, Os mandarins pasmados. 18 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 18 L'empereur (Selon Thou-Fou) (Judith Gautier) Sur un trône d'or neuf, le Fils du Ciel, Éblouissant de pierreries, est assis au mi- Lieu des Mandarin; il sembre un soleil en- Vironné d'étoiles. Les Mandarin parlent gravement de graves choses; mais la pensé de l'Empereur s'est en fuie par la genêtre ouverte. Dans son pavillon de porcelaine, comme Une fleur éclatante entourée de feuillage, l'Impératrice est assise au milieu de ses femmes. Elle songe que son bien-aimé demuere trop ! ! 50 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Longtemps au conseil, et, avec ennui, elle Agite son éventail. Une bouffée de parfums caresse le visage De l'Empereur. << Ma bien-aimée d'un coup de son éven tail m'envoie le parfum de sa bouche; >> et L’Empereur, tout rayonnant de pierreries, Marche vers le pavillon de porcelaine, lais- Sant se regarder en silence les Mandarins Étonnés. The Emperor (Judith Gautier) (English translation by Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr.) On a throne of new gold, the Son of Heaven, resplendent with gems, is seated amidst the mandarins; he seems like a sun surrounded by stars. The mandarins speak gravely of serious matters; but the thought of the Emperor has run off through the open window. In her pavilion of porcelain, like a dazzling flower surrounded by foliage, the Empress is seated amidst her women. She thinks that her beloved is tarrying too long in the council, and, with vexation, she waves her fan. A whiff of perfume caresses the Emperor’s countenance. <<My beloved with a wave of her fan sends me the perfume of her mouth;>> and the Emperor, all agleam with gems, ! ! 51 In 1906, Nicaraguan poet and diplomat Rubén Darío wrote the poem “A Machado de Assis” in homage to the Brazilian author of many genres, including journalism, theater, narrative fiction, poetry, essay, and criticism. Darío remembers meeting Machado at the Third Pan- American Conference in Rio de Janeiro, which took place from July 23 to August 27: Dulce anciano que vi en su Brasil de fuego y de vida y de amor, todo modestia y gracia. Moreno que de la India tuvo su aristocracia; aspecto mandarino, lengua de sabio griego. Acepta este recuerdo de quien oyó una tarde en tu divino Rio tu palabra salubre, dando al orgullo todos los harapos en que arde, y a la envidia ruin lo que apenas la cubre. 19 Darío describes Machado in an endearing fashion. Fred Ellison suggests that the references to the mandarin might be an allusion to Machado’s “Lira chinesa,” a section within the collection of poems Falenas published in 1870 (27). Although this could be possible, I would like to suggest that it could also be a historical reference that evokes other geographical spaces of Portuguese imperialism, such as Goa, India, and Macau, China. This historical and political affiliation is then used to address Machado in Brazil. Darío conflates Machado’s skin-color to a specifically !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! marches toward the porcelain pavilion, leaving the astonished mandarins to look at one another in silence. 19 To Machado de Assis Sweetly aged-man, I saw you in your Brazil of fire and life and love, all modesty and grace. Moreno aristocracy held in India; mandarin aspect, wisdom of ancient Greek words. Accept this remembrance from the one who listened to an afternoon of your divine River, your salubrious word, giving pride to all that burning rags and vile envy covers (Translation mine). This poem was reprinted in Fred Ellison’s “Rubén Darío and Brazil.” Its first publication was by Alberto Ghiraldo, El ruiseñor azul. Santiago: Chile, 1945. ! ! 52 Portuguese imperial expansion to Asia, where its largest settlement was in Goa. Moreover, one of the most important ports in Asia was Macau, where Portuguese merchants had to regularly interact with Qing officials also known as mandarins. In praising Machado in this way, the poem redraws the racial hierarchies established during Portuguese colonialism to state that the new aristocracy of Brazil encompasses the regality of its past, yet does not depend on it nor on birthright to attain a privileged position in society. In these verses, as Ellison observes, Darío’s concept of the “intellectual aristocracy of Brazil” referred to Brazil as having an aristocracy of intellect and not of birth (29). The poem depicts Machado, and Brazil more generally, as a tropical Orient. Brazil is conflated with its Portuguese past, which includes its settlements in the so-called Orient, to become the imaginative space for Darío to project his vision for Pan-Americanism. However, I would like to suggest that the representation of Machado is ironically Orientalized when analyzed alongside the history of Brazil and the trans-Pacific coolie trade. The ironic tone transforms Orientalist imagery into a critical form of contemplating the position of coloniality. In this section, I comparatively examine the Orientalist imagery in the poetry of Rubén Darío and Machado de Assis within the context of the abolition of slavery and the trans-Pacific coolie trade in the hemispheric Americas to argue that an ironic reading of Orientalist references brings forth the critical tone within the poems. Orientalist references in Machado and Darío are not deployed homogenously as in French Orientalism. Rather, they are historical and address pressing issues of the period. I comparatively analyze Machado’s writings alongside Rubén Darío’s “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China” in the 1888 collection of poetry and fiction titled Azul and “La sinfonía en gris mayor” from Prosas profanas (1891) to contend that irony became a major formalistic device for these writers to contemplate Pan-Americanism, freedom and citizenship ! ! 53 within the historical context of hemispheric abolition and tense debates over the transition to free labor by way of the trans-Pacific coolie trade. Ironic Orientalisms Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism is a theory of representation that seeks to explain imperializing tactics of representation, wherein stereotypes, depictions, and imaginary become technologies to convey a hierarchical relation of power between the one representing (imperial center) and the represented (colonial periphery). For Said, Europeans from imperial centers held the pens that wrote the bodies and cultures of the Middle East. These tactics of representation created the Orient and the Oriental subject. Reading Orientalist references as ironic underscores the power dynamic between center and periphery, and specifically relates the coloniality of Orientalist luxury. I contend that the lens of irony provides a privileged analysis of this discursive position due to its dependence on the socio-cultural political occasion of the text. Ironic Orientalisms portray such occasional gestures that necessarily depend on regional specificity to derive the meaning that contrasts with what is written or spoken. In this sense, ironic Orientalisms might be viewed as coming from the discursive space of French Orientalist references, reflecting also the disturbance provoked by coloniality. First, I would first like to explore some features that determine what makes a particular work ironic. Linda Hutcheon has examined “scenes of irony” where she argues that irony works when a series of elements are present, namely “its critical edge; its semantic complexity; the ‘discursive communities’” where intention and contextual framing are main elements (4). One key facet that produces the ironic tone within a scene is the interpretation of the reader. Along the vein ! ! 54 that defines irony as emerging from within a scene, Kevin Newmark contends, “irony can never be anything but occasion” (3). Borrowing from Kierkagaard’s definition of the occasion as the “accidental external circumstance” that becomes the occasion for the actual producing,” Newmark contends that “irony and occasion are intimately related to the accidental” (7). He continues “because irony all by itself it not easy to locate, to determine, to define and to control; it always has a way of slipping away from whatever means of observation, verification, and oversight one tries to apply to it. It may therefore be thanks only and exclusively to the occasion that we will ever be granted access to irony” (7). Taking a Marxist and political approach to the discussion of irony, Terry Eagleton’s essay “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment” uses the contradictory structure of irony to analyze the oppositional terms that define nationalism, class and sexuality, which involve an impossible irony. For Eagleton, irony sustains a commitment to the contradictory terms that beset nationalism and works against those very antagonisms (23-24). Eagleton analyzes British rule in Ireland, but I would like to suggest that in the literary production of the Americas at the end of the nineteenth century, it is also possible to interpret the antagonistic terms of nationalism as an impossible irony. How to analyze irony as an occasion of the text, and to interrogate its deployment as a critique of the exclusionary practices of citizenship in nationalist and class struggles as defined by racial labor and the trans-Pacific coolie trade is the focus of this chapter. Historian Rogério Dezem has also observed that the imaginary of the “chim” related racial anxieties over the assimilation of the “yellow race” in the formation of Brazilian national identity (105). In 1878, under the pseudonym H. Pito, Machado de Assis wrote the poem “Chinoiserie” for the anti-abolition journal Revista Ilustrada. Dezem contends it is clear that the poem mimics Chinese to produce derogatory sounds that negatively portray Chinese language and culture (103- ! ! 55 105). However, I prefer to analyze the poem in a way that might give a better understanding to how irony functions in the poem to speak to coloniality and the threat of new forms of imperialism in Brazil. The first version is in the original Portuguese and the second version is my translation of the poem. Chinoiserie H. Pito (Machado de Assis) Gê-yué é na China –e cá, José. Dil-o o Amen, mas diz isto muito bem, pois até nos diz na sua que quer dizer –sol e lua. Ora este Chim-Zé Ou Chimpanzé, é o seu caro mentor nas suas coisas da China. O Gé Yué é uma mina Que vale um’rôr Pois é a quem O bello Amen Conta o quasi assassinato Do Guilherme-Imperador. E Gè-Yuè, ! ! 56 O Chim-Zé, –- larga o pato, pega o leque, faz o seu salamalek, põe-se de cócaras e diz: Pelas leis do meu paiz feitas por Konfucio e Mencio, revistas por Kincio e Sencio, é cangado qualquer Chim que pratique –por traição – um furo n’um cidadão como ao Kaiser de Berlim Concorde o Amen com Gè-Yuè –- o Chim-Zé –- pergunta se no Ta-hio não haverá –inda além – em nome de Fú ou Fó –-o Supplicio da gallinha. Ri o Chim –e eu também, Eu que entendo, cá na minha, Que chim só na cosinha De-peena –é bem ! ! 57 o mesre Amen Kakòlé. Como coisa da China ou do Amen. In this translation, I chose to leave invented words in their original form, since the poem explicitly deploys nonsensical words to imitate the foreignness of Chinese. “Chinoiserie” 20 Gê-yué is in China –and here, José. Dil-o Amen, But says this very well, until he says in his by which I mean --sun and moon Now this Chim-Zé Or Chimpanzee Your mentor is dear the things from China Gé Yué is a mine worth an enormous lot for whom is the beautiful Amen Recounts the quasi assasination The Emperor William !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 20 I am very grateful to João Adolfo Hansen for reading early drafts of this translation and for his tremendous insight in deciphering some of Machado’s wordplay. ! ! 58 And Gè-Yuè The Chim-Zé, –- large duck picks up the fan, Makes its salamalek, Sits on his knees and says: By the laws of my country Made by Confucius and Mencius Amended by Kincio and Sencio, Punish any Chim --with treason-- Who punctures a citizen As the Kaiser in Berlin Agrees Amen With Gè-Yuè –- the Chim-Zé –- Wonders if the Ta-hio Without having ---gone beyond— In the name of Fú or Fó –-is hanged Laughs the Chim –and I as well, I understand, here in my, That only the plucked chim in the kitchen –is well ! ! 59 o mesre Amen Kakòlé. Like something from China or Amen. (Revista Ilustrada, n. 115, junho de 1878. IEB-USP.) This poem is cryptic and filled with allusions to Asia, in particular China and Portuguese-China (Amen). It plays with the word Amen in the religious sense and in its allusion to Macau, whereas Amen could very well have been in reference to au men , the Chinese name for Macau, to convey a specifically Portuguese China. The figure of the “Chim Zé” might convey a derogatory way of referring to someone from China (chim), but the negative portrayal is also a critical depiction of Brazilian society. The second name Zé is actually a Brazilian nickname for José. The Chim-Zé or Chinese José does not actually refer to any specific person; instead, it expresses a critical perspective of Chinese assimilation into Brazilian society, which for Machado could not be understood as separate from the legacy of slavery. The poem implicitly links the China trade and the trans-Pacific coolie trade in the lines “Gé Yué é uma mina” (Gé Yué is a mine) and “chim só na cosinha” (chim only in the kitchen). In the stratification of labor in Brazilian slave-society, the reference to the kitchen directly invokes a domestic space of servitude for female slaves, whereas mines were generally places where male slaves labored. The depiction of the chim in the mine and kitchen becomes a critique of the political and economic situation that had begun to equate slavery with new forms of labor immigration. Moreover, depictions of the chim, as well as, objects from China and Macau have the same symbolic function in the poem; they portray an empathetic tone towards new technologies of racial labor. In the line, “Que chim só na cosinha de peena,” Machado is playing with multiple meanings of the expression “de peena.” In one sense “de peena” could come from the expression “tirar as penas” (to pluck feathers) as well as “de pena” (to feel ! ! 60 sorry for someone). Thus, Machado’s “Chinoiserie” expresses a critical stance towards the politics and economic reality of transitioning from one form of racial labor to another. Moreover, Machado’s critiques about the trans-Pacific coolie trade appear in other journals dispersed throughout a number of years, demonstrating a prolonged preoccupation with the situation. Between 1883 and 1886, Machado wrote Balas de Estalo, a collection of chronicles, for the journal Gazeta de Notícias. According to Heloisa Helena Paiva de Luca’s study of Balas de Estalo, its founder Ferreira de Araújo, who often wrote under the pseudonym Lulu Sénior, determined that “balas” would be a form of aggressive journalist artillery whose intention would be to awaken readers. Pseudonyms would serve as an “escudo protetor,” a protective shield against possible retaliation towards the writers (22). The first publication of the Gazeta on August 2 , 1875, inaugurated a new form of popular and affordable press in Brazil. On October 16, 1883, under the pseudonym Lélio, Machado wrote a chronicle about the visit from Chinese government official and merchant Táng Jǐngxīng (often transliterated into Portuguese as Tong King Sing), director of the Companhia Chinesa de Navegação Mercante. Táng Jǐngxīng’s visit was in response to the formation of the Companhia de Comércioo e Imigração Chinesa by the Brazilian government. The shipping company formed with the intention of bringing 21,000 coolies from China at the cost of 35 mil réis per person to Brazil (Dezem 102). If successful, the venture would have resulted in regular maritime routes between Bahia and Rio de Janeiro Brazil and ports in southern China, including Macau. In response to these events, Machado poses the question in French, “As-tu vu le mandarin?” Machado asks the question in French, demonstrating his sensibility that French signified high culture, yet he reverses the intention of French. Instead, it appears in a mocking way to sneer at the pretention of those who utilize French to express false airs. The critique of French Orientalism comes about in the subversion of Orientalist imagery from their idealist references ! ! 61 towards the reality of the labor crisis. In the preface to the chronicle, Machado claims that he decided to publish the letter in its original form without translation. Machado gives the disclaimer that some parts would be incomprehensible since it is in Chinese. However, he adds that the Mandarin inserted some expressions in Portuguese that do not exist in Chinese, demonstrating his increasing familiarity with the language of the country. Although, initially, it is clear that the poem mimics Chinese to produce derogatory sounds that negatively portray Chinese language and culture, it is preferable to analyze the poem in a way that might give a better understanding to how the ironic Orientalisms were speaking to coloniality and the threat of new forms of imperialism in Brazil. The chronicle-poem is replete with nonsensical words that break down language and meaning. Chinese culture and language are presented as non-representable. Irony is derived in the slow break down of language, which becomes a form of halting the idea of capitalist progress symbolized by refusal to give meaning, or commodity value, to the circulation of trade objects from China and Macau to ports around the globe. Não traduzi a carta, para lhe não tirar o valor. Além disso, há dela alguns juízos demasiado crus, que melhor é fiquem conhecidos tão-somente dos que sabem a língua chinesa. Em alguns lugares, o meu ilustre correspondente inseriu expressões nossas; ou por não achar equivalente na língua dele ou (como me parece) para mostrar que já está um pouco familiar com o idioma do país (Balas de Estalo 68). 21 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 21 I did not translate the letter in order not to decrease its value for you. In addition, there are some judgments that are too crude, so it is best to let merely those who know the Chinese language understand them. In some places, my illustrious correspondent inserted our expressions, since he could not find the equivalent in his language (I believe) thus showing that he is already somewhat familiar with the language of this country . ! ! 62 The tone becomes clearly sardonic and derisive when the reader sees in the next section that the letter and most of the words therein are fictional. The words seem to imitate foreignness by appearing and sounding resolutely non-Portuguese. Yet, the foreign words are also ironic in the way that they conflate the genre of the chronicle with poetry. The chronicle assumes the genre of non-fiction, since it is meant to give non-biased daily accounts of current events; but that is not all. The intention of chronicles such as those included in Revista Ilustrada and Balas de Estalo expressed what we might call grande realismo –a hyperbolic reality– to awaken a sleepy public. The journalists’ imagination would aggrandize the already exaggerated reality of the period’s actual ideological contradictions. Machado conflates the literary genres to create a visual and aural foreignness in Portuguese. The nonsensical words refuse meaning, yet the few lines that are written in Portuguese, “mete dinheiro no bolso” (put your money in the bag), explicitly critique the monetary and greedy intentions of the real-life man Táng Jǐngxīng, Brazilian plantation owners and agricultural tycoons. The following excerpt creates the sense of foreignness within the absurdity of language that makes ironic even the signature of the mandarin, “Mandarim de 1ª classe” (Mandarin of the highest class). The stoppage of meaning also makes it impossible to understand the Mandarin’s plans of entering into Brazilian society. Viliki xaxi xali xaliman. Acalag ting-ting valixu. Upa Costa Braga relá minag katu Integridade abaxung kapi a ver navios. Lamarika ana bapa bung? Gogô xupitô? Nepa in pavé. Brasil desfalques latecatu. Inglese poeta, Shakespeare, kará: make money; upa lamaré in língua Brasil: — mete dinheiro no bolso. Vaia, Vaia, gapaling capita passa a unha simá teka laparika. Eting põe-se a panos; etang merú xilindró. [signed] Mandarim de 1ª classe. Tong Kong Sing (Balas de Estalo 69). ! ! 63 This chronicle-poem is a visual and aural attempt to halt signification. It relies on textual representations of foreignness to stop linear progression; thus, the chronicle-poem portrays a dead time in relation to the progression of quantifiable time that underlies capitalist time. There is a slippage between foreignness, object and body, meaning and senselessness. Irony is derived from this dead time, which is the temporal occasion of this text and intertext. In January 1884, a report in The Anti-Slavery Reporter 22 described Táng Jǐngxīng’s decision to withdraw from the venture of Chinese immigration after his visit to Brazil. A scheme for introducing Chinese coolies into Brazil on a very large scale has fortunately been frustrated. The attention of the Anti-Slavery Society was first called to this scheme by an influential English gentleman, resident in Brazil; and soon afterwards the Managing Director of the Steam Company which was about to contract to carry the coolies, Mr. Tong King-Sing, [Táng Jǐngxīng] was interviewed by a Deputation from the Society on his journey through London. The facts laid by the Deputation before that gentleman were of such a nature that he resolved at once to enquire into the guarantees provided by the planters in Brazil for the protection of the indentured coolies. It is needless to say that these guarantees were unsatisfactory, and the Secretary of the Society was informed by Mr. Tong King Sing, on his return from Brazil, that the scheme was abandoned (“Brazil” Anti- Slavery Reporter January, 1884). Although, the coolie trade in Brazil did not reach the height that it did in other places in the Americas, the imaginary that formed around the arrival of “Tong Kong Sing” reveal a lot about the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 22 The Anti-Slavery Reporter was printed for The London Society for the Mitigation and Abolition of Slavery in the British dominions, and available to anti-slavery associations by subscription. ! ! 64 attitude among Brazilian intellectuals towards slavery and free labor. Writers during this period took up their pens to criticize Chinese immigration as an extension of African slavery. The negative references towards Chinese culture exhibit the attitude that critiqued the coloniality of racial labor whereby the negative and racial sentiments held against Chinese immigrants was also a denunciatory stance against slavery. Machado’s irony conveys an exaggerated realism that uses the derivative possibilities of language to express the irrepresentability of the violence that permeates every aspect of a slave society. There is nothing more ironic than the poetic attempt to represent reality, and Machado’s irony grapples with this constant slippage. Irony is derived in the slow breakdown of language, which becomes a form of halting capitalist progress, symbolized by the refusal to give meaning, or commodity value, to the circulation of trade objects from China and Macau to ports around the globe. Rubén Darío’s Poetics of Diplomacy The formalistic technique of ironic Orientalisms could also be observed in the writings of Rubén Darío in poems written before “A Roosevelt,” a period of his oeuvre that scholars often treat as being apolitical. However, as a diplomat, his professional responsibility was to be political, and furthermore, to intervene in international relations. Arguably, it is possible to imagine that during the supposed apolitical period, he was actually developing a poetics of diplomacy where irony functioned as a technique to contemplate nationalism and freedom. In this next section, I analyze Rubén Darío’s “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China” from Azul (1888) and “La sinfonía en gris mayor,” which appears in Prosas profanas (1891). I contend that an ironic reading makes explicit the contemplation of new forms of racial labor and immigration. An ironic reading ! ! 65 makes apparent the multiple significations of language and the ability of the poem to permeate between politics and aesthetics. I would like to suggest that the ironic tone of the poems is an early example of Darío’s vision of Pan-Americanism and hemispheric solidarity. Prior to “A Roosevelt,” the general critical sentiment is that Darío’s poetry was concerned purely with aesthetics – following in Théophile Gautier’s mantra of art for art’s sake. On the contrary, I would like to suggest that prior to “A Roosevelt,” in his collections in Azul and Prosas Profanas, there were already examples of his critical international sensibility. References to the trans-Pacific coolie trade implicitly work their way into Darío’s poetry to become the imagery that is used to contemplate freedom, labor and immigration. The admiration towards Brazil’s stance on immigration greatly affected the development of his thinking on Pan-Americanism. Yet, ultimately, the critique conveys a general sentiment of complacency and pessimism. In 1912, Darío wrote “Conferencia sobre Joaquim Nabuco,” a text that Fred Ellison has argued as revealing Darío’s vision of Pan-Americanism in relation to Brazil’s stance on immigration (24-35). Since Brazil’s attitude towards immigration could not be understood as separate from its labor crisis, then Darío might have been contemplating immigration as it related to new forms of free racial labor. In his essay about Joaquim Nabuco and the poem “A Machado de Assis,” there is strong admiration for Brazilian letters and what Darío called the “intellectual aristocracy of Brazil.” Darío admired Machado de Assis and was familiar with his work before they had the opportunity to meet in person in 1906. Ellison has noted that Darío greatly admired Brazilian literary production, and viewed literary production from Brazil and Portugal as examples of a “renacimiento latino” (24). Even though Darío made his visits to Brazil after the publication of “La emperatriz” and “Sinfonía,” it is possible to consider that his diplomatic missions and ! ! 66 international sensibility made him keenly aware of current affairs around the world, influencing what might be called his poetics of diplomacy. Juan Manuel Fernández has argued that Darío’s vision of Pan-Americanism was a type of poetic response to his diplomatic attempt to foster harmonious hemispheric and trans-Atlantic relations. According to Fernández, Darío’s opinion of Brazil was largely influenced by its stance on abolition that occurred under the reign of Dom Pedro II. For this reason, Darío referred to Dom Pedro as well as Brazilian literature and culture as models for a successful transition towards a republic. Darío also praised Brazil’s retention of the cultural elements of its aristocratic past in its transformation towards the modern nation-state, even though this praise ignored racial and exclusionary practices that were also carried over into the structure of the Brazilian Republic. 23 In 1888, Júnior Araripe wrote the essay “Estilo tropical” (Tropical style), which Darío translated into “naturalismo brasileño” (Brazilian naturalism). Araripe’s concept implied the critical tradition of transforming the aesthetics of European realism of the nineteenth century into something completely different due to the reality of Brazil. This referred to the actual location of the tropical geography, but also and arguably, I would add that it represented the coloniality of modernity, what Júnior might have referred to as the “sentimento da realidade,” (sentiment of reality) which had to face the specificity of slavery and abolition, plus the debate over immigration to compensate for the labor shortage. Fernández argues that Darío believed that nature would triumph over “los componentes exóticos, ya sean inmigrantes o estéticas extranjeras” 24 to assert that Darío’s !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Fernandez has pointed out that in contrast to Darío, Brazilians such as Lima Barreto criticized the racist and exclusionary legacy of the Portuguese and Brazilian empires that permeated into the infrastructure of the Brazilian nation (111). For more on Barreto’s critical commentaries on the exclusionary racial politics of Brazil at the formation of the Republic see Lima Barreto. Os bruzundangos. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1985. 24 The exotic components, whether they be of immigrants or foreign aesthetics . ! ! 67 assimilationist attitude was a kind of diplomacy that would promote confraternity between Latin American and European culture (122). Darío viewed Brazil’s stance towards abolition and immigration as the spirit of Brazilian nationalism that could be projected to the rest of Latin America. The imaginary of the Brazilian tropics, believed to convey national identity, had to withstand foreign influences that would accompany mass immigration (Fernández 120). I would like to build on Fernández’s argument in regards to Darío’s views on Brazil. Through portraying Brazil as the aesthetic model towards building hemispheric solidarity and harmonious immigration, Fernández focuses the scope of his article to the later political period of Darío’s work. For me, Darío’s poetics of diplomacy were in line with Brazilian writers he admired such as Machado de Assis, who viewed the exclusion of Chinese immigrants as vital to the success of a republic; in this context, the trans-Pacific coolie trade signified a conflation between immigration and new forms of slave labor. Darío’s admiration for Brazilian literature and cultural production existed prior to his first visit to the last country to abolish slavery in the hemisphere. Moreover, he was fluent in Portuguese and so could read Brazilian literary production in the original language. Further evidence that current events in Brazil might have influenced Darío’s poetry prior to his visit to Rio de Janeiro appeared in print on February 3, 1889, in Buenos Aires’s La Nación, where Darío described the arrival of Dom Pedro’s nephew aboard the ship Almirante Barroso to Valparaíso. As we saw before, literary scholars often read Darío’s references to the Orient as Orientalist, and as either imitations or a transplanted form of French Orientalism to Spanish American modernista poetry. Critical references to Darío’s affection towards the Orient often tend to read his poems as Orientalizing all of the Middle East, Asia and the cultural realm of Judaism ! ! 68 under the homogenous nomenclature of the Orient. Estuardo Núñez in the essay “La imaginería oriental exotista en Rubén Darío” (1966) discusses the Orientalist aspects in Darío’s poetry: Esa afición por lo oriental explica asimismo la elección del nombre “Darío” como apelativo literario, que está señalando ya desde la adolescencia, una predilección orientalista. A “lo hebreo” de Rubén, se unió (con fruición exotista) “lo persa” de Darío. En sus cuentos de juventud, también existen huellas de esa afición, tangible en un cuento de Azul: “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China” (Núñez 53). 25 In this analysis, the references to all non-European cultures are grouped under the term Oriental. Núñez’s article actually uniforms everything from Darío’s own name to the poem “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China.” The essay stresses Darío’s poetry as portraying a universalism of the world —imago mundi— whereby the Orient represents the perspective that claims Darío’s poetry as emitting a homogenizing poetics. All of Darío’s historical allusions to the Orient are interpreted as one flat and all-encompassing term. On the other side of the spectrum, Araceli Tinajero’s takes a revisionist look at Spanish American modernismo through posing the question, “¿cómo analizar y conciliar la representación de un sujeto ‘exótico’ por otro ‘exótico’ en la escritura modernista?”(9). 26 Tinajero begins from a historicist perspective, pointing to the commercial relationship between Asia and the Americas, specifically the Philippines and Spanish America, to argue that one margin (Other) can speak to another margin (another Other) without interference from the center. I would like to build on Tinajero’s study that affirms that Spanish American !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 That penchant for the Oriental also explains the choice of the name 'Darío' as literary appellation, which points to an orientalist predilection starting in adolescence.The 'Hebrew' Rubén, paired (with exoticist delight) 'the Persian' Darío. In his stories of youth, there are also traces of this hobby, tangible in the story in Azul: "The Death of the Empress of China” . 26 How to analyze and reconcile one exotic subject from another in modernist writing? ! ! 69 modernismo writers were influenced by English and French Orientalism, and also the historical trade between Asia and the Americas. I wish to push her thesis and Said’s discussion of Orientalism further by considering how the trans-Pacific coolie trade as well as related debates that arose in relation to questions of freedom and immigration could contribute to new readings of Spanish American modernismo as well as Brazilian literary production produced during the same time. The pan-American circulation of similar formalistic techniques during this period might allow for the literary production of Brazil and Spanish America to be understood as a continuum of recurring formalistic and symbolic techniques that convey the hyperbolic realism of the impossible irony of racial labor practices that dictate the exclusionary practices of citizenship. Studies on Luso-Hispanic Orientalism during the literary period normally referred to as Spanish American modernismo rarely bring it into relation with late nineteenth-century Brazilian literature due to the separate literary traditions that often divides them into separate provinces in the academy, and thus hinders the potential for comparative readings. In fact, even the term modernismo refers to different movements in Spain and Spanish America, on the one hand, and Portugal and Brazil, on the other. However, through contextualizing the production of these works within the context of the trans-Pacific coolie trade and the fall of imperial China, I argue that there is a strong hemispheric dialogue occurring that emerges in the literary form of irony in the poetry and prose of the writers of this period. Most studies that read these poems within the rubric of Luso-Hispanic Orientalism discuss the dialogues occurring between what they term an Other and another Other, or they explore how one periphery could become the space for another periphery to reimagine itself through literary escapism or detachment. Although I agree that peripheral states have developed discourses apart from those of the center, I would like to suggest a reading that is not composed of new categories of Other/Self or Other/Other, which would risk reinstating ! ! 70 Orientalizing practices and erasing literary and historical nuances. Instead, I propose analyzing the specific historical situations and conflicting nationalisms that produced such power dynamics to then examine how writers during this period used literary form to contemplate new notions of freedom amidst the struggle among conflicting and emerging imperial-nations. Rather than analyzing the poems as being imitations of French Orientalism or as a form of Luso-Hispanic Orientalism, I prefer to historicize the writings, and then to analyze how history and technical innovations in language create a suspended tension between politics and aesthetics. In examining Rubén Darío’s “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China,” Tinajero observes that the title might have been in reference to the Empress of China, the first galleon to depart from the Americas to Asia, which would bring back porcelain and Oriental objects. Tinajero uses this historical materialist argument to proclaim that such references allowed Darío to feel an approximation and admiration to objects from the Orient. Rather than imagining the Orient, the material objects would allow the poet to discursively contemplate his own position within modernity. “La emperatriz” is a short prose poem about a young heterosexual couple living in Paris. The man is an avid collector of curiosities and has received a porcelain doll from his friend who went to Hong Kong to start a shipping company. During this period, Hong Kong was under British occupation and the southern ports of China had become major exits routes from war, poverty, and other atrocities. Coerced through deceptive means or by individual will, the trans- Pacific voyages to the Americas had become widespread. Diplomats such as Darío, and writers like Machado, were not only keenly aware of the current debates surrounding Chinese immigration, but actively contributed to how it would be viewed in mass print. Literally and visually, chronicles portrayed the trans-Pacific coolie trade as a new kind of slavery in the Americas that would demonstrate the inextricably linked relationship between race, culture, labor, ! ! 71 and immigration. Moreover, the expression of these contradictions brings forth questions about the politics of irony within a slave society where actual enslaved bodies were transformed into abstract and fragmented commodity objects whereby the whole body, or parts thereof, could be sold in pieces. For example, amas de leite were enslaved women whose breast milk could be sold. The Lei de Ventre Livre was a law that freed enslaved wombs. These practices make it quite imaginable to think that the politics of irony in a slave society, where bodies were traded in the same way as inorganic material, could be portrayed as the irreconcilable contradiction that places commodity value onto human bodies. Within this logic, the constructed ideologies of race assigned to bodies as laboring bodies or freed bodies could also become associated with material culture, thus racializing material objects. In Darío’s text, “La emperatriz,” the girlfriend’s jealously over the porcelain doll – the material object – builds to the point of destruction; the porcelain object has taken all the attention of her lover, so she gives him the ultimatum that he must choose the porcelain or her. In the end, he chooses her, but to calm her insecurities, she destroys the porcelain into a thousand shards. The story ends with the heavy tone of irony: --Sea, --dijo Recaredo. Y viendo irse a su avecita celosa y terca, prosiguió sorbiendo el café, tan negro como la tinta. No había tomado tres sorbos, cuando oyó un gran ruido de fracaso, en el recinto de su taller. Fue. ¿Qué miraron sus ojos? El busto había desaparecido del pedestal de negro y oro, y entre minúsculos mandarines caídos y descolgados abanicos, se veían por el suelo pedazos de porcelana que crujían bajo los pequeños zapatos de Suzette, quien toda encendida y con el cabello suelto, aguardando los besos, decía entre carcajadas argentinas al maridito asustado: ! ! 72 ---¡Estoy vengada! ¡Ha muerto ya para ti la emperatriz de la China! Y cuando comenzó la ardiente reconciliación de los labios, en el saloncito azul, todo lleno de regocijo, el mirlo, en su jaula, se moría de risa (Darío 331). 27 The use of commas juxtaposes different images to produce meaning through the association of the alignment of images of lips kissing, a blue room, shattered porcelain, and a blackbird in a cage, laughing to death. The blackbird’s cynical laugh echoes past the completion of the text. The mirlo is a common blackbird. In the context of Chinese immigration to the Americas and the end of slavery from Africa, it is possible to read into the etymology of the word. The expression “to blackbird” or “caza del mirlo” refers to the deceptive means of being kidnapped and sold into slavery; the laughter of the caged bird seems rather cynical and ironically pessimistic when read in this context. The porcelain object is shattered, symbolically gesturing to the representational shards of the broken Iberian and Chinese empires, yet the cynical laughter echoes among the walls of successive and rising imperialisms. The Oriental luxury objects that fill the couple’s blue suite are not merely escapist motifs, but rather their images are broken, fallen and shattered. Breaking the porcelain object is also a departure from the idealism of French Orientalism. The shards convey a highly critical tone towards the Orientalist practices that contributed to China’s vast material-born empire via the China trade. For Darío, the Oriental luxury items are damaged. Pieces like the fallen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27 “So be it, “ said Recaredo. And he went on sipping his coffee black as he watched his jealous little bird leave the room. He had taken only three sips when he heard a great crash and clatter in his studio. In he went. What did he see? The bust had disappeared from its black-and-gold mount, and on the floor, among a scatter of tiny fallen mandarins and fans, lay shards of porcelain, that crunched beneath Suzette’s little feet. Flushed, her hair mussed, giggling silvery giggles to her startled husband, and awaiting kisses. “I have wreaked my revenge. The Empress of China is dead!” And when their lips so passionately met and made up in the blue room brimming with joy, the blackbird in his cage died laughing” (109-100, Trans Sarah Arvio). ! ! 73 and miniature mandarin express the ruins of empire. “La emperatriz” bears close similarity to other poems in Darío’s oeuvre such as “Sinfonía en gris mayor.” In Ann Darroch’s analysis of “Sinfonía en gris mayor,” she observes the irony between the title of the poem and its content. Darío stated that the title was inspired by Théophile Gautier’s “Symphonie en blanc majeur.” 28 However, unlike the idealism in Gautier’s poem, Darío’s is replete with elements of prosaic reality. Whereas Gautier creates his poetic symphony out of imperial objects, Darío’s “Sinfonía” contains no references to such material culture. Rather, as Darroch points out, it is a “dramatization of the conflict between the real and the ideal, and by the structural principles of antithesis, synthesis and parallelism” (51). Darroch’s reading of the poem is based primarily on distinguishing it between two time periods. The past and the present are juxtaposed as a way of contemplating idealism and reality whereby the past tense indicates an ideal vision that is contrasted with the present tense of reality. Darroch observes that harmony is undermined in the last stanza, which in turn brings forth the ironic tone of the title. However, her analysis only briefly mentions the formal function of irony in the poem. Rather than thinking of the ironic tone as a contrast of the idealism of the past and realism of the present as Darroch contends, I want to suggest the possibility of reading it within the temporality of modernity and the lag of coloniality. In this sense, the past and present could actually refer to coloniality and modernity whereby the temporality of the colonies is always timed against modernity as determined by the imperial-state, and thus, there is always a time lag in coloniality !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 In Darío´s Historia de mis libros, he indicates the influence of Théophile Gautier: ‘La sinfonía en gris mayor’ trae necesariamente el recuerdo del mágico Théo, del exquisite Gautier, y su ‘Symphonie en blanc majeur’ (Quoted from Darroch 194). ! ! 74 since its arrival is only measured a posteriori to the imperial core. Arguably then, when read ironically and as a critique on coloniality, Darío’s symphony in the major key of gray is a critical ode to laboring bodies: El mar como un vasto cristal azogado refleja la lámina de un cielo de zinc; lejanas bandadas de pájaros manchan el fondo bruñido de pálido gris. El sol como un vidrio redondo y opaco, con paso de enfermo camina al cenit; el viento marino descansa en la sombra teniendo de almohada su negro clarín. Las ondas que mueven su vientre de plomo, debajo del muelle parecen gemir. Sentado en un cable, fumando su pipa, está un marinero pensando en las playas de un vago, lejano, brumoso país. Es viejo ese lobo. Tostaron su cara los rayos de fuego del sol de Brasil; los recios tifones del mar de la China lo han visto bebiendo su frasco de gin. ! ! 75 La espuma impregnada de yodo y salitre, ha tiempo conoce su roja nariz, sus crespos cabellos, sus bíceps de atleta, su gorra de lona, su blusa de dril. En medio del humo que forma el tabaco, ve el viejo el lejano, brumoso país, adonde una tarde caliente y dorada, tendidas las velas, partió el bergatín. La siesta del trópico. El lobo se aduerme. Ya todo lo envuelve la gama del gris. Parece que un suave y enorme esfumino del curvo horizonte borrara el confín. La siesta del trópico. La vieja cigarra Ensaya su ronca guitarra senil, el grillo preludia un solo monótono en la única cuerda que está en su violín. 29 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 29 Symphony in Gray Major The sea like some giant crystal of quicksilver Reflects the metal plate of a sky of rolled zinc. Far away there are flocks of birds forming a stain ! ! 76 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! On a polished background of a pale shade of gray. The sun, a piece of glass, both rounded and opaque, Walks towards its zenith with a sick person’s steps. The breezes from the sea take a rest in the shade, Using as a pillow what their black trumpets play. The waves, moving their bellies made of lead, Seem to be moaning under the great wharf. Sitting on a cable and puffing on his pipe, There is a mariner, thinking about beaches In some distant countries, lost on a foggy day. That sea-wolf is ancient. The burning rays of light From the Brazilian sun toasted him to a crisp. The harshest typhoons in the South China Sea Found him drinking his gin in a protected bay. Iodine and nitrate fecundate the sea-spray That has known his red nose for a very long time, And his curly hair, too, and his athlete’s biceps, His hat made of canvas, his shirt ripped in a fray. In the midst of the smoke from clouds of tobacco The old man can discern the country lost in fog, Where on one afternoon that was golden and warm, The brigantine weighed anchor and then sailed away. ! ! 77 This first image establishes a parallel between sea and sky through the juxtaposition of crystal and zinc. Moreover, the commodity objects mentioned in the poem including, crystal, zinc, iodine, saltpeter and lead are attained through the labor of mining. El mar como un vasto cristal azogado refleja la lámina de un cielo de zinc; lejanas bandadas de pájaros manchan el fondo bruñido de pálido gris. Flocks of birds stain the burnt pale gray setting, possibly alluding to the smoky and polluted scene of mineral mining. The sun is unforgiving and intensified by describing it as “vidrio redondo” which evokes the way that glass can harness and direct the heat of the sun. The sunlight beams onto the next image of sickly footsteps that move onward towards the zenith of progress that comes at their expense. The first two stanzas anticipate the marinero who enters in the second half of the third stanza. Once again the imagery of commodity related to mining labor appears. The “vientre de plomo” personifies the interior of a mine filled with lead – a lead stomach. The !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Tropical siesta. The sea-wolf is sleeping. The gamut of the gray enshrouds everything now. It seems like some gentle and huge stump of paper For shading the lines that frame the curved sky today. Tropical siesta, and the old cicada Practices its guitar so hoarse and so senile. The cricket tries out a monotonous solo On the one-stringed violin it knows how to play (Trans Greg Simon and Steven F. White). ! ! 78 marinero could very well refer to different figures who formed part of the traffic of human labor that moved people from the shores of Brazil and China to the current port to labor in mines. The poetic voice tells us: Es viejo ese lobo. Tostaron su cara los rayos de fuego del sol de Brasil; los recios tifones del mar de la China lo han visto bebiendo su frasco de gin. If read as an ode to laboring bodies, the direct link that the poem creates between Brazil and China might be read as creating a certain geography that alludes, at least obliquely, to debates in Brazil over establishing immigration lines with China. The next stanza continues by describing that the ocean foam is contaminated with saltpeter and iodine. Saltpeter is a material often needed to create gunpowder and iodine is commonly used as a disinfectant during battle. The alignment of these two raw materials associates them, and by extension the labor needed to extract them, as the foul sustenance of militarism. The sailcloth hat, twill shirt, and the repeating imagery of smoke depict the marinero as a poor voyager wearing cheap materials. Pessimistically, he is placed in the same symbolic space as his tattered, and easily discarded, clothing. Moreover, there is an implicitly racialized description of the marinero’s toasted skin and “crespo cabello” who has left his “brumoso país.” Perhaps the “brumoso país” alludes to a foggy climate, but it might also express confusion regarding his country or nation of origin. But the “brumoso país” could very well express incertitude towards which nation one belongs, and the perpetual displacement of the immigrant laborer. The description of labor is made most ironic in the repetition of the line “la siesta del trópico.” There is no rest in this unforgiving tropical environment where all objects and people ! ! 79 have transformed into commodity and labor. The juxtaposition of Brazil and China once again returns to the contemplation of a tropical Orient where discussions of immigration and labor undercut poetic form with the sentiment of reality. The shades of gray erase the specificity of geographical boundaries to portray how the “siesta del trópico” is not specific to any one place; rather, it comments on the simultaneity of linked imaginaries across disparate locations that have become connected through the circulation of raw material, luxury objects and laboring bodies that are called on to perform only the monotonous, one-stringed violin. Rather than imitations of French Orientalist poetry whereby the Orient is made into the imaginary space to project imperial power, the writers’ ironic references to Orientalist allusions express the position of coloniality. Moreover, the ironic tone addresses the contradictory terms of immigration and free labor that were viewed as renewed forms of colonial racial labor and imperialism in the Americas. The discursive space of coloniality transforms emblematic motifs and figures such as the mandarin to an expression of the coolie or racial labor immigration. In the next chapter, I follow the mandarin and coolie to the theater of Arthur Azevedo and Sampaio Moreira. ! ! 80 Chapter Two Waging Mandarins and Coolies in Arthur Azevedo and Moreira Sampaio’s O Mandarim “O teatro em cada país não deve ser um divertimento public, mas uma institução nacional” (Azevedo, Artur. Palestra. Rio de Janeiro, 20 Mar 1901). Playwright Arthur Azevedo (1855-1908) contemporary of Machado de Assis and Rubén Darío, similarly utilized his craft to participate in the debates of the day in which literary and cultural production had become a combative form of critiquing new forms of colonialism, such concerns are embedded in debates over the trans-Pacific coolie trade. Like the literary pieces explored in the previous chapter, Azevedo’s little-known poem “No jardin” was published in the abolitionist periodical Revista Ilustrada in 1876, which was also the inaugural year of the journal. Azevedo’s poem exemplifies an aesthetic sensibility that cynically portrays the Orient. Rather than conveying imperialist projections, Azevedo’s allusions might be read within the context of the economic crisis as a caution to the Brazilian public in falling for the delirium of Orient-based riches via the trans-Pacific coolie trade. No Jardin Deslumbrado por tanta formosura, alimentando lubricos desejos, eu comprimi-lhe a rigida cintura e cobri-a de beijos sobre beijos. Mas a candida virgem, semi-nua não resguardava o pudibundo pomo nem deixava entrever á luz da lua ! ! 81 de opportuno pudor um leve assomo. Honny soit qui mal y pense. A moça, o anjo de cynisimo… e de bellesa, era uma deusa oriental… de louça, que encontrei no jardim da baroneza. 30 (Revista Ilustrada, n. 45, December, 1876. IEB-USP.) The beauty of Azevedo’s “angel” seems to be untrustworthy, since it follows the ellipses of cynicism. Recalling the texts from the previous chapter, such literary chinoiserie and Orientalist !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 30 In the Garden Dazzled by so much beauty; feeding lustful desires, I compress her rigid waist and cover her with kisses on kisses. But the ingenous virgin, semi-naked unguarding of the blushing pome neither did glimpse the light of the moon, faint glimmer of appropriate modesty. Honny soit qui mal y pense. The girl, angel of cynicism... and of beauty; I found the goddess of china in the garden of the Baroness. ! ! 82 symbolism are, I suggest, intertextually related to debates over the trans-Pacific coolie trade. 31 Rather than relating luxury or idealism, the allusion to “the Oriental goddess… of china” conveys a pessimistic and weary tone. Furthermore, the title of the poem is spelled using the French jardin rather than the Portuguese jardim, implying a shift in meaning from French Orientalism towards one that possesses an added caution to delirious fantasies of luxury. 32 The founding of the Revista Ilustrada five years after the Lei de Ventre Livre had been passed is significant. As the name of the law literally suggests, it granted freedom to wombs, which by extension would mean the end of inherited slavery, and thus the eventual end of African slavery in Brazil. The name of the law also makes the metaphor of emancipation in term of the freedom of Black female sexuality as the possibility of a societal emancipation. It also exhibits !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 31 On September 2, 1881, the daily journal O Mandarim was first published and distributed in Lisbon. It had the specific aim of addressing the issue of Portuguese nationalism, and Chinese immigration was treated as a repeating thematic point as a threat to the consolidation of the nation. Contributors included Camillo Castello Branco, Fernando Leal, Fialho d’Almeida, Gomes Leal, Gualdino de Campos, João de Deus, Luiz de Magalhães, Manuel d’Oliveira Ramos, Narcizo de Lacerda, Silva Pinto, Teixeira de Queiroz e Urbano de Castro. The writers of O Mandarim published in Lisbon mention other journal names (Folha Nova, Diario das Notícias, among others) that also appear in Azevedo’s O Mandarim, and thereby attest to the trans-Atlantic circulation of information and opinions. 32 In Paris during the year 1885, Eugène Le Mouel published an illustrated book titled Viagem du Haut Mandarin Ka- Li-Xó et de son Fidèle Secrétaire Pa-Tchou-Li. Similar to Azevedo’s O Mandarim, the illustrations and plot share the theme of the mandarin’s voyage to the Americas. In Mouel’s version, the mandarin gives in to the vices of the Americas. Indigenous tribes whose leaders profess allegiance to Allah enslave him. Finally, the story shows that after recklessly spending Qing government money, the mandarin is forced to stay in the Americas, join the circus and eat raw rabbits to pay for his corruption. Indigenous and African men who tend to the mandarin are depicted as part of the punishing landscape. Shortly after the original publication in French, the illustrated book was republished into Brazilian Portuguese by the Rio de Janeiro-based press Livreiro-Editor. ! ! 83 how the law conceived of the enslaved body in fragmentary terms, whereby a womb could be free even if the rest of the body continued as commodity. The efforts of abolitionary periodicals like Revista Ilustrada to utilize literary and visual culture to address the legal statues that break up the whole body into divisions between freedom and property suggest that cultural production played a vital role during the interim period between abolition and emancipation. With the passing of the Lei de Ventre Livre, an economic crisis in Brazil was inevitable since its economy was by and large based on slave labor. The projected economic catastrophe turned the heads of political leaders and agricultural tycoons towards China in search of new forms of free or cheap labor. Arthur Azevedo and Sampaio Moreira’s O Mandarim was inspired by the debates over the trans-Pacific coolie trade. 33 In the piece, mandarins and coolies enter into the imaginary as a form of waging a stance against a new era of slavery. Racial impersonation is utilized as both a formidable and comic means for audiences to imagine new terms of nationalism constructed against Chinese Otherness. Impersonating the mandarin and coolie makes new provisions to citizenship in the transition from colonial systems of racial labor to racial labor immigration. Investigating the imaginary that constructed the figures of the mandarin and coolie, I would like to suggest, is central to understanding how Brazilian writers of the 1870s and 80s imagined freedom and nation as related to new forms of racialized immigrant labor. National Satires: Brazilian Teatro de Revista In 1808, the Portuguese Imperial Court fled to Brazil with the aid of British naval forces to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 33 In addition to O Mandarim, Artur Azevedo and Sampaio Moreira collaborated on a number of other pieces, including Cocota (1885), O Bilontra (1886), Mercúrio, O Carioca (1887) and finally O genro de muitas sogras in 1908, the same year as Azevedo’s death. ! ! 84 escape the Napoleanic invasion of Portugal. The presence of the Portuguese Imperial Court in Brazil produced a new era of intellectual, artistic and cultural production that had not existed there before. Whereas, previously the children of the elite class would receive their training and education in Coimbra, the nineteenth century saw a shift in intellectual development from metropolis (Portugal) to the colony that became the United Kingdom of Portugal (Brazil). 34 From the establishment of the Brazilian Imperial court, all festivals, commemorations and anniversaries took to the stage in the form of musical theater. The Court strategically utilized Italian opera as a form of what Luiz Costa-Lima Neto has called colonialismo cultural whereby European models of urbanization and modernity were displayed on the stage, didactically creating a more efficient !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 34 In 1820, due to the Revolução do Porto and the need to secure the Portuguese throne, Dom João VI left Brazil and crowned Dom Pedro the Regent Prince of Brazil. Dom João VI asked his son, Dom Pedro, to return to Portugal in 1821, and to turn Brazil back into a colony thereby absolving all the privileges and status it had been granted during the thirteen years as part of the United Kingdom of Portugal. In 1822, with the support of the colonial elite, who were mainly composed of the coffee plantation masters, Dom Pedro denied his father’s request and declared independence from Portugal. As opposed to the bloody and devastating independence battles that occurred in the Spanish Americas, Brazilian independence was relatively non-violent. Dom João fined his son 2 million sterling for his defiance, resulting in Brazil’s first foreign national debt since Dom Pedro paid it by borrowing the money from England. After declaring independence from Portugal, Brazil transformed into a constitutional monarchy, followed by a nine-year Regency rule until Pedro II rose to the throne. Crowned the first mazombo ruler of Brazil who was a mazombo. Darcy Ribeiro discusses in O povo brasileiro (1995), an in-depth study of the different developments of ethnicity in each of the different Brazilian regions, that people of Portuguese descent born in Brazil referred to themselves as mazombos. The term mazombo demonstrates an example of a Brazilian identity that was clearly defined against the Lusophone. These identity categories also vary between Spanish and Portuguese America. For example, criollo in Spanish refers to white Europeans who were born in the Americas whereas crioulo in Portuguese refers to people of African descendent who were born in Brazil. ! ! 85 form of domination and cost effective alternative to war. Theater audiences included members of the aristocracy and oligarchy, but also the rising urban middle class, including intellectuals, doctors and small business owners, among others. Despite the pedagogical objectives that the Court had for the public via theater, the Imperial Theater became a space where different social relationships developed such as business negotiations and romantic rendezvous (Neto 41). Meanwhile, European theatrical forms also transformed on the stage, showcasing hybridity between genres, and solidifying in new form, popular theater such as the Revista de Teatro, of which Azevedo and Moreira’s O Mandarim is often cited as an exemplary piece. Arthur Azevedo and Sampaio Moreira’s collaboration on the Teatro de Revista O Mandarim was presented for the first time in Rio de Janeiro at the Teatro Príncipe Imperial on January 9, 1884, and is composed of one prologue with three acts. 35 Although Azevedo and Moreira were consciously inaugurating a national theater, they had to negotiate the contradictory concepts of nation as guarded by the watchful eyes of the Conservatório Dramático Brasileiro that represented the interests of the Imperial Court in Brazil. In the definition of nation as defended by the monarchy, Brazilian culture must be shaped into the likeness of European civilization. On the one hand, the Imperial Theater served a didactic purpose of “civilizing” the population. On the other hand, in literary and theatrical Romanticism, nation and nationalism is the exploration of exactly what is particular to Brazil and brasilidade. O Mandarim hovers in the tension between the different concepts of nation. Ironic portraits serve two purposes: they satisfy censoring eyes and address the fear that assimilation of Chinese laborers would hinder progress. There is also a tension between the text and the stage performance. The contrast between what is written and what !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 35 The Fundação Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro holds two musical scores for O Mandarim, a mazurka by J. Alves Leite Successor and a tango composed by José Simões Junior. ! ! 86 was performed on the stages, textually incorporate the Mandarin into the national body politic, but the performance of the text is ironic. The stage presents an opposing meaning –the impossiblitiy of assimilation– to fin-de-siècle audiences. Additionally, the play contains other kinds of inversions. O Mandarim also projects a utopian vision for Brazil through carnivalizing the exclusionary signifiers of citizenship. O Mandarim overturns all signifiers including those that mark race, sexuality, gender, culture, people, objects and ideas. For Azevedo, developing the theater into a space to express public opinion was an essential element behind his work in the making of a national theater. Towards the end of his life, reflecting on his work as a playwright, he stated: “O teatro em cada país não deve ser um divertimento público, mas uma institução nacional” (Palestra). O Mandarim achieved instant success among audiences through its use of satire and irony to critically express immediate events and expose societal follies. O Mandarim enables the audience to engage in a form of public discourse to learn about contemporary political events through the non-threatening pulses of laughter. This is not Saidian Orientalism where the Orient and Oriental characters are exoticized or made grotesque as they project imperial fantasies. Rather, the figure of the Mandarin voices a specific position of coloniality in face of the trans-Pacific coolie trade and threat of Chinese imperialism. In October of 1883 a man named Táng Jǐngxīng, a Qing dynasty official of the genteel class known in Portuguese as “mandarim,” arrived in Rio de Janeiro. Táng Jǐngxīng was the director of a China-based shipping company that intended to bring 21,000 contract laborers from China to Brazil to offset the shortage in labor anticipated by abolition. On the week of his arrival, this image of him appeared in the Revista Ilustrada. ! ! 87 Figure 2. Revista Ilustrada No 8. Rio de Janeiro, October 13, 1883, IEB, USP This sketch of Táng Jǐngxīng juxtaposes the figure of the mandarin Tong King Sing (as his name was transliterated into Portuguese) with caricatures of men who are meant to represent Chinese laborers —the so-called coolies, as they were negatively known. It aims to depict the local reaction to the mandarin’s visit to Brazil and his intention to open direct trade routes with China, which would adhere Brazil to the circuits of the trans-Pacific coolie trade. On the one hand, this development could mean the prolongation of slavery in a new form, but on the other it depicts anxieties toward the possibility of a Chinese colonization of Brazil. ! ! 88 Figure 3. Revista Ilustrada, 20 October 1883, No. 558. IEB-USP. In Figure 3, titled “a colonização chinesa” the overt quality of racial depictions themselves construct a visual discourse with legal implications, making Chinese immigrants and culture legible in the codification of racialized labor. The images deploy racial features and cultural traits such as the Qing queue, a braided hairstyle that was mandatory for all men in China at the time. There are also depicted with accessories such as fans, conical hats, and parasols. These markers portray various warnings against Chinese laborers to the country. Accordingly, the consequences can only forge violence as the means and ends. The drawings literally illustrate political and economic fears in the visual discourse of the coolie; the images visually convey an overt narrative of fear. In these frames, Brazilian characters like the fazendeiro (landholder, agriculturalist) are portrayed as slave drivers by standing above the Chinese laborers whose queues have been tied to a pole while they toil in agricultural labor. Another image demonstrates the negative effects of ! ! 89 Chinese labor, which would lead to suicide among the laborers and theft of local wealth symbolized by the stealing of farm animals. The sum of these images is to show the representation of Asiatic and African literary figurations as symbolizing Brazil’s struggle with what Doris Sommer, in another context, has called “Brazil’s two-faced indigenism” (Sommer 138). These images depict Chinese immigrants directly against Brazilian terms of modernity whereby the end of slave labor was a necessary step for consolidating the modern nation-state. The images warn that Chinese laborers will become slaves, fall victim to suicide, and moreover, Brazilians, including the “fazendeiro” and indigenous people, will literally eat them up. Azevedo and Moreira’s O Mandarim was presented for the first time in Rio de Janeiro at the Teatro Príncipe Imperial. It achieved instant success among audiences and earned Azevedo the reputation of establishing the genre of the teatro de revista in Brazilian popular theater. Participating in the construction of a national institution, O Mandarim performs a form of rhetorical citizenship whereby the ironic and satirical portrayals of nationalist assimilation become the tool to stage citizenship and expose the performative technologies of the State in political and economic transition. Satire and irony are useful tools in nationalist discourses precisely because of their debt to a socio-cultural and political context for meaning. Charles Knight’s discussion of satirical nationalism contends that satire is useful in the transition to nation due to its ability to coordinate diverse or conflicting loyalties and morals. Too unstable to become a tool of nationalist ideology, satire reveals the “nation’s double image” whereby the nation is intricately bonded by actual and imagined communities. Satire interrogates the doubling that participates in solidifying national belonging. Knight emphasizes that a moralizing mission does not drive satirical nationalism; rather, it is invested in changing perception (3-4). ! ! 90 Satire is both a literary device and a form of public discourse, as such it could be studied under the paradigm of what Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen have discussed as rhetorical citizenship to refer to the pairing of citizenship with deliberation. In this sense, citizenship is not limited to the rights accorded to the individuals of a polity, but rather it involves participation from multiple actors and sites to represent various positions. According to the authors, participation in a deliberative democracy requires two main aspects, “active output” and “inner deliberation,” whereas rhetoric is an essential part of deliberating and being a citizen (2-5). As an example of the diverse forms of deliberation, Jette Barnholt Hansen contends that the genre of the revue is the “satirical manifestation of rhetorical citizenship” (261). 36 Barnholt Hansen emphasizes that revues must recreate the experience of the present in such a way that spectators recognize the direct allusion to political reality through the lens of satire. The viewer is readily cognizant of the allusion, yet effectively defamiliarized through techniques of satire. Due to the extreme timeliness of the subject matter dealt with in revues, the genre is also a “cultural artifact” that exposes the rhetorical citizenship of a particular period (251). The genre of the revue is a necessary part of public debate as much as it is a cultural phenomenon. 37 I consider Barnholt Hansen’s elucidation of revue helpful, and I want to build on this explanation to consider the role between cultural forms of public deliberation, nationalism and the staging of Otherness. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 36 Barnholt Hansen’s study of satire in Danish revue as a form of popular resistance against Nazi occupation during 1940-1945 explains that the revue is a specific form of rhetorical discourse that must capture the immediacy of the current times, as it directly relates to spectators’ lives. 37 Barnholt Hansen applies her analysis to the 2006 Circus Revue response to the 2005 cartoon in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that depicted Muhammed wearing a bomb for a turban, causing an international relations catastrophe for Denmark. Her analysis of the revue song focuses on the meta-level of how it satirizes the satirical cartoon. ! ! 91 Determing the contours of Azevedo and Moreira’s national theater as a space of public deliberation and national instituation makes it possible to examine how the page and the stage became a place to renegotiate citizens-in-transit and citizenship-in-transition. Tang Jingxing’s visit to Rio de Janeiro, as I mentioned above, inspired the play O Mandarim. In the theater revue, the Mandarin, guided by the Baron of Caiapó, is introduced to Brazilian society. The Baron’s goal is to convince the Mandarin to invest his business (the Trans-Pacific coolie trade) in Brazil. The revue critiques the actions of the mandarin as well as the Baron, all the while parodying the ills of Brazilian society. There is not one stable perspective towards Chinese immigration because of the consistent irony that runs through the entire revue. On the one hand, there is an utopian vision that is projected in O Mandarim that refuses to accept a single unitary notion of language or nation, nor does it accept the complete exclusion or inclusion of Chinese immigrant laborers. On the other hand, the mandarin represents different sides of the assimilationist perspective for which the trans- Pacific coolie trade in Brazil would lead to the racial mixing of Chinese with Brazilian “races,” namely indigenous, African and European. Through all of these various perspectives, O Mandarim gives a glimpse into how actual bodies were encoded to take on the signifiers of race, ethnicity, and gender in order for them to enter, or not, into the political anatomy under a transitional order from colonial to national. Yet, O Mandarim carnivalizes everyone and everything, so that there is always a deferral of meaning --an ironic gesture between what is said and what is meant, or even between the text and the stage enactment. The comedic revue engaged audiences in a form of public discourse to learn about contemporary political events through the non-threatening pulses of laughter. The assimilationist terms of managing racial laboring bodies forms the basis of the exclusionary practices that determine whether the Mandarin can enter into Brazilian society. Furthermore, the early-modern ! ! 92 history of China and Portugal, plus the fact the many Chinese immigrants were coming from Portugal’s colony in South China, Macau, also symbolically tied the imaginary of China with Brazil’s desire to reject the expansion of Portuguese imperialism. The figure of the Mandarim voices Brazil’s specific position of coloniality in face of the trans-Pacific coolie trade and threat of Chinese imperialism. To expulse Chinese elements would mean to doubly expel Asian and Portuguese imperialism from Brazil’s shores. In the prologue, all the “bad and evil” characters in Brazilian society gather to meet the Mandarin. Referred to as “todos os males em sessão (sêssão)” the characters include people, such as Olímpia (a prostitute and leading lady), Candy Butchers, Traveling Musicians, objects and abstract concepts such as Politics, Lottery, Slavery, Yellow Fever, the Streetcar, Periodicals, among others. The Mandarin enters the stage beside the Barão de Caiapó, an aristocrat who serves as his guide during his visit. The baron’s main goal throughout the revue is to convince the Mandarin to invest his immigration company in Brazil. Upon their entrance, the motley chorus proclaims: Oh, que caras esquisitas! Que esquipáticas visitas! Que bons tipos ambos são, Tanto o chinês como o Barão! 38 (Azevedo and Moreira) The Mandarin enters the stage among the most marginalized figures of society. From the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 38 Oh what strange faces! What odd visits! What good types both are, As much the Chinese man as the Baron! . ! ! 93 beginning, the figure of the Mandarin is aligned with the evils, “os males,” of society. The irony in this passage is derived in the contradiction between what is said about the Mandarin and what the Mandarin actually represents, which is the illness of racial labor that obstructs the passage to the republic and conflicting patriotic loyalties to China. The plural tense of “caras esquisitas” is made to rhyme with “esquipáticas visitas” to refer to both the Mandarin and Baron as “good types.” However, the audience would have understood the ironic tone in the passage, since both the Mandarin and the Baron were partners in their interest to bring the coolie trade to Brazil. However, as the drawings that appeared in the Revista Ilustrada show, there was nothing “good” for Brazil in their intentions. The highest points of irony in the revue play with different modes through which the Mandarin can assimilate into the national body. There is actually no desire for assimilation with the Mandarin, and so the irony evokes the sentiment that the Chinese race would denigrate Brazilian society. The irony of the Mandarin’s assimilation in the national body can be read in the three primary options available to him that also demonstrate the regulation of bodies. One option is for him to biologically assimilate through catching yellow fever or through receiving an inoculation against it. At this time, yellow fever had become an epidemic that plagued Brazil. In this scene, the Mandarin learns that Yellow Fever attacks foreigners, but spares nationals so he states, “naturalizo-me” or “naturalize me.” In other words, he wishes to be vaccinated against the qualities of foreignness. Indeed, to integrate into society, he must first receive a biological alteration. OLÍMPIA [A Febre Amarela] ataca de preferência os estrangeiros e poupa os nacionais. MANDARIM ! ! 94 Ah! Sim? Em último caso, naturalizo-me! 39 (Azevedo and Moreira). The second ironic possibility for assimilation is the proposed affair with the prostitute Olímpia, which means committing adultery on his wife, Peky who is described as “Um homem que parece mulher! É uma mulher que parece homem! (“A man who looks like a woman! A woman who looks like a man!”) Even the Mandarin is fearful of his own ambiguously gendered wife. Allegorically, the ambiguous sexuality of Peky represents the anxiety towards miscegenation that would ensue with Chinese immigration. The Mandarin is unfaithful sexually, but he is also not trustworthy culturally and patriotically, which is the third impossibility for assimilation. Peky discovers his infidelity to her, and by extension to China. She looks for him at Olímpia’s house, but before she finds him, the Mandarin makes a deal with the prestidigitadores (the illusionist or magicians) to hide him. In doing so, he sheds his mandarin clothing and offers them the pledge of his Qing queue. The following scene presents all three forms of the impossibility for the Mandarin to form part of Brazilian society: CRIADO Está aí outro homem que parece mulher! OLÍMPIA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 OLYMPIA [Yellow Fever] preferentially attacks foreigners, but it spares nationals. MANDARIN Oh! Really? In that case, naturalize me! ! ! 95 (Erguendo-se): Quem? MANDARIM Um homem que parece mulher! Pelo Deus Fó! Já sei que é! CRIADO Está furioso! MANDARIM: É minha mulher! OLÍMPIA Sua senhora! Um homem que parece mulher! MANDARIM É uma mulher que parece homem! Vem a dar na mesma! Buda me acuda! É a esposa mais ciumenta de Pequim! Descobriu que estou cá, e quer apanhar-me com a boca na botija! Escondam- me! OLÍMPIA Um escândalo em minha casa! CRIADO (Que se tem conservado ao fundo.): Ela aí vem! HERMANN (Aos prestidigitadores.) Meus senhores, mostremos que somos ótimos artistas! Escamoteemos o Mandarim! MANDARIM (Com volubilidade.): Ah! Meus amigos, se o conseguirem, sou capaz de empenhar o rabicho para pagar-lhes tamanho favor! OS PRESTIDIGITADORES: ! ! 96 Mãos à obra! (Rodeim o Mandarim, que desaparece misteriosamente, deixando-lhes roupas nas mãos.) OLÍMPIA E esta roupa? HERMANN Este senhor que as ponha. (Vestem o Barão com a roupa do Mandarim. Entra Peky furiosa e o Criado sai.) 40 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 40 SERVANT Here, there is another man who looks like a woman. OLYMPIA (Standing up): Who? MANDARIN A man who looks like a woman? For Fó’s sake, I know who it is. SERVANT He is furious. MANDARIN: It’s my wife! OLYMPIA Your wife! A man who looks like a woman? MANDARIM É uma mulher que parece homem! Vem a dar na mesma! Buda me acuda! É a esposa mais ciumenta de Pequim! Descobriu que estou cá, e quer apanhar-me com a boca na botija! Escondam-me! She is a woman who looks like a man! But, it’s all the same. Buddha, save me! She is the most jealous spouse in Peking. She has discovered I am here, and wants to catch me red handed. Hide me! ! ! 97 At the end of the scene, the Mandarin mysteriously disappears. His disappearance indicates the view that assimilation is not possible. However, even though the body of the Mandarin is gone, his Qing-style clothing is left and provides evidence that he was there. The Baron assumes the cultural !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OLYMPIA A scandal in my house! SERVANT (In the background): She is coming! HERMAN (To the magicians) My gentlemen let us show what great illusionists we are. We will conceal the Mandarin. MANDARIN (With volubility.): [This next line is a little trickier to translate to English because there are actually a number of meanings available in Portuguese due to the ambiguity of the word “rabicho” which can mean a ponytail or pigtail, or simply just a tail. It also means “to tag along” used affectionately or in annoyance, like the child who is always a rabicho following their mom. For that reason, it can also be used to indicate a loved person, someone you might be having a little flirt with. The word Rabico in popular language or slang also connotes to sodomy. In the context of this scene then, it could mean either]: My friends, if you could do this, I would pawn my queue to pay such a debt” [as well as] My friends, if they could do this, I would be capable of pawning my ass to pay such debt. THE MAGICIANS: All hands on deck! (They encircle the Mandarin, who mysteriously disappears, leaving his clothes in their hands. OLYMPIA And these clothes? HERMAN Sir, you wear them. (They dress the Baron in the Mandarin’s clothing. Peky enters furiously and the Servant exits.) ! ! 98 traits of the Mandarin by wearing his clothes. Dressed in the Mandarin’s clothing, the figure of the Baron reiterates the lines from the beginning of the play when the Baron and the Mandarin are both referred to ironically as the same “good types.” The Baron might also be seen as a figuration of Portugal, whereby his pairing with the Mandarin harkens to the complex history of Portuguese and Chinese imperial sovereignty in Macau. This joining of the Baron and the Mandarin in the grammatically plural tense as in the opening lines of the play (“caras esquisitas, esquipáticas visitas”) and in shared attire highlights a pairing of these two characters, which in current events, actually referred to their potential joint effort in initiating the business of the trans-Pacific coolie trade. But the figure of the Mandarin also warns of the detriment of both racial and cultural miscegenation, which the Chinese would cause in Brazil. We might be able to imagine this contradiction between what is written in the text and what might have seen on the stage in the following cartoon series: Figure 4. Revista Ilustrada No 523. Rio de Janeiro, November 17, 1888, IEB, USP Titled “Brazil-Chim,” this image shows a similar irony between what is said in the text and what the image is performing. This series of images visually tells the narrative that the Baron of ! ! 99 Cotegipe has become delirious with the idea of Chinese immigration as the solution to the labor crisis. However, the images warn against the Chinese by showing how they will integrate negatively into society. In Figure 5, a detail of the larger image, we can read that the first frame says “É um samba meio bahiano, meio chinês, que coisa divertida e esplêndida. Está pois decidido, o chim vem” (chim, as mentioned above, was a derogatory way of referring to Chinese). Figure 5. Revista Ilustrada No 523. Rio de Janeiro, November 17, 1888, IEB, USP (detail) At this time samba was negatively viewed and prohibited in public spaces so the scene of the Chinese immigrant “sambando,” or dancing the samba, is actually an unfavorable portrayal. Likewise, the next frame shows a contradiction between what is written and what is seen in the visual image. Here a man is stealing farm animals, but the caption states “he works.” The next frame pictures an impoverished man begging the heavy-set chim for money. But underneath the caption it ironically says, that the chim will enrich us. Different from the irony within just a text, wherein it is derived from the socio-cultural and political context. Here we see the irony between what is written and what the body of the “chim” inscribes. Figure 6 shows that ! ! 100 the Baron is so taken up with the idea of a Brazil-chim that he himself becomes the Mandarin. In this image, the Baron has assumed the cultural traits of the Mandarim, such as the Qing queue and dress, much like the scene in O Mandarim wherein the Baron puts on the Mandarin’s clothing. Figure 6. Revista Ilustrada No 523. Rio de Janeiro, November 17, 1888, IEB, USP (detail). The caption in this frame states “Ficam só no Brasil o Sr. Cotegipe e os chins. Estes, no delírio do enthusiasmo [sic] proclamam-no Mandarim Tchim-Tcham-Fó imperador d’esta cotegipica China… Um pagode!” It warns that Brazil will become Chinese if the Baron of Cotegipe succeeds in establishing the coolie trade with mandarins such as Tang Jingxing or other officials, who like him, became fictional mandarins such as Tchim-Tcham Fó. If this venture were to become successful –the image warns– the only ones left in Brazil will be the Baron and the Chinese. Brazil ! ! 101 will become a Brazil-chim, “esta cotegipica China,” that is to say the Baron of Cotegipe will turn Brazil into his version of an enslaved China. Figure 7. Revista Ilustrada No 522. Rio de Janeiro, November 11, 1888, IEB, USP (detail) O Mandarim, to reinstate the words of Azevedo, was not pure entertainment; rather, it configured the theatrical stage into a nation-building platform. Indeed, staging nation in the form of racial impersonation embodies while at the same time displaces the actual bodies that did not fit into the scheme of modernization. Such embodied practices put into flux the period’s technologies of raciality deployed to establish the boundaries of citizenship based on new terms of racial labor. Yet, the representations of the mandarin and coolie demonstrate the presence of an annihilating drive that underlies the discourse of racial labor within nationalist practices of inclusion and exclusion. ! ! 102 Chapter Three Deaths of Mandarins and Coolies in Eça de Queiroz, Machado de Assis and José Martí Figure 8. Eça com a cabaia chinesa (c. 1893) 41 Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa In the essay, “The Politics of Posing,” Sylvia Molloy analyzes the posing body in Latin American fin-de-siècle literature to argue that posing is an “oppositional practice” that occurs in a variety of discourses (aesthetic, political, legal and medical) as well as at their convergences (184). She locates the posing body in “its intersection with nation and culture” and as presenting an “inevitable theatrical projection” and “pictorial connotations” in order to consider how posture !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 41 Eça often entertained intellectuals and artists from Brazil and Portugal at his home in Portugal where pastimes included photography, cycling, experimenting in the culinary arts and in which Eça would frequently dress in a chángpáo [traditional Chinese dress] while spontaneously reciting familiar theatrical verses (Fialho 10). ! ! 103 constructs a field of visibility. For Molloy, “posing is the representation of invisibility” and as such, it creates the subject precisely through representing and naming (184). Posing also exposes and subverts the performative categories of identity. In the photograph that opens this chapter, Eça de Queiroz is posing in a traditional Chinese dress. His is at once the emblematic Portuguese writer and diplomat, and his pose for the camera is that of a Qing dynasty official in wearing the dress of a mandarin. This convergence of semiotic fields simultaneously makes evident and subverts the constructedness of culture and nation, yet, posing as a mandarin calls attention to the very bodies that have vanished from the scene: “the unnamed, the it, or the thing the inscription of which…is posing itself” (Molloy 190). Thematically, the texts analyzed in this chapter share the same end, or rather; they all pose as figures of the mandarin and coolie, and in making apparent their vanished bodies, the texts make visible their symbolic death. I argue that these endings for both the mandarin and the coolie belong to a larger economic field of representation in which this final resolution serves as the symbolic desire of containing the Chinese in China. I situate Eça de Queiroz’s consular correspondences about Chinese indentured servitude in Cuba (1872-1874) as well as his novella O Mandarim (1884) into conversation with Machado de Assis’ chronicles in the Gazeta de Notícias and José Martí’s short story Edad de Oro (1889) and essay “Un funeral chino” (1888) both written during his exile in New York, as participating in a larger hemispheric and cross-Atlantic dialogues, which, as we saw, also engaged diplomat and author Rubén Darío as well as writers in Brazil such as Artur Azevedo and Sampaio Moreira among others. I underscore the trait of volatility that lies behind the descriptions of mandarins and coolies across a diversity of discourses. The fictionalization of historical figures into mandarins and the coolies expresses new notions of national belonging that became solidified in new terms inclusion or exclusion of new forms of ! ! 104 racial labor. Eça de Queiroz: Letters from Cuba In addition to a long career as a successful author, Eça de Queiroz served as a diplomat for the Portuguese government for nearly twenty-eight years. During this time, he traveled throughout Europe as well as Egypt, New York, Havana, Paris, London, among other places, as a Portuguese official. Eça’s letters from Cuba, including the essay “Emigração como Força Civilizadora,” as the title suggests, defines civilization in terms of emigration. The rhetorical function of the Chinese laborer in these epistolary correspondences relate larger struggles concerning European colonial rivalries and colonial independence movements that would ultimately lead to renegotiations over the boundaries of modern citizenship. Specifically, Eça’s mission to Cuba from 1872 to 1874 had as its objective to investigate the welfare of Chinese immigrants who had departed Macau, a Portuguese possession at that time, for the Spanish colony. The Chinese labor immigration situation had reached numbers of more than 100,000 by the time of his arrival in December 1872. Similar to the politico-economic situation found in Brazil during the late 1880s discussed in chapters one and two, Cuba was experiencing a transitional political period from colony to independence and from a slave-based economic system to wage labor. Eça’s letters written about the Chinese immigration labor situation in Cuba can be found primarily in his letters from Havana (I, VI, IX, X) housed in Special Collections at the Portugal’s Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros in Lisbon, to where Eça had originally sent them. Historian Alan Freeland published Eça’s letters ! ! 105 written from Cuba, Newcastle, Bristol and Paris in the compilation Correspondência consular (1994) in the original Portuguese. 42 In a letter written on December 29, 1872, Eça makes clear that the treatment of Chinese emigrants from Macau arriving in Havana was in fact also a larger issue concerning Portuguese interests in gaining a stronghold in Cuba: Existem, Il.mo Sr., nesta ilha mais de cem mil asiáticos que o Regulamento de Emigração pelo porto de Macau põe hoje explicitamente sob a protecção do Consulado Português. Se V. Ex.a atender a que este elevado número de colonos é uma das forças mais vitais da agricultura da a que este número crescerá pelas condições deste país que entrega todo o seu trabalho a braços importados, e que a raça chinesa subtil e hábil poderá, tendo a sua actividade livre, tomar em grande parte o domínio das indústrias da Ilha –V. Ex.a compreenderá a importância deste consulado que pode abrir a cem mil almas o registro de !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 Historians Archer de Lima, Joaquim Palminha Silva, Raul Rêgo and Alan Freeland have done the rigorous task of transcribing the letters into publication form. During the 1920s, Archer de Lima published a significant portion of Eça’s diplomatic correspondences in Eça de Queiroz, diplomata. Silva’s O Nosso Consul em Havana: Eça de Queiroz (1981) concentrates on Queiroz’s letters from Cuba, situating his mission within the Ten Year’s War. Rêgo recovered Eça’s manuscript A Emigração como Força Civilizadora at an antiques auction in 1979. The letters from Cuba are addressed to the Ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros to the attention of João Andrade Corvo. In all likeliness, after receiving the manuscript, Corvo took the document home and there it stayed. He died in 1890 and the document remained in the hands of his family until 1979 when Rêgo purchased it at an auction and then published it in its entirety. ! ! 106 nacionalidade portuguesa: é portanto urgente que o Governo de S. M. atenda às condições em que vive aqui esta população colona (Freeland 5). 43 Eça’s first correspondence from Cuba to the Portuguese State Department immediately establishes Portuguese national and political interest in overseeing the conditions of Asians who have departed Macau. 44 This is a significant claim that the consul makes clear in the following sentence when he states Portuguese nationality may be extended to the Chinese migrants from Macau, which would indirectly allow Portugal, through its overseas Chinese nationals, to dominate industries in Cuba: “subtle and skillful Chinese race may…take domain of the Island’s industries –Your Excellency will understand the importance of this consulate as it can register Portuguese nationality to a hundred thousand souls.” This initial letter written on December 29, 1872, days after Eça’s arrival in Havana, explains the political and social condition of the Chinese living in Cuba. First, Eça remarks that the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 43 On this island, Most Illustrious Sir, there are over a hundred thousand Asians that the Emigration Regulation of the port of Macau today explicitly places under the protection of the Portuguese Consulate. If your Excellency takes into consideration that this high number of colonists is one of the most vital forces of agriculture on this Island, and that this number will grow due to the conditions of this country that yield all of its labor to imported arms, and the subtle and skillful Chinese race may, in having free agency, take large domain of the Island’s industries –Your Excellency will understand the importance of this consulate as it can register Portuguese nationality to a hundred thousand souls: it is therefore urgent that the Government of S.M. attend to the living conditions of this colonial population . 44 Due to the Emigration Regulation of 1872, departures from Macau granted Portuguese protection to voyagers, with special attention to the living conditions aboard vessels. Whether or not this was upheld is questionable since many of the ships were formerly used to transport kidnapped men, women and children from the African coastline. The brutal conditions aboard ships such as the “Fatchoy” and the “Lola” that made world news headlines caused such attempts at reform. ! ! 107 plantation-based economy and contractual terms reproduce the condition of slavery, but under deceitful terms of contractual labor, thus resulting in inhumane working conditions of slavery. Furthermore, the legal status of Chinese laborers is essentially bound to their relationship to a contract; a laborer without a contract, therefore, would have an undocumented and unclassifiable legal status, and thus no access to legal protection. Chinese laborers pose a double concern that hinders the possibility of an independent state. First, their exploitative conditions will replicate slave-like labor conditions and second, their undocumented and thus ambigous citizenship status challenges the developing boundaries of nation: A lei permite aos asiáticos que chegaram antes de 61 que solicitem a sua cédula de estrangeiro – mas por todos os modos se impede que ele a obtenha: e o meio é explícito: formou-se na Havana, sem estatutos e sem autorização do Governo de Madrid, uma comissão arbitrária que se intitula Comissão Central de Colonização; esta comissão pretende ter o pleno domínio da emigração: formada dos proprietários mais ricos impôs-se, naturalmente, às autoridades superiores da Ilha, e conseguiu que se determinasse – que nenhum asiático tire ao Consulado a sua cédula de estrangeiro sem que a Comissão Central informe sobre ele e o autorize a requerê-la: ora sucede que a Comissão Central, para cada asiático, prolonga indefinidamente esta informação – e durante este tempo o colono está numa situação anormal e inclassificável; – não é colono porque terminou o seu contrato – e não é livre porque não tem a sua cédula; esta situação faz a conveniência de todos – da polícia que à mais efémera infracção (encontrar, por ex[emplo] o china, fumando ópio) o sobrecarrega de multas enormes, do Governo, que o aproveita, sem salário, para as obras públicas, e dos fazendeiros que terminam por o ! ! 108 recontratar. De sorte que o benefício que a lei lhe concede é inútil na prática (Freeland 5). 45 Advocating for defining a legal status for Chinese laborers was inevitably tied to conflicting imperialisms in Cuba. Pessimistically, according to Eça, the debate over coolie labor among such powers as England, France, Spain and Portugal was more of a concern over colonial rivalry in which philanthropic arguments masked imperial desires to take control of the island. Moreover, moral arguments were deployed mostly for the sake of gaining a stronghold over the wealth of the Antilles, or at best, they were taken into consideration as secondary priority: A oposição feita ultimamente à emigração chinesa era, incontestavelmente, um excitação do interesse. A filantropia e a caridade influíam muito secundariamente. Tantas reclamações contra o tráfico dos coolies da parte da Inglaterra e o interesse que a ligação francesa mostrava na China a favor da proibição do tráfico eram originadas por uma rivalidade colonial. A Inglaterra, excitando a opinião contra a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 45 The law permits Asians who arrived before [18]61 to request foreign identity cards –but by all means he is prevented from obtaining it: the means is explicit: it developed in Havana, without statute and without authorization from the Government of Madrid, an arbitrary commission calling itself the Central Commission for Colonization; this committee intends to have full control of emigration: it is composed of the richest land owners who imposed their interests, naturally, to the higher authorities of the Island, and were able to determine – that no Asian be allowed to obtain a foreign identity card unless the Central Commission informs and authorizes the request: as it happens the Central Commission indefinitely prolongs this process for each Asian –and during this time the colonist is kept in an abnormal and unclassifiable situation; –he is not a colonist because his contract has ended –and is not free because he does not have documentation; this situation is convenient for everyone –for the most momentary infraction (see, for example the china smoking opium), the police will impose enormous fines, the Government benefits from their condition, without pay, for public services, and the plantation owners will eventually rehire them. Wherefore, the benefit that the law grants him is useless in practice. ! ! 109 emigração chinesa, era inspirada pelas mesmas influências coloniais que a determinaram a tomar uma atitude tão decididamente hostil ao tráfico dos negros e que a levaram a opor-se a toda a operação que dê a Cuba trabalhadores mais numerosos e mais baratos do que os das colónias tropicais (Rêgo165). 46 Eça’s letters from Cuba convey the urgency of the labor crisis in Cuba and advocate for a more humane treatment of the Chinese laborers. Chinese contract laborers are described in slippery terms that oscillate among “asiático, china, chim, cul and chines.” Arguably, the unstable manner in which Eça addresses Chinese immigrants conveys the very terms of their labor contracts that produced larger legal and economic discourses. Chinese migrant workers departing from Southern China, mainly from the port of Macau, signed labor contracts that bound them to a limited term of service. Their unclassifiable economic status as undocumented foreigners in Cuba had not yet caught up to new legal and economic structures of society that was still in flux between slavery and abolition. Negotiations that took place over the status of their bodies entered into a diversity of discourses including fiction, thereby blurring the planes of representation between those with political or aesthetic objectives. Deaths of Mandarins In Eça’s fiction, the novella O Mandarim, most clearly echoes his diplomatic mission to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 46 The recent opposition taken against Chinese emigration was, undoubtedly, an excitement of interest. Philanthropy and charity are secondary influences. Many complaints against the trafficking of coolies on the part of England and the interests of the France connection shown in China in favor of prohibition of the trafficking originate from colonial rivalry. England, exciting opinion against Chinese emigration, was inspired by the same colonial influences that determined it to take a decidedly hostile attitude against the traffic of Negros which led it to oppose the whole operation that gives Cuba more numerous and cheap laborers than any of the other tropical colonies. ! ! 110 Cuba and concerns with Chinese immigration labor. Existing scholarship on representations of Chinese people and cultures in the literary works of Eça de Queiroz often examine such symbolism under the rubric of Portuguese Orientalism. José Suarez’s analysis of O Mandarim returns to Said’s discussion in Orientalism to points out, as others have done, that Said does not provide comprehensive attention to Portugal and Spain. He argues: “Portuguese writers have thematically portrayed the East, not in the Orientalist manner defined by Said, but in a sympathetic and realist manner” (189). He concludes that Eça was “Orientalist but unprejudiced against the East” (195). Likewise, José Carvalho Vanzelli’s study “Uma leitura da China em ‘Chineses e Japoneses’ e O Mandarim de Eça de Queirós” declares that Eça’s writings do not simply invert the dichotomies of Orient/barbarism and Occident/civilization, but rather, depict the Other in a respectful way. Although I agree with Vanzelli’s claim that “China” in Eça’s works may have two planes of meaning: on the one hand, China may relate positive depictions through fantasy and the Chinese intellectual elite; on the other hand, it symbolizes an aversion towards Chinese diaspora. The form in which this argument is presented, though, is problematic. First, Vanzelli refers to everything from Eca’s travels to Egypt, Palestine and Syria to his consul mission in Havana where he interacted with Chinese laborers in Cuba as all forming part of his contact with the “Orient.” Regarding these two experiences, Vanzelli states “O contato direto com o Oriente se resume a esses dois fatos ocorridos na juventude do romancista” (127). 47 Such statements in scholarly analyses replicate Orientalist tropes and imitate rather than interrogate the homogenizing factors that produce such representations. As such, Vanzelli’s examination of the multiple meanings of China in O Mandarim and “Chineses e Japaneses” concludes with the oversimplified claim that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 47 Direct contact with the Orient is summarized in these two events that occurred during the romanticist’s youth . ! ! 111 ultimately Eça critiques the lack of mutual interest between China and Europe: “A crítica parece ser a ambos, Europa e China, ou seja, Ocidente e Oriente, que convivem, mas não interagem, não se interessam um pela outro e, portanto, nada aprendem” (140). 48 Rather than begin from the fictional binary construction of Occident and Orient, I prefer a materialist approach to examining the various discourses of the Chinese body, as conveying multiple, and often conflicting, political agendas. I want to identify the different layers of representation that the figures of the mandarin and coolie may carry to observe how the text – including visual texts– disclose multiple and conflicting layers of discursive power. In this sense, I use the Derridian notion of the text, as context, “To the extent that every trace is the trace of a trace, no text is ‘itself’ enough to do without a context; but by the same token no context can really be closed” (Derrida 90). Deciphering, or unpeeling, the many possibilities of meaning within a single image or text enable each topographic representation to exhibit larger political, economic and social tensions that have a spatial and temporal trace. Moreover, to allow the text to speak in this way, also gives it an independent position from the author and upholds the impenetrable subjectivity of the individual. Distinguishing life from the historicity of the signifiers of race, ethnicity, class and gender, a focus on the text as discourse enables an analysis of how historical bodies have been constructed. The full novella was published in 1884, but first appeared in serial form in the journal Diário de Portugal in 1880, six years after Eça’s diplomatic mission to Havana, Cuba. The main character of the novella is Teodoro a scribe at the Ministry for Internal Affairs and Education in Portugal. Living a simple and humble life, Teodoro dreams of luxurious dinners filled with !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 48 The critique seems to be directed to both Europe and China, in other words, the Occident and the Orient, which coexist, but do not interact, nor have interest in each other, therefore nothing is learned” . ! ! 112 champagne at fancy hotels. One day, he is confronted with the decision of ringing a bell that will kill a mandarin in China, but in return, he will receive the fortune of his dreams. Expectedly, Teodoro rings the bell and is suddenly rich and famous, making headlines in actual magazines titles that circulated during the publication of the novella. As such, in citing actual periodicals as Gazeta das Locais, Figaro as well as full color foreign illustrated magazines like the Illustration française the novella creates an imaginary, which bridges the plane of fiction with journalism. One one level, the novella seems to be simplistically moralizing: Teodoro’s wealth causes delusional states in which he sees apparitions of the mandarin he indirectly assassinated. Out of guilt, he decides to travel to China to return the fortune to the mandarin’s relatives. The story ends with a repentant Teodoro urging the reader to earn his daily bread with hardwork and avoid pursuing the suspicious forms of quick riches. However, when read as converging between the fields of aesthetics and politics, the novella exposes the fictional element behind each mode of representation, and in fact, this becomes its strongest critique against political representations as assisting a political agenda. The novella’s rejection of the mandarin is also a refusal of idealism. The prologue of O Mandarim opens with two friends sipping on cognac and soda sitting by a shady water bank. The First Friend desires to drift into a state of reverie, described metaphorically to be located among the cool mosses that hide the ruins of Idealism: Camarada, por estes calores do Estio que embotam a ponta da sagacidade, repousemos do áspero estudo da Realidade humana…Partamos para os campos do Sonho, vaguear por essas azuladas colinas românticas onde se ergue a torre ! ! 113 abandonada do Sobrenatural, e musgos frescos recobrem as ruínas do Idealismo… Façamos fantasia!... 49 To this musing, the Second Friend inserts a dose of sobriety to keep them from departing too far from human Reality: Mas sobriamente, camarada, parcamente!... E como nas sábias e amáveis alegorias da Renascença, misturando-lhe sempre uma Moralidade discrete… (O Mandarim 17). 50 As the two friends contemplate in the prologue of the novel, it is not possible to escape “human Reality” to hide in the moss that covers the “ruins of Idealism.” Rather, the fictional elements of literature provide the sobering perspective of the fictional and violent elements of the political imaginary. In the 1927 edition of O Mandarim that includes illustration by Rachel Roque Gameiro, such ruins of idealism are visually depicted as dire poverty. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 49 My friend, let us succumb to this heavy summer heat that blunts the cutting edge of wisdom and rest a while from the harsh study of human Reality. Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothes the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy! (Translation Costa) 50 But let us do so soberly and temperately, my friend! And, as in the wise and amiable allegories of the Renaissance, let us add just a pinch of Morality (Translation Costa). ! ! 114 Figure 9. Illustration by Rachel Roque Gameiro. Porto: Livraria Chardron, 1927. Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa. ! ! 115 Machado de Assis’ figurations of the mandarin and coolie similarly converge at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. The volatile mandarin meanders briefly into Machado’s Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881) in the chapter entitled “Delirium.” The reader is taken to a curious scene in which the narrator has transformed into a potbellied Chinese barber who is giving a close shave to a mandarin. In this scene, the narrator assumes the posture of the Chinese barber: O delírio: Que me conste, ainda ninguém relatou o seu próprio delírio; faço-o eu, e a ciência mo agradecerá. Se o leitor não é dado à contemplação destes fenômenos mentais, pode saltar o capítulo; vá direito à narração. Mas, por menos curioso que seja, sempre lhe digo que é interessante saber o que se passou na minha cabeça durante uns vinte a trinta minutos. Primeiramente, tomei a figura de um barbeiro chinês, bojudo, destro, escanhoando um mandarim, que me pagava o trabalho com beliscões e confeitos: caprichos de mandarim 51 (Machado de Assis, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cuba, 1881). The expression “caprichos de mandarim” to describe the mandarin’s decision to pay for services in the form of pinches and sweets implies that the narrator –posing as a Chinese barber– has not consented to exchange his services in the capricious manner that the mandarin wishes to pay. Posing as the Chinese barber, the narrator evokes invisible members of society. It was not !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 51 “As far as I know, no one has ever spoken about his own delirium. I’m doing just that and science will thank me for it. If the reader isn’t given to the contemplation of these mental phenomena, he may skip this chapter and go straight to the narrative. But if he has the slightest bit of curiosity, I can tell him that it’s interesting to know what went on in my head for some twenty or thirty minutes. At the very first I took the figure of a Chinese barber, potbellied, dexterous, who was giving a close shave to a mandarin, who paid me for my work with pinches and sweets, the whims of a mandarin” (Trans. Rabassa 16). ! ! 116 uncommon for Chinese immigrant laborers to the Americas to take on jobs including barbers, cooks, laundry cleaners, gardeners, waiters and shopkeepers. 52 Machado may well be commenting on aspects of Chinese immigration in the Americas, which he does more explicitly in chronicles published during the same period. There is no other mention of the mandarin or Chinese barber in the novel, but this book was originally published in serial form in the Revista Brasileira in 1880. From 1877 to 1895, Machado published eighteen essays related to Chinese and Japanese immigration. 53 In the following chronicle from the Gazeta de Notícias, in the column “Balas de Estalo” published on October 23, 1884, Machado writes a parodic letter addressed to Sir Conde George Granville, British Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1880 to 1885. Imitating, yet mocking, the official tone of such diplomatic correspondences, Machado depicts the issue of Chinese labor immigration with the play on words between Chinese laborer (derogatorily called chim) to a chimpanzee (chimpanzé) with the play on words “chim-panzé.” Although the word possesses a double meaning in the derogatory association between Chinese workers as likened to monkeys, it also critiques British exploitation of Asian laborers who do not have diplomatic protection due to internal political turmoil: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 52 Robert Chao Romero’s research on Chinese immigration to Mexico (1882-1940) found that the Chinese immigrants who had gone to Mexico as a result of the U.S. Exclusion Act of 1882 started a complex network of illegal border crossing that would allow Chinese people living in Cuba and Mexico to enter into the United States through San Francisco Bay. Chao found that the Chinese community took up professions such as barbers, gardeners, waiters and shopkeepers (Romero 103). 53 See the following works by Machado de Assis Notas semanais; Obra completa; Balas de estalo de Machado de Assis, Bons dias!, A semana, “História de quinze dias”, Ilustração Brasileira. For a full inventory of references to Chinese and Japanese immigration in the chronicles of Machado de Assis, see “Imigração chinesa e japonesa nas crônicas de Machado de Assis (1839-1908)” Universidade de São Paulo, Dissertation. Lica Hashimoto (2009). ! ! 117 A primeira vantagem do chim-panzé é que é muito mais sóbrio que o chim comum… O chim-panzé não usa roupa, calçado ou chapéu. Não vive com os olhos na patria; ao contrário, Sir John Sterling [first British subject residing in India to employ coolie labor] e seus parentes afirmam que têm conseguido fazer com que os chimpanzés mortos sejam comidos pelos sobreviventes, e a economia resultante deste meio de sepulture pode subir, numa plantação de dois mil trabalhadores, a duzentas libras por ano. Não tendo os chim-panzés nenhuma espécie de sociedade, nem instituições, não há em parte alguma embaixadas nem consulados; o que quer dizer que não há nenhuma espécie de reclamação diplomática, e pode V. Excia. calcular o sossego que este fato traz ao trabalho e aos trabalhadores. Está provado que toda a rebelião do chim comum provém da imagem, que eles têm presente, de um governo nacional, um imperador e inúmeros mandarins (Heloísa 71). 54 In another column “A semana” on September 18, 1892, Machado situates Chinese immigrants in contrast to European immigration. Chinese laborers will only provide a labor force, but not contribute to the betterment of Brazilian society. The chronicle describes that European immigration will bring European institutions and emancipatory ideas. In contrast, Chinese laborers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 54 The first advantage of the chimpanzee is that it is much more frugal than the common chim. The chimpanzee does not use clothes, shoes or hats. He does not live with his eyes fixed on the home country. On the contrary, Sir John Sterling and his relatives affirm that they have managed to make the chimpanzees eat their dead, and the economic benefits resulting from this means of sepulture may rise in a plantation with two thousand laborers at two hundred pounds per year. Since the chimpanzees do not have any kind of society or institutions, nor any embassies or consulates, which means there is no potential for diplomatic complaint, your Excellency may calculate the kind of peace this fact will bring to the work and workers. It is proven that all the rebellions of the common chim provide the image that they have a national government, an emperor and numerous mandarins. ! ! 118 will accept all kinds of labor conditions and perpetuate an enslaved mentality. In fact, the “chim” cannot even bring his name since the sounds are incomprehensible in Portuguese, so it is advisable for them to adapt Christian names. Ultimately, Brazilian society will completely consume the chim. Like the narrator who transforms into the Chinese barber, this rhetorical posing positions the argument against Chinese immigration as actually a critique on the brutalities of colonialism in Brazil: Italianos entram aqui com o seu irridentismo, franceses com os princípios de 89, ingleses com o Foreign Office e a Câmara dos Comuns, espanhóis com todas las Españas, caramba! alemães com uma casa sua, uma cidade sua, uma escola sua, uma igreja sua, uma vida sua. Chim não traz nada disso, traz braço, força e paciência. Não chega a trazer nome, porque é impossível que a gente o chame por aqueles espirros que lá lhe põem. O primeiro artigo de um bom contrato deve ser impor-lhe um nome da terra, à escolha, Manuel, Bento, pai João, pai José, pai Francisco, pai Antônio (Gledson 120). 55 In another chronicle Machado makes a number of observations of the Chinese immigrants he has seen in Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, the representations exhibit an empathetic tone that is torn for the sad and deterritorialized souls of the migrant laborers. However, trapped in tradition and unable to adapt to Brazilian culture even if they assimilate through learning local customs and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 55 Italians enter here with their irredentism, the French with the principles of ’89, the English with the Foreign Office and the House of Commons, the Spanish with all of the Spains, caramba! the Germans with their own house, their own city, their own school, their own church, their own life. The chim does not bring any of this; he brings labor, force and patience. The chim fails to bring his name because it is impossible for us to call him by the sneezes that are given to him there [in China]. The first article of a good contract should be to impose a name of the land, some choices, Manuel, Bento, Father John, Father Joseph, Father Francis, Father Anthony… ! ! 119 wearing Christian clothing, there is still no place for their form of racial labor in Brazil. On April 15, 1894 in the column “A semana,” Machado makes the following commentary: O que a China não faz, é deixar os seus trajes velhos, nem o arroz, nem o pagode, nem nada. Quando eu vejo aí nas ruas algum filho do Celeste Império mascarado com as nossas roupas cristãs, cai-me o coração aos pés. Imagino o que terá padecido essa triste alma desterrada, sem as vestes com que veio da terra natal. (Obra completa, em quatro volumes: volume 4. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 2008, pp. 1063-1065). 56 In these depictions, the Chinese immigrant is unable to assimilate into Brazilian society. The figure of the Chinese immigrant becomes a rhetorical device to express the rejection of slave-based labor conditions as well as the rejection of untrustworthy nationalist loyalty to China, which is represented by two main characteristics. First, the Chinese immigrants’ refusal to let go of tradition as exemplified in the references to trajes velhos, arroz, pagoda and, second, the short-term nature of the labor contracts implicitly made it understood that Chinese laborers would take the wealth of the Americas back to China as soon as they could depart. In 1894, both Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis wrote a number of articles for the Gazeta de Notícias regarding the issue of Chinese and Japanese immigration. Written during the early years of the First Republic and six years after the passing of the Lei Áurea, the chronicles illustrate the concerted economic shift towards immigration to offset the crisis in labor. In the following examples, Japanese immigration is viewed favorably as opposed to Chinese !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 56 What China does not do is leave behind its old clothing, or rice, or the pagoda, nothing. When I see a child from the Celestial Empire on the street disguised in our Christian clothes, my heart falls to my feet. I wonder what this sad displaced soul will have suffered, without the clothing that he came with from his birthplace. ! ! 120 immigration. The latter is described derogatively and detrimental for the country. Japan is depicted as exhibiting Western traits whereas China is trapped in tradition and decay. Comparisons made between the benefits of Japanese over Chinese immigrants convey a larger discourse about race and citizenship that is tied to conflicting imperial powers. During this time, Japanese imperialism was expanding through Asia. Japanese imperial power was further reconfigured in Brazil and Cuba, as Eça and Machado remark in their commentaries that favorably depict Japanese imperial subjects as suitable immigrants for building strong citizens and nations. Japanese immigrants were more advantageous to Brazil, for instance, because their entrance would enable the country to form an alliance with a rising political and economic superpower. In contrast, Chinese immigrants – and by extension, an alliance with a politically and economically weak country such as China – could only perpetuate a colonial state. The letters written by Eça, together with Machado de Assis’s chronicles published in the Gazeta de Notícias convey unstable ways of naming the Chinese immigrant in Brazil and Cuba including Asiático, chinês, chim, cule, coolie. Such linguistic disjunctions in naming the foreigner reflect the larger condition of labor whereas these words belong to the same economy of representation in which men from China are depicted in various forms to denote a kind of menial and exploitative labor. Furthermore, the condition of engaging in slave, or slave-like, labor labels people partaking in such practices in dehumanizing terms, such as monkey, ants and rats. These kinds of depictions represent Chinese immigrants as vermin, infestation and filth. That transforms their humanity into concepts that are containable or exterminable. Published in five installments from December 1 st through 6 th 1894, in the Gazeta de Notícias, a journal published in Rio de Janeiro to which Machado de Assis contributed regularly, Eça’s chronicle “Chinezes e Japonezes” was later compiled by Luís Magalhães and reprinted in ! ! 121 Cartas Familiares e Bilhetes de Paris (1893-1896) in 1907 published by Chardron de Lello & Irmão in Porto, Portugal. 57 Europeans and the United States have greatly misjudged China and Japan according to Eça, and this is what led to the incorrect analysis of the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) as a war between two barbaric countries of little importance. In the following chronicle, Eça explains the urgency in understanding the tension between China and Japan through deciphering their conflicting interests in Korea. The purpose of this portrayal is to convey the “official” view that explains the conflict that started the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) was a struggle over Korea. In Eça’s view, informed by his professional career as a diplomat, this explanation is a “fantasy” that masks the desire of the two superpowers of Asia –Japan and China– go to war with each other in order to gain domination over Asia. As such, Korea is used as a martial red herring to declare war: A nordeste da China, ou antes da Manchúria chinesa, entre o mar do Japão e o mar Amarelo, há uma tristonha península de costas escarpadas, que a si própria se enfeitou, desde o ano de 1392, quando começou a reinar a dinastia que ainda hoje reina (ou que ainda reinava no mês, passado) com o nome risonho, luminoso e fresco de Reino da Serenidade Matutina. Os Japoneses, seus vizinhos, chamam a esta terra Ko Rai; nós, mais comodamente, Coreia (13)… 58 E, com efeito, para o !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 57 I found the 1907 edition in an antique bookstore in São Paulo, Brazil. In its pages fell out a pharmacy prescription from the year 1910 written out to a man whom, I imagine, was one of the owners of the book. This is a small detail that attests to the trans-Atlantic circulation of these works. 58 In the Northeast of China, or formerly Chinese Manchuria, between the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, there is a dismal peninsula with sloped coastlines, which itself adorned, since the year 1392, when the dynasty that still reigns today began to reign (or which still reigned last month) with the cheerful, bright and fresh name, the Kingdom of Matutinal Serenity. The Japanese, their neighbors, call this land Ko Rai; we, more conveniently, call it Korea. ! ! 122 grande público, para todos aqueles que não são profissionalmente diplomatas, sociólogos ou estratégicos, esta guerra entre as duas nações fortes do Extremo Oriente oferece apenas o interesse divertido de uma pantomima militar, passada numa região de fantasia, onde a política é dirigida pelas fardas e os príncipes são picarescos (14). 59 Opinions about Japan and China are misinformed due to the wrongful imposition of European criteria to judge other societies. As such, these chronicles clearly convey a critical attitude towards the European manner of projecting one kind of civilization onto other geopolitical territories. The following passage critiques the assessment of progress in Peking that is measured in terms of European markers of modernity: vapor machines, sewing machines or pianos: Quando uma civilização se abandona toda ao materialismo, e dele tira, como a nossa, todos os seus gozos e todas as suas glórias, tende sempre a julgar as civilizações alheias segundo a abundância ou a escassez do progresso material, industrial e sumptuário. Pequim não tem luz eléctrica nas lojas; logo, Pequim deve ser uma cidade inculta… Milhares, se não milhões, de europeus não acreditam ainda, verdadeiramente, que os Romanos e os Gregos fossem povos civilizados, pois que não conheciam a máquina a vapor, nem a máquina de costura, nem o piano, nem outras grandezas do nosso grande tempo (14-15). 60 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 59 And indeed, for the general public, for all those who are not professional diplomats, sociologists or strategic leaders, this war between the two strongest nations of the Far East offers only the distracted interest of a pantomime military, occurring in a fantasy region where uniforms direct politics and princes are picaroons. 60 When a civilization abandons all materialism, and its takes, like ours, all its joys and all its glories, tends always to judge others’ civilizations according to the abundance or scarcity of material progress, industrial and sumptuary. Peking does not have electric lights in stores; therefore, Peking must be an uncultured city… Thousands, if not ! ! 123 Moreover, Eça brings this to the critique to his European and American readers, whom he refers to directly, in order to warn them that the result of the Sino-Japanese war will directly impact Europe and the Americas. China’s defeat, explains Eça, is seen as the real peril that will penetrate and collapse the mandarinato, or the very dynastic structure of China. O que ardentemente nos deve ocupar, a nós Europeus, e mesmo a vós Americanos, são as consequências da guerra – sobretudo as consequências de uma derrota da China, de uma boa derrota, bem estridente e humilhante, que penetre até ao mandarinato, até ao inacessível orgulho da dinastia manchu. Se fosse o Japão o esmagado, não viriam daí inquietações para o nosso mundo ocidental. Era apenas um povo ligeiro e atrevido que levava uma sova. A China vitoriosa seria a China readormecida. A China vencida – é a Europa ameaçada (15). 61 According to Eça’s viewpoint, reflective of and informed by diplomatic perspectives of the period, the Meiji restoration adapted styles of European imperialism and thereby transformed Japan into a formidable power in Asia. E, como não lhe falta a inteligência destra para aplicar os nossos princípios e usar o nosso material, e como os seus oficiais são educados nas escolas, nos arsenais, nos campos de manobras da Europa, em breve o Japão pitoresco se tornou o Japão !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! millions, of Europeans still do not believe, truly, that the Romans and Greeks were civilized people, because they did not have the steam engine, the sewing machine, nor the piano, or other prominent things of our time. 61 What should ardently occupy us, Europeans, and even you, Americans, are the consequences of this war – especially the consequences of a strident and humiliating defeat of China that penetrates to the Mandarin, into the inaccessible pride of the Manchurian dynasty. If Japan were the one that is crushed, there would come no concern to our Occidental world. It would be merely a slight and daring people who took a beating. A victorious China would return to sleep. A defeated China is a threat to Europe. ! ! 124 formidável, e, apesar de as fardas mal feitas lhe darem um ar xexé de Entrudo, ficou sendo a grande potência do Extremo Oriente (18). 62 The main purpose in explaining Japan’s rise to power is to explain the potential threat of China, if it were to take the same road as Japan, or worse, if it were to be defeated. Due to its population alone and the potential of the Chinese “race” to copy and improve European military technology, then the potential threat would mean that China would rise as the strongest military power in the world: “Ora quando a China se tornar uma nação militar, extremamente poderosa, a Europa ficará numa situação singularmente perigosa” (19). However, this statement is not meant to cause panic, which the next sentence immediately reassures: Não que devamos recear, como tanto receiam e já profetizam, uma nova invasão de bárbaros da Ásia. Mesmo quando na China surgisse um Átila, capaz de reunir pela energia do seu génio todos o povos do Oriente, para os lançar sobre o Ocidente – a nossa civilização nunca poderia ser submergida, nem mesmo parcialmente desmantelada (19). 63 Rather than a military danger, this chronicle explicitly states that the risk is in the humble, peaceful, mass invasion of Chinese laborers, rhetorically likened to an ant’s nest. According to Eça, most Chinese laborers are educated and intelligent, and have the only goal of earning money !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 62 And, like the right hand does not lack intelligence to apply our principles and use our materials, and since their officers are educated in schools, armories, European operations camps, picturesque Japan soon became formidable Japan, and despite the poorly made uniforms that gave them the look of a caricature of a noble, became a great power in the Far East. 63 Not that we should fear, as much as has been feared and already prophesized, a new invasion of barbarians from Asia. Even when an Attila arises in China, able to gather from the energy of his genius all of the peoples of the Orient, to launch them over the Occident, our civilization will never be submerged, not even partially dismantled. ! ! 125 to then returning to China. Eça then goes on to give the example of California, in which the willingness of Chinese laborers to work in terrible conditions for extremely low wages directly contradicted the idea of just and noble labor of the “white race”: Nas minas, nas estradas, nas fábricas, nas indústrias, por toda a parte onde se necessitavam braços os amarelos eram preferidos aos brancos. E como esta imigração se desenrolava sempre cada dia mais densa, e o seu crescente conhecimento do país lhe aumentava os meios de expansibilidade, a concorrência chinesa em breve pesou vitoriosamente no mercado, e a taxa do salário baixou de um modo esfaimante para o trabalhador de raça branca. A consequência foi que a raça branca (que tem inventado as teorias mais nobres sobre a liberdade do trabalho) passou a impedir violentamente os chineses de trabalharem (19). 64 The prohibition of Chinese laborers eventually led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in which all Chinese male laborers were denied entry into the United States. How such “scandalous violation” could happen explains Eça is due to the fact that China was too weak to defend its nationals: Mas como se pôde estabelecer uma tal lei, tão escandalosamente violadora de todos os direitos divinos e humanos? Porque a China era fraca, e não tinha esquadras nem exércitos para fazer respeitar nos seus nacionais o direito que a todo o habitante da Terra assiste de percorrer a Terra, e de escolher nela um canto onde se instale, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 64 In mines, roads, factories, industries, everywhere that arms were needed, yellows were preferred over whites. And as this immigration is always unfurling more densely each day, and their growing knowledge of the country increase the means of expansion, Chinese competition soon weighed victoriously on the market, and the earning rate dropped in a famishing manner for the worker of the white race. A consequence resulted in which the white race (that invented the most noble theories about freedom from work) began to violently impede the Chinese from working. ! ! 126 pacificamente trabalhe e se nutra (21). 65 Finally, in the last chronicle that forms the collection of “Chinezes e Japonezes,” Eça directly addresses his Brazilian readers, who are still interested in the prospects of Chinese laborers. As a final and extremely ironic description, the author states that Brazil will become China in a very short time. The nativists will turn over in their graves, and the Gazeta de Notícia will have to be published in Chinese. In addition, Chinese material culture will overtake Brazilian society, inevitably transforming it into a vast Chinatown with markers of all the negative stereotypes of Chinese society. In the shadows of Brazilian society, Chinese immigrants will bring organized crime and drug addictions. Chinese dress and customs will overtake Brazilian culture and Chinese- run businesses will crush all competition to eventually refashion Brazil in the likeness of China: Mas basta de Chineses! Vós, amigos, aí no Brasil, parece que os desejais, para vos plantar e vos colher o café. Sereis inundados, submergidos. Virão cem, virão logo cem mil. Daqui a dez anos em São Paulo e no Rio tereis vastos bairros chineses, com tabuletas sarapintadas de vermelho e negro, fios de lanternas de papel, covis empestados de ópio, toda a sorte de associações secretas, uma força imensa crescendo na sombra, e cabaias e rabichos, sem cessar fervilhando. Mas tereis cozinheiros chineses, engomadores chineses – e sabeis enfim o que é uma sopa superlativamente sublime e um peitilho lustroso e digno dos deuses. Todas as outras colónias, portuguesa, italiana, alemã, serão insensível e subtilmente empurradas para as suas pátrias de origem – e o Brasil todo, em vinte anos, será uma China !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 65 But how could such a law be established that so scandalously violates all divine and human rights? Beacause China was weak, and had no fleets or armies to enforce the rights of their nationals that all have to traverse the Earth, and to find a corner in which to settle down, work peacefully and be nourished. ! ! 127 (22). 66 This warning recalls the image published in 1889 in Revista Ilustrada in which Brazil, and all people in Brazil, will become an enslaved China, a Brazil-chim (see figure 4). Poet, abolitionist and revolutionary José Martí dedicated his life to the struggle for Cuban independence. A number of Martí’s essays and short stories also depict volatile mandarins and coolies through the theme of death, a recurring theme that symbolically stops Chinese immigration. As the title suggests, Martí’s “El presidio político en Cuba” (1871), written during exile in Spain relates the brutality he experienced as a political prisoner in Cuba. In the tract, there is a passing mention of a dying Chinaman. The injustices of the prison go uncounted. Lino Figueredo is a twelve-year old boy, sentenced to ten years in prison with no explanation for this punishment. When it is discovered that Lino has smallpox, he is taken to hospital, but not before his sickly body demanded it while it attempted to stay alive through brutal beatings and severe work conditions. At the hospital, Martí makes a parallel between the desperate state of Lino’s sickly condition to that of a Chinaman he sees there. Similar to Lino, the Chinese man was not taken to the hospital until it was discovered that his blood was contaminated with cholera, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 66 But enough with the Chinese! You, friends, here in Brazil, it seems that you wish for them to plant and harvest coffee. You shall be flooded, submerged. One hundred will come, then a hundred thousand. In ten years, São Paulo and Rio will have large Chinatowns, with signboards mottled in red and black, strings of paper lanterns, infestation of opium dens, all sorts of secret associations, an immense force growing in the shadows, and Chinese dress and queues, incessantly seething. But you will have Chinese cooks, Chinese launderies –and finally you will know what is a superlatively sublime soup and a lustrous and dignified cravat [or bib] of the gods. All the other colonies, Portuguese, Italian, German, will be subtly and insensitively pushed back to their land of origin –and all of Brazil, in twenty years, will be Chinese. ! ! 128 described as a drop of black blood: Lo recuerdo, y lo recuerdo con horror. Cuando el cólera recogía su haz de víctimas allí, no se envió el cadáver de un desventurado chino al hospital hasta que un paisano suyo no le picó una vena y brotó una gota, una gota de sangre negra, coagulada. Entonces, sólo entonces se declaró que el triste estaba enfermo. Entonces; y minutos después el triste moría. 67 (“Damisela” Chap VII) As laborers intended to substitute African slaves, one cannot help but read the racial tone that associates the body of the Chinese laborers as emitting the succession of black racial labor. Then, in a melancholy tone, Martí laments, “Bello, bello es el sueño de la Integridad Nacional? No es verdad que es muy bello, señores diputados?” (“Damisela” Chap VII). 68 Directed to a “cementerio de sombras vivas” (cemetary of living ghosts), this requiem for national integrity follows the two stories that give acknowledgement to sightless and voiceless victims like Lino and the nameless Chinaman. The recurring theme of the Chinese immigrant’s death is also a critique about the economic and political conditions that will lead to their final end. Martí’s “Un funeral chino” published in La Nación (Buenos Aires) on December 10, 1888 –incidentally written seven months after the Lei Áurea passed in Brazil– is a more blatant thematic treatment of the death of the Chinese immigrant. The narrator describes a funeral procession and ritual occurring at the end of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 67 “I remember it with horror. When cholera was gathering up its sheaf of victims, the body of a Chinaman was not sent to the hospital until one of his countrymen cute into the ill-fated man’s vein and a drop welled up, a drop of black, coagulated blood. Then, only then, was it established that the sufferer was sick. Only then. And minutes later that sufferer died.” (Translation Echevarría 16). 68 “Beautiful, beautiful is the dream of National Integrity. Is it not truly beautiful, O you representatives of the nation?...(Trans. Echevarría 17). ! ! 129 nineteenth century in New York City on Mott Street, or specificially, “Mott es en Nueva York la calle de ellos, donde tienen sus bancos, su bolsa, sus sastres y peluquerías, sus fondas y sus vicios” (“Un funeral chino”). 69 The burial is in honor of Li-In-Du, a general in the Chinese military who drove France out of Tonkin. However, the narrator remarks, even a decorated man as Li-In-Du, had to flee China. Like Martí, he was also a political exile in New York. This essay is critical towards the political forces that drove men like Li-In-Du into exile due to the desire to maintain class hierarchy in China: “Li-In-Du fue persona valiente: derrotó a Francia en Tonquín: usó de su prestigio para favorecer a los amigos de la libertad: ni el prestigio le valió contra la persecución de los autoritarios, que no quieren sacar a China de su orden de clases” (“Un funeral chino”). 70 Through the funeral procession, the narrator paints a picture of Chinatown. Moreover, he describes the people who occupy the streets as different kinds of “Chinaman” according to their professions as the Chinaman friar, the Chinaman shopkeeper, the Chinaman of the laundries. Then, utilizing an explicitly racial coding, Martí describes “a yellow man” as prey in a miserable state near death: “El hombre amarillo lleva el ojo de la fiera cazada: va mirando a su alrededor, como para precaverse de una ofensa: va blasfemando a media voz, lleno el ojo de fuego: va con la cabeza baja, como para que le perdonen la culpa de vivir” (“Un funeral chino”). 71 Words !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 69 In New York Mott Street is theirs; that is the street where they have their banks, their stock market, their tailors and barbershops, their taverns and their vices” (Trans Echevarría 237). 70 Li-In-Du was a man of valor: he drove France out of Tonkin and used his prestige to help the friends of liberty, but not even that prestige was of use against the harassment of the authorities who do not want China to be rid of its class hierarchy (Trans Echevarría 237). 71 The yellow man lifts up his eyes, the eyes of a hunted animal; he looks about as he walks along, as if to guard against an offence; he swears under his breath as he walks, his eyes ablaze, or he walks with his head low, as if to be pardon for the sin of being alive (Trans Echevarría 238). ! ! 130 such as “yellow man” and the list of different kinds of “Chinaman” in relation to their forms of labor supports the racial labor discourse running along the movement of the funeral procession where it finally ends at the grave of Li-In-Du, joining all of Mott Street, including Italian and Irish immigrants, as well as curious spectators from all parts of the world. The funeral of Li-In-Du is not only about the end of Chinese immigration, but rather, the essay places all of society on the march to his grave. There is no separation between Marti’s self and the Chinese other. Instead, the essay attests to political struggles that produce certain overlaps through the flows of migrations that intersect in places as Mott Street. As an ode to political revolutionaries like Li-In-Du who fought for freedom in China, this eulogy mirrors Martí’s own fight for Cuban independence that has placed him in similar exile. In addition to poetry, chronicles, essays and political orations, José Martí’s literary production include a collection of children’s literature titled La Edad de Oro aimed at constructing better citizens in the Americas. In the preface to La Edad de Oro, Martí writes a three-page dedication titled “A los niños que lean la Edad de Oro” (“To the Children who Read the Age of Gold”). Martí explicitly states that these stories are meant to educate the gentlemen and mothers of tomorrow: Este periódico se publica para conversar una vez al mes, como buenos amigos, con los caballeros de mañana y con las madres de mañana; para contarles a las niñas cuentos lindos con que entretener a sus visitas y jugar con sus muñecas; y para decirles a los niños lo que deben saber de veras hombres (La Edad de Oro 9-10). 72 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 72 This journal is published in order to have monthly conversations, like good friends, with the gentlemen of tomorrow and the mothers of tomorrow; to tell lovely stories to girls with which to entertain their visitors and while they play with their dolls; and to tell the boys what real men should know. ! ! 131 One of the stories in the collection is titled “Los dos ruiseñores.” The recurring theme of death and containment is also present in this tale. The story begins by presenting China as having uncontrollable population growth, a threat that Eça and Machado mention as well: “En China vive la gente en millones, como si fuera una família que no acabase de crecer, y no se gobiernan por sí, como hacen los pueblos de hombres… (176). From the beginning, this children’s story creates two planes of representation in the story, the first refers to the country of China with its political and economic problems, and the second is a self-consciously separate and fictional space. It distinguishes the geopolitical space of China with an actual repressive emperor to a fictional China with a good emperor who is generous and enlightened. The following line states that the Chinese are happy with their emperor, but it then depicts the actual situation that depicts the foreign (Manchurian) conquest of China. The tale is self-consciously aimed at a young audience, and thereby didactically explains historical events in a biased manner in which the actual emperor is depicted as unjust. He eats all of the people’s food and sentences them to death for wanting to think and eat, treating them like subordinates: “¡Lo triste es que el emperador venga de afuera, dicen los chinos, y nos coma nuestra comida, y nos mande matar porque queremos pensar y comer, y nos trate como a sus perros y como a sus lacayos!” (177-178). However, the tale that unfolds is actually about the good emperor and two nightgales– one an actual bird and the other a mechanical bird made of sapphires, diamonds and rubies. The nightingale’s singing enchants the emperor who orders his mandarins to capture the bird so that he may listen to the singing at will. Once captured, the nightingale is placed in a royal cage and made to wear a golden chain around its neck, which he graciously refuses to do by stating that he does not need such a prize because he has already received the greatest gift of all –the tears of the ! ! 132 emperor. One day, the emperor receives a package with the inscription “The Nightingale.” Opening it, he finds a bird made of exquisitely precious jewels and sings as well as the living bird. The emperor favors the mechanical artifact because it does not runaway and sings on command, as opposed to the living bird that had used the opportunity to escape and is thereby not a reliable form of entertainment. The entire court listens to the music of the mechanical bird for one full year until a spring in one of its parts breaks, and the music stops. For five years the court is without the song of the nightingale, and during that time the emperor falls ill. At a moment when death is about to take him, the living nightingale returns to bring him back to life. The emperor thanks the bird, repeating the word “deterritorialize” two times. This phrase makes an analogy between the emperor who has displaced the nightingale from his kingdom and the nightingale that has displaced death from the emperor’s heart. The theme of death is not located in the body of the emperor, but in the symbolic desire of the emperor. The symbolic liberation of the emperor’s heart from the thematic option of death transforms demise into life and peace: “¡Gracias, gracias, pájaro celeste! –decía el emperador–. Yo te desterré de mi reino, y tú destierras a la muerte de mi corazón” (184). 73 In the next line, the mandarins enter the emperor’s chambers to find him dead, wearing his imperial tunic, with the hand of his sword atop his heart. The mysterious death of the emperor has been made analogous to a new era of peace and vitality. This ending harkens to the death of the mandarin in Eça de Querioz’s homonymously titled novella in which the main character Teodoro is told that if he is to ring a certain bell, he will kill the mandarin but gain all of his fortune. In a dream-like state, Teodoro fulfills the request and becomes rich beyond his dreams. However, the dead mandarin continuously appears before him, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 73 Thank you, thank you, celestial bird! –said the Emperor– I displaced you from my kingdom, and you displaced death from my heart. ! ! 133 haunting his decision and preventing him from living a peaceful life free from the guilt that his small action led to the murder of a man. The sense of guilt leads him on a journey to China where he attempts to find the mandarin’s family to wrong his right by giving them the fortune acquired. While in China, Teodoro is confronted with scenes of abject poverty: O velho estalajadeiro de óculos, uma avó andrajosa que eu vira no pátio deitando ao ar um papagaio de papel, os arrieiros mongóis, as crianças piolhosas, esses tinham desaparecido; só ficara um velho, bêbedo de ópio, caído a um canto como um fardo. Fora ouvia-se já a multidão vociferar (54). 74 Five references are made to coolies during the novella, mainly in passing to describe their kind of labor or to depict their condition of living. There is no character development, but only descriptions in which they are presented as part of the landscape: Depois é alguma aristocrática cadeirinha de mandarim, que coolies vestidos de azul, de rabicho solto, vão levando a um trote arquejante para os yamen do Estado” (36). In the next sentence, they are depicted as part of a list of possessions and entourage: “Ao outro dia lá vou para Tien-Hó – com o respeitoso intérprete Sá- Tó, uma longa fila de carretas, dois cossacos, toda uma populaça de coolies” (47). The concentrated focus on the mandarin that gives title to the novella, and the little attention paid to the coolie is an interesting contrast given Eça’s time in Cuba in which he wrote adamantly against coolie labor. In the novella, the issue is no longer about coolie labor, but about the murder of mandarin in order to gain his fortune. Teodoro’s actions allow the novella to explore the question: For what will the fortune be worth when it is built on the death and erasure of an entire !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 74 “The old bespectacled innkeeper, the ragged old woman I had seen earlier in the courtyard flying a paper kite, the Mongol muleteers and the lice-ridden children had disappeared. Only one old man remained, too befuddled by opium to move. He sat crumpled in a corner like a bundle of rags. Outside I could hear the howling o fthe mob” (Translation Costa 876). ! ! 134 population? In of the final words of the novella, Teodoro addresses his reader, and states that one can only trust in the money that we earn daily with our own hands, never kill the Mandarin: “Só sabe bem o pão que dia a dia ganham as nossas mãos: nunca mates o mandarim! (65). 75 The unjust death of the mandarin symbolically advocates against unscrupulous earnings. The recurring theme of death that runs through the works of Eça de Queiroz, Machado de Assis and José Martí rhetorically confines the Chinese in China. At the same time, keeping Chinese immigration away was believed to stave off corrupt forms of wealth built on deceitful terms that included the misleading contracts that Chinese laborers were enticed into signing. The discourse of racial labor also critiques the economic and political conditions that produce inhumane labor conditions that Chinese immigrants from a politically weak China, and thus, without political protection would face. As a figurative imagining with unstable legal and economic fixtures, the undocumented status of Chinese immigrants and the threat of uncontrollable virility made them unfit immigrants for industrializing nations with racial whitening teleologies in the various projects of mestiçagem or mestizaje that solidified in the twentieth century. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 75 “The only bread that tastes good is the bread we earn day by day with our own hands; never kill the Mandarin!” (Translation Costa 1123). ! ! 135 Chapter Four Exclusionary Practices of Citizenship in the Writings of Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz The relationship between miscegenation and racial labor became inseparable during Iberian colonialism through the creation of paternalist plantation societies in Brazil and Cuba. Racial labor sustained both the economic and ideological practices of such agriculturally based exploitative systems. The first three chapters discussed how debates over nation could not be viewed separately from the succession of labor racial from African slave labor to Chinese immigrant labor that encoded new bodies with the signifiers of race, ethnicity, gender and labor. This chapter traces these discussions into the twentieth century in Gilberto Freyre’s theory of Luso-Hispano Tropicalismo and Fernando Ortiz’s discussion of transculturation. Freyre’s idealist theory of Luso- Hispano Tropicalism depicts Portuguese colonialism as a benevolent kind of imperialism. Although, his theory has been heavily refuted, during the twentieth century, it received much attention and wide consensus. Returning to his problematic theory provides insight into larger concerns of the twentieth century that sustained the desire to project the fantasy of a racial democracy. Freyre’s much criticized theory is based on the harmonious reimagining of the racial mixture of three races, African, indigenous and European. Indeed, all of the categories of race that come from this mixing replicate the racial hierarchies established under the paternalistic structure of Portuguese colonialism, in which European plantation masters could have sexual relations with any of his female possessions on the plantation. During the twentieth-century, I argue, this ideology takes new shape in the theory of Luso-Hispano Tropicalism, which attempts to create an inclusionary notion of cultural and social integration, but while always maintaining Portuguese supremacy above the proliferation of racially and culturally mixed categories. Further, my analysis ! ! 136 turns to a colllection of poems on Africa and Asia written by Gilberto Freyre that have the undertone of his theory of Luso-Hispano Tropicalism. Finally, I bring Freyre’s discussion of tropicologia into conversation with Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturaltion. I argue that analyzing how Freyre and Ortiz justify new forms of racial and cultural inclusion provides insight into the reconfiguration of nation into transnational paradigms that nevertheless reproduce the exclusionary practices of nationalist ideology. In Lisa Lowe’s “Intimacies of Four Continents,” she observes that the discourse of the Chinese coolie as depicted in British colonial archives created a critical political discourse that made Asian indentured servitude contiguous with African abolition and liberal freedom. Further, Lowe argues that the terms of liberal freedom that govern the management of the global order of labor is inscribed in terms of personal property, which includes the possession of person and self- interiority. Lowe understands the expression of liberal freedom in the performance of three overlapping concepts of “intimacies.” She explains the first layer as the geopolitical and spatial connections among four continents – Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas – linked through the political economic circulation of the trade of people, ideas and objects. The second meaning of intimacy describes the biopolitical discourse of deploying the figure of the Chinese immigrant to stabilize the transition to free labor in which anxiety of racial mixing with African slaves would be ameliorated by allowing the Asian immigrant to act as a bridge for modernizing labor and society. The third definition of intimacy refers to the unpredictable kinds of contact among colonized peoples. Lowe reads colonial archives as a site of knowledge production in which systems of knowledge are formed as much as histories are made to disappear. Acknowledging loss and lack of evidence as punctures left by political violence is a methodological practice. Lowe states: ! ! 137 In this sense modern humanism is a formalism that translates the world through an economy of affirmation and forgetting within a regime of desiring freedom… What we know as ‘race’ and ‘gender’ are traces of this modern humanist forgetting (206). I find the concept of the intimacies of four continents useful, and I want to build on Lowe’s work through a consideration of the figure of the coolie from the perspective Brazil and Cuba. When located within the workers of writers and artists in Brazil and Cuba, as opposed to colonial archives, the figure of the coolie takes on a different configuration. 76 In the literary and visual cultural production in Spanish and Portuguese colonies at the end of the nineteenth century, the figure of the coolie is coterminous with the mandarin, and is used to convey the desire to expulse new forms of imperialism and slavery, both of which stand directly in the way of independence and the formation of the modern republic. The expulsion and erasure of Asia in the debates over labor immigration that enter into the foundational texts on Brazilian and Cuban nationalism by Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz, respectively, present the Asian immigrant laborer as an impediment to civilization. Figurations of the Chinese coolie enter into the works of Freyre and Ortiz as part of a larger debate over nationalism whereby exclusion or inclusion of the figure represents an anti-colonial stance. Dually, the figure of the Chinese immigrant symbolizes an imperial threat and an inferior race; they symbolize the fear of Asian imperialism and of the biological bodies of Asians as direct obstacles to the project of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 76 Another difference is due to the fact that many Chinese laborers were departing from Macau, a Portuguese possession. As discussed in the previous chapter, the emigrants signed contracts that placed them under Portuguese protection with the potential for Portuguese nationality at the termination point of their contracts. Diplomats like Eça de Queiroz’s mission in Cuba was primarily concerned with protecting Chinese laborers from indentured servitude out of Portuguese interests. Furthermore, the relationship between Macau and Portugal is more complex than that of other empires and colonies, since Macau was initially leased to the Portuguese as a trading post in 1557. ! ! 138 miscegenation, with its ultimate objective being the achievement of European whiteness and civilization. Scholars have referred to the treatment of Asia in the writings of Freyre and Ortíz as a Latin American form of Orientalism. 77 The risk of analyzing all representations of non-European spaces under the rubric of Orientalism unavoidably creates an all encompassing and overstated vision of Orientalism, which Edward Said warns about. Such studies lose the specificity of the materiality of the text and the spatio-temporal coordinates that provide the contextual framework to understanding relationships of power in different political spaces. Rather than examining depictions of all non-European spaces including Asia, Africa and the Americas through the rubric of Orientalism, which would ignore the power structures between Asian and European imperialism and struggle for hegemony, I suggest an analysis that is oriented around the temporal-spatiality of the object of representation. As such, the unstable meanings behind the figures of the coolie and the mandarin might be better understood as conveying moments in which Otherness is constituted and reconstituted to depict conflicting economic, political and social transition in the Americas. In tracing the shift from African slave labor to Asian indentured servitude, I suggest that signifiers of ethnicity, race and gender are adapted in relation to new economic systems of labor and liberal structures. Freyre’s highly criticized Casa grande e senzala (1933) (The Masters and the Slaves) presents the beginning of his controversial theory of tropicologia that he would fully develop !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 77 On Ortiz, see Frank F. !Scherer. “Sanfancón: Orientalism, Self-Orientalization, and ‘Chinese Religion’ in Cuba” in: P. Taylor (ed.), Nation Dance: Religion, Identity and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. On Freyre see Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond “Aristocratas da Senzala: Gilberto Freyre na interseção do Orientalimso e dos estudos sobre a escravidão” Afro-Asia, 37 (2008), 75-95. ! ! 139 throughout the course of his career (1930s-1980s). Freyre’s theory divulges the celebratory vision of Portuguese colonialism as benevolent and harmonious. Freyre’s study claims Portuguese imperialism, as it happened, promoted harmonious miscegenation between African, Indigenous and European races. Further, regardless of diversity, Portuguese colonies around the globe share a common language, religion and familial structure. This universalizing rhetoric enables Freyre’s tropicology to create the appearance of plurality, but one that is always in a subordinated position of integration under Portuguese terms. Casa grande e senzala, specifically, as its title implies, is largely a sociological examination of the formative relationship between the physical place of the plantation and discursive spaces of power it engendered. Freyre argues that the layout of plantation houses or “casa grande” in relative proximity to adjacent slave quarters or “senzala” may be seen as a microcosm of economic and patriarchal structures in Brazilian colonial society. Freyre uses the domestic intimacies established in plantation society to claim that the Portuguese were not the same as warmongering Spaniards, nor did they possess Puritanical harshness of the English. The introductory paragraphs to the chapter titled “O colonizador português: antecedentes e predisposições” (The Portuguese Colonizer: Antecedents and Predispositions) immediately creates a distinction between Portuguese colonizers, in contrast to their Spanish and English counterparts. 78 On the one hand, the Portuguese –slave drivers as they were –had greater “social plasticity” in their ability to cross racially with “exotic women.” On the other hand, Portuguese colonialism did not have the brutality of aspects of the so-called Black Legend of Spanish colonialism. Instead, the Lusiads left a legacy rooted in “ineptitude, stupidity, and salaciousness” (185-6). Although, not !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 78 In later writings, Freyre would advocate for a positive view of Spanish colonialism as Hispano-Tropicalism. ! ! 140 praiseworthy traits, this paints the image that Portuguese colonialism was non-threatening and not as terrible as what occurred with other imperial powers. Freyre’s schizoid and contradictory analysis of Portuguese colonialism stems from a romanticized attempt to grapple with slave-trade atrocities and cultural genocide through a new frame: a theory of miscegenation based on the fantasy of harmonic racial assimilation that he terms as Luso and Hispano Tropicalism or tropicologia. Moreover, Freyre conceptualizes miscegenation in terms of geographical conditions; the tropical landscape of Brazil, Africa and Asia is better adept than Europe to allow the materiality of Portuguese colonialism to flourish. The fantasy of racial and cultural assimilation provides the basis of Freyre’s explanation of the social history of the Brazilian family. The global Lusitanian empire mixed in the tropics with lavish and ancient Asian and African cultural material influences: Resta-nos salientar o fato, de grande significação na história social da família brasileira, de ter sido o Brasil descoberto e colonizado –do fim do século XVI em diante o Brasil autocolonizou-se, defendendo-se por si das agressões estrangeiras – na época em que os portugueses, senhores de numerosas terras na Ásia e na África, se haviam apoderado de uma rica variedade de valores tropicais. Alguns inadaptáveis à Europa. Mas todos produtos de finas, opulentas e velhas civilizações asiáticas e africanas. Desses produtos, o Brasil foi talvez a parte do império lusitano que, graças às suas condições sociais e de clima, mais largamente se aproveitou: o chapéu-de-sol, o palanquim, o leque, a engala, a colcha de seda, a telha à moda sino-japonesa, o telhado das casa caído para os lados e recurvado nas pontas em cornos de lua, a porcelana da China e a louça da Índia. Plantas, especiarias, animais, ! ! 141 quitutes. O coqueiro a jaqueira, a mangueira, a canela, a fruta-pão, o cuscuz. Móveis da Índia e da China. 79 Freyre elaborates on the idea that material objects from Asia represented Portuguese imperialism in Sobrados e mucambos (1964) (The Mansions and the Shanties), the sequel to Casa Grande e Senzala, in which Freyre analyzes the urbanization of Brazil in the nineteenth century, during which plantation manors turned into city mansions, and slave quarters into shanties or favelas. The chapter titled “Oriente e occidente” (Orient and Occident) contends that when the Portuguese Court moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1809, the leaders of Brazil began to bring European flora to the country in contrast to previous policy of importing flora and fauna from Portuguese territories in Africa and Asia. Freyre observes that the nineteenth century would be marked by confrontations between the Orient and Occident, and views Brazil as the battlefield where East and West would meet. Freyre refers to the gradual removal of “Oriental” features from Brazilian architecture and landscape as a process of unshadowing: Pois não se vence o trópico sem de algum modo ensombrá-lo à moda dos árabes ou dos orientais. Sem rua estreitas. Sem xales, panos da Costa, guarda-sóis !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 79 There remains for me to stress the fact, of great significance in the social history of the Brazilian family, that Brazil was discovered and colonized –from the end of the sixteenth century on, autocolonized, being its own defender against foreign aggression –in an era in which the Portuguese, lords of numerous lands in Asia and in Africa, had come into possession of a rich variety of tropical products, some of them not adaptable to Europe, but all of them the product of fine, opulent, and ancient Asiatic and African civilizations. And of all the parts of the Lusitanian empire, it was perhaps Brazil that made the most extensive and advantageous use of these cultural contributions: the parasol or sunshade, the palanquin, the fan; the Bengal stick or cane; the silk counterpane; the Sino-Japanese roof, projecting over the sides of the house and curved at the corners like the horns of the moon; Chinese porcelain; plants; spices; animals; sweetmeats; the coco tree; the jaqueira; the mango; cinnamon; the breadfruit tree; couscous; Indian and Chinese furniture” (Translation Samuel Putnam 273). ! ! 142 orientalmente vastos para as caminhadas sob o sol dos dias mais quentes. Sem sombras de grandes árvores asiáticas e africanas, como a mangueira, a jaqueira, a gameleira, em volta das casas, nas praças e à beira das estradas…Mas não era só ecologicamente que o Brasil, oficialmente colonizado por europeus, se aproximara de tal modo do Oriente e, através de experiências e instrumentos de cultura do Oriente, se adaptara de tal modo ao trópico, a ponto de se haver tornado, sob vários aspectos de sua organização e de sua paisagem, área indecisa entre o Oriente e o Ocidente. Área que às vezes se diria destacada antes do Oriente que do Ocidente. Espécie de Goa portuguesa em ponto grande onde o Oriente se encontrasse com o Ocidente (A china tropical 36). 80 Cultural material objects as well as architectural and engineering techniques that moved along European oceanic trade circuits became emblems of race whereby the removal of such racial objects also signified the triumph of Western civilization. Moreover, the slave trade and trafficking of Asian laborers following abolition occurred alongside the circulation of racial material objects. Exclusion of Asian and African blood from Brazilian society would enable it to culturally and ethnically approximate Europe. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 80 For the tropics cannot be vanquished without shading them in some way or other, as the Arabs or Orientals do. Nor without narrow streets, shawls, broad parasols to protect one from the sun’s rays. Nor the shade of spreading Asiatic and African trees, such as the mango, the breadfruit, the gameleira, around the houses, the squares, and along the road…It was not only ecologically that Brazil, officially colonized by Europeans, was so closely linked to the Orient. Through the experience and cultural instruments acquired from the East, it adapted itself to the tropics to the point of becoming, in various aspects of its organization and landscape, an area poised between East and West. A kind of vast Portuguese Goa (Translation Samuel Putnam 281). ! ! 143 According to Freyre, the shift to British hegemonic rule throughout the nineteenth century engendered an Aryanist notion of racial supremacy that would demand the cultural and ethnic exclusion of African and Asian people in order for Brazil to become European. However, Freyre’s theory of tropicologia is unable to escape his own critique of European racial hegemony: As sobrevivências da Ásia e da África entre nós, pensavam os antimelanistas, só faziam humilhar-nos aos olhos dos europeus. Delas deveríamos nos desembaraçar completamente em vez de reanimá-las ou refrescá-las com a introdução, no país, de novos asiatismos e africanismos, ao lado de novos africanos e de asiáticos em grande número, que acentuassem vergonhas manchas pretas, pardas e amarelas na face da população e conservassem na cultura e na paisagem brasileiras vermelhos escandalosos e amarelos gritantes que já não correspondiam aos gostos europeus de cor, de decoração e de composição aqui desenvolvidos. Ao tráfico de escravos africanos não queriam os antimelanistas que se sucedesse o de asiáticos aparentemente livres mas tão servis como os africanos, e, como eles –ou pior que eles –, elemento de perturbação do desenvolvimento do Brasil em população branca e em cultura européia (A china tropical 40). 81 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 81 The ‘Aryanists’ felt that the presence of Asia and African lowered us [Brazilians] in European eyes. We should completely ride ourselves of this handicap instead of encouraging or augmenting it by the introduction of new Africans and Asiatics, who would accentuate the black, mulatto, yellow hue of our people and preserve in our culture and landscape the loud reds and yellows which no longer met with the approval of European taste. The ‘Aryanists’ did not want the traffic in African slaves to be followed by that in ostensibly free Asiatics, through as enslaved as the Africans, and like them –or even more –an alien element in the development of a white population of European culture in Brazil (Translation Samuel Putnam 282). ! ! 144 Furthermore, Freyre attempts to defend Chinese immigration by describing the cleanliness of Chinese laborers. In underscoring hygiene, Freyre addresses the fear of immigration as insanitary contamination. Freyre provides the example of the “colonization experiment” in Mucurí during the mid-nineteenth century in which there were Chinese and German immigrants. The Chinese immigrants bathed regularly and thus avoided chigoes (tropical or sub-tropical species of fleas), whereas German immigrants or the “blond colonists” attracted the fleas due to lack of bodily cleanliness. Freyre, quoting Theophile B. Ottoni’s description of A Colonização do Mucurí (1859) states: “Enquanto isso acontecia com os colonos alemães, os chins, ‘como não têm horror à água, nunca sofreram de bichos no Mucuri’” (A China Tropical 42). 82 For Freyre, the desire to rid Brazilian society of culturally and ethnically inferior people and materiality entered into debates of modernizing Brazil in which the bodies of Chinese immigrant laborers formed an integral part of new definitions of citizenship. Modernity and a free state depended on abolishing African slavery and Chinese contract labor, but also excluding bodies and materiality marked by signifiers of race, culture and ethnicity. Exclusion depended on demarcating the boundaries of bodies and material culture through the practice of transforming bodies and materiality into insignia for race and empire. Scattered throughout the corpus of Gilberto Freyre’s writings on Brazilian society, are commentaries about the impact of Chinese labor immigration and culture on Brazilian society. 83 During the era of Portuguese expansion to places that included China, India, East Timor and throughout the African continent, the cultural characteristics of these places were transplanted to !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 82 While this was happening with the German settlers, the Chinese, ‘as they have no aversion to water, were never troubled by chigoes in Mucurí” (Translation Samuel Putnam 283). 83 The Gilberto Freyre anthology titled A China tropical (2003), edited by Edson Nery da Fonseca, is a chronological compilation of all of Freyre’s references to the Orient throughout his works. ! ! 145 the Brazilian tropics where they found new expression. Tropicology clearly creates a hierarchy between European culture in opposition to the cultures of the “tropics” through establishing the premise that Portuguese and Spaniards had direct experiences in the tropics that enabled them to integrate European culture with the tropical cultures of Africa, Asia and the Americas: Assim se teria iniciado desde o século XV um novo tipo de civilização, para o qual se sugere a caracterização de civilização lusotropical, dado a seu character singularmente simbiótico de união de europeu com tropic –união que em nenhum outro europeu chegou a ser assim intense e simbiótica em suas constâncias em diferentes áreas tropicais, embora desse character simbiótica se tenha aproximado o tipo de relações desenvolvido por espanhóis nas Filipinas e em certas regiões da América tropical. Ao lado desse novo tipo de civilização, vir-se-ia desenvolvendo um novo tipo do conhecimento ou saber dos trópicos pelo Europeu, para o qual se sugere a caracterização de lusotropicologia, dentro de uma sistemática mais vasta de conhecimentos do tropic pelo Europeu –uma Tropicologia—e de outra, intermediária: uma hispanotropicologia ou uma hispanologia. Dizemos <<pelo Europe>>, não por nos inclinarmos a qualquer critério etnocêntrico de saber que reconhecesse na gente europeia superioridade ou supremacia étnica sobre as outras; e sim pelo facto d o saber humano mais elevado e mais complex—pelo menos em sua parte científica—vir sendo h´å séculos o que se exprime em linguagem europeia” (34). 84 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 84 From the fifteenth century onward, a new type of civilization was commenced forwhich a characterization as Lusotropical is suggested, in view of its singularity symbiotic character of union of European with Tropical –union that in no other European was ever so intense and symbioltic in its constancies in different tropical areas, although such symbiotic character was approached by Spaniards in the Philippines and in certain regions of tropical America. ! ! 146 This problematic theory sets up European culture as always above the cultures of its colonies. Further, Freyre creates the metaphor between color blocking and racial difference whereby one color or race is set against other, and then they are led to blend together. This metaphor suggests that just like colors, race and ethnicities may blend. Underlying this discourse is the idea that Portuguese civilization can assimilate all races, cultures and ethnicities. This concept is created on supremacist language in which ethnic and socio-cultural assimilation is made inseparable to such words like “half-breed” and miscegenation that ultimately reinscribe European racial and cultural supremacy above any multiplicity of racial and cultural mixing: E quando nos referimos a português, é a um português social ou culturalmente português que nos referimos; e que tanto pode ser amarelo, pardo, vermelho, preto, como brano. Essa superação da condição étnica pela cultural caracteriza a civilização tropical; e se algum dia de constituir em ciência a sistemática lusotropicológica aqui sugerida, terá nesse processo de superação da condição étnica pela cultural, mercê da qual o mais preto dos pretos da África tropical se considera português sem ter de renunciar a alugns dos seus mais deletos hábitos de homem ecológicamente do tropic, um dos seus principais, objectos de estado. Não é, entretanto, certo que, na pretendida lusotropicologia, se faça do mestiço o santo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Side by side, a new type of knowledge of the tropics by the European would be developing, for which the characterization of Lusotropicology is suggested, within a more vast systematics of the knowledge of the tropics by the European –a Tropicology– and another intermediate one: an Hispanotropicaology or a Hispanology. I speak of the European, not because I am inclined towards any ethnocentric criterion of knowledge which might grant to the Euorpean people an ethnic superiority or supremacy over others; but due to the fact that the highest and most complex human knowledge –at least in its scientic part—is that which for centuries has been expressed in European language (Trans administered by Ministério do Ultramar 42). ! ! 147 dos santos, nesse processo de superação do étnico pelo cultural –superação que alcança o mestiço--, e se julgue a miscigenação inseparável, desde o início, de todo ou qualquer esforço português nos trópicos” (37). 85 Beside the reinscription of supremacist thinking within the theory of tropicologia, historians have refuted Freyre with empirical evidence. Charles Boxer has proven that racial prejudice was in fact deeply ingrained in Portuguese colonialism. His study, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire: 1415- 1825 (1969), addresses Portuguese notions towards race by examining native clergy in Portuguese India (Goa), where Jesuits such as Padre Nuno da Cunha argued that the Indian clergy were not fit for anything more than ordinary parish priests due to their racial inferiority (252). Furthermore, Boxer shows that there was a rigid color bar when he examines a case in the 1630s in which Franciscan friars in Goa tried to prevent Creoles from holding high office (253). Other scholars have also refuted tropicologia by contending that it rewrites Portuguese imperial history in order to justify Portugal’s unwillingness to cease its colonial possessions after World War II and in the aftermath of global decolonization. Freyre’s writings on China, Japan and Goa, scattered through his major works, should be understood within this ideological context. Moreover, these various !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 85 And when I refer to a Portuguese, it is a social Portuguese or a cultural Portuguese that I mean; and who can be either yellow, dark, red, black or white. This surpassing of the ethnic condition by the cultural characterizes the Lusotropical civilization; and if one day the Lusotropicological systematics here suggested is constituted into a science, one of its main objects of study will be this process of the surpassing of the ethnic condition by the cultural, by virtue of which the blackest of blacks of tropical Africa is considered Portuguese without having to renounce some of his dearest habits of an ecologically tropical man. It is not, however, certain that in the Lusotropicology aimed at, the half-breed will be considered a saint of saints, in this process of the cultural suprassing the ethnic, –a process that arrives at the half-breed –and that misecegenation should be considered inseparable, from the beginning, from any and all Portuguese effort in the tropics” (Trans administered by Ministério do Ultramar 47). ! ! 148 references offer a unique perspective of the imperial relationship between Portugal and Portuguese China (Macau) that shed understanding onto the hostile reception of Chinese immigrants from Macau in Brazil. In a little known collection of poetry written by Gilberto Freyre published in 1961, titled Talvez Poesía, sociological theory takes poetic form. In the poem “O outro Brasil que vem aí” racial categories and sexual miscegenation are explicitly transformed into the same discourse. Race is made into a series of color images. The grouping of racial categories for race “branca, morena, preta, parda, roxa” expresses the vision of racial harmony through miscegenation for the future of Brazil. The poem states: “Mão todas de trabalhadores, pretas, brancas, pardas, roxas, morenas” then lists a number of professions including artice, pastor, and societal roles such as mothers taking care of children, brothers helping brothers, and then continues: Mão brasileiros brancas, morenas, pretas, pardas, roxas tropicais sindicais fraternais. Eu ouço as vozes eu vejo as cores eu sinto os passos desse Brasil que vem aí (15). A similar discourse can be found in another poem whose title unambiguously intends a landscape of miscegeny “Paisagem Sexual” that includes the reference to the above-mentioned racial groupings, with the incorporation of the Brazilain flag colors of yellow and green: Maciços de catingueiras ! ! 149 Salpicados nos tempos de chuva de vermelhos ao sol como pingos de sangue fresco: e de amarelos vivos e de roxas untuosamente religiosos. No verão, chupados pelo sol de todo esse sangue e de [toda essa côr e quase reduzidos aos ossos dos cardos e a um mundo de forams esquisitas de ascéticos relevos ósseos, de meios-têrmos grotescos entre o vegetal e o humano, de plágios até da anatomia humana mesmo das partes vergonhosas. Não haverá paisagem como esta tão rica de sugestões nem animada de tantos verdes, tantos vermelhos, tantos roxos, tantos amarelos, e tudo isso em tufos, cachos, corolas e folhas. Como os cachos rubros em que esplende a ibirapitanga e arde o mandacaru, como as formas verdadeiramente heráldicas em que se ! ! 150 [ouriçam as quipás como as folhas em que se abrem os mamoeiras, como as flores em que se antecipam os maracujás, como as manchas violáceas das coroas-de-frade (18). Similarly, Fernando Ortiz utilizes biological and racial discourse to define his concept of transculturation wherein the blending of culture and ethnicity are used to define Cubanness. Ortiz’s discussion of transculturation in Contrapunteo cubano del azúcar y el tabaco (1947) defines it as the unique mixture of cultures that occurred in the Americas due to the multiple processes of deterritorialization that occurred around the world, colliding in what Mary Louis Pratt has called “contact zones.” For Ortiz, the dominant group adopts cultural aspects of the dominated group. Ortiz provides a series of examples of such migrations to back his theory of transculturation: Al mismo tiempo, la transculturación de una continua chorrera humana de negros africanos, de razas y culturals diversas, procedentes de todas las comarcas costeñas de Africa, desde el Senegal, por Guinea, Congo y Angola, en el Atlántico, hasta las de Mozambique en la contracosta oriental de aquel continente. Todos ellos arrancados de sus núcleos sociales originarios y con sus culturas destrozadas, oprimidas bajo el peso de las culturas aquí imperantes, como las cañas de azúcar con molidas entre las mazas de los trapiches. Y todavía má culturas inmigratorias, en oleadas esporádicas o en manaderos continuos, siempre fluyentes e influyentes y de las más varias oriundeces: indios continentals, judíos, lusitanos, anglosajones, franceses, norteamericanos y hasta amarillos mongoloides de Macao, Cantón y otras regions del que fue Imperio Celeste. Y cada inmigrante como un desarraigado de su tierra native en doble trance de desajuste y de reajuste, de desculturación o ! ! 151 exculturación y de aculturación o inculturación, y al fin de síntesis, de transculturación. 86 Ortiz’s descriptive list of the different populations that make up Cuba is meant to support the concept of transculturation, which he later defines as the transitional process of both losing (deculturation) and acquiring (acculturation) a new culture (103). Ortiz’s formulation of Cuban identity constructs national belonging as a commonality of being “torn from his native moorings” and faced with the “problem” of transculturation. For Ortíz, transculturation assumes an ontological essence to culture in which one culture is able to destroy another as in the examples he provides of African, indigenous, as well as immigrant groups consisting of “Jews, Portuguese, Anglo-Saxons, French, North Americans, even yellow Mongoloids from Macao, Canton, and other regions of the sometime Celestial Kingdom.” In naming the different “cultures” that collided in the Americas that have experienced the processes of transculturation, Ortiz adapts racial technologies of Iberian imperialism into the narrative of nationalism. Likewise, in the collection of essays titled Etnia y sociedad, Ortíz similarly depicts Chinese !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 86 At the same time there was going on the transculturation of a steady human stream of African Negroes coming from all the coastal regions of Africa along the Atlantic, from Senegal, Guinea, the Congo, and Angola and as far away as Mozambique on the opposite shore of that continent. All of them snatched from their original social groups, their own cultures destroyed and crushed under the weight of the cultures in existence here, like sugar cane ground in the rollers of the mill. And still other immigrant cultures of the most varying origins arrived, either in sporadic waves or a continuous flow, always exerting an influence and being influenced in turn: Indians from the mainland, Jews, Portuguese, Anglo-Saxons, French, North Americans, even yellow Mongoloids from Macao, Canton, and other regions of the sometime Celestial Kingdom. And each of them torn from his native moorings, faced with the problem of disadjustment and readjustment, of deculturation and acculturation-in a word, of transculturation (98). ! ! 152 immigration to Cuba as of having little impact or importance on the socio-cultural and ethnic as well as racial aspects of Cubanness 87 : Los asiáticos, entrados a millares desde mediados del siglo ultimo, han penetrado menos en la cubanidad; pero, aunque reciente, no es nula su huella. Se les imputa la passion del juego; pero ya era nota de cubanidade antes de que entraron los chinos. Acaso han propagado alugna constumbre exotica, pero escasamente. Más de una vez se advirtió como extraordinaria en esta últimas décadas cierta tendencia a la minucia y finura del detalle y a la frialdad ejecutiva en varios politicos encumbrados, profesionales de saber y poeta laureados, caracterizados además por alguna ascendencia amarilla. Pero de todos modos, el influjo asiástico no es notable fuera del caso individual (19). Ortíz removes the presence of other groups from the discourse of national identity to state that there is a black/white dichotomy. Ortiz first formulates this binary in order to then attack it as a colonial construct. However, he dismisses the possibility of other forms of assimilation in a matter that is similar to Freyre’s discourse on miscegenation that can only consider the original members of the colonial plantation. Inclusion of other racial categories occurs only under the hierarchies established during colonialism. In adapting this racial labor discourse into the rhetoric of Cubanness, Ortíz, like Freyre, inadvertently adapts the hierarchical logic solidified in plantation configurations of racial labor into the discourses of national identity. Emancipation may have signified the legal end of slavery, but Freyre and Ortiz’s writings !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 87 Ignacio López-Calvo’s comprehensive study of the rhetoric of Chinese-ness in Cuban literature points to the social constructedness of Cuban identity built against the construction of Asian otherness. He contends “the analysis of the (mis)representation and erasure of the Chinese presence in Cuban cultural production inevitably disrupts the official black-and-white discourse of the nation by underscoring alternative notions of ethnic difference” (19). ! ! 153 in the twentieth-century show us how bodies and nations were still in the process of being inscribed by the inheritances of race. Correspondingly, the figuration of Chinese laborers in the works of Freyre and Ortíz present the terms of modern citizenship through the discourse of immigration and emigration. Ethnic or cultural markers impressed onto the body, came to define alien against citizen, a rhetoric in which the alien body is clearly differentiated by identifying and containing threats of overpopulation. The debates are refined through the animalization of Chinese sexuality and the need to contain such numbers, which is defined in metaphorical linkages to primates, rodents, insects and the contamination of disease. Moreover, the figure of the Chinese laborer within the discourse of miscegenation becomes the articulation of national desire whereby the sexual virility of racialized immigrant laborers is deployed as either a threat or potential. Although seemingly a contradiction, these terms similarly deploy virility and race as technologies that sustain nationalist hierarchies even in transnational reconfigurations. How such debates unravel demonstrate that the inheritances of colonial racial ideology are still in a process of negotiation and transition in the makings of modern citizenship. ! ! 154 Conclusion Diasporic Imaginaries Circum-Oceanic circuits produced new collocations of people, objects and ideas that collided in the Americas. Once distant imaginaries coincided in newly formed diasporic communities that permanently altered visual and rhetorical regimes. 88 The transition from slave- based agricultural systems to wage labor was also a process of urbanization. Moreover as flows of diasporic immigrant communities constituted emerging cityscapes, citizens-in-transit reformulated the linguistic and cultural disjunctures formed on circum-Oceanic circuits into platforms to stage citizenships-in-transition. 89 As much as Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos express the far reaches of an imperial imaginary, the diasporic imaginaries that collided and coincided in these newly juxtaposed spaces pull apart the technologies of imperialism and racial labor discourse. 90 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 88 As Nicholas Mirzoeff has observed, visuality is a regime composed of irresolvable contradictions precisely because it is the collision of imperial culture with subcultural pratices of appropriation or resistance. Multiple and often conflicting simultaneities produce its inherent inconsistency (70). 89 Elizabeth Grosz’s essay, “Bodies-Cities” discusses the “constitutive and mutually defining relation between bodies and cities” (242). She describes “corporeality in its sexual specificity,” as the “material condition of subjectivity.” The materiality of the body becomes the “locus and site of inscription for specific modes of subjectivity” (241). The experience between the body and the environment –the cityscape in this case– is a dynamic “interface” among “assemblages or collections of parts” (Grosz 248). For Grosz, the city allows for many kinds of flows (interpersonal, informational, economic, and so forth) to regulate and administer subjectivities, and in turn, “the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body” (242). 90 Jennifer González’s study of racial discourse within strategies of display utilizes the term “epidermalized” to describe the processes in which museums, collections and the marketplace display objects in such a way that they become racially defined. Racial discourse produces the subject it supposedly describes. It operates through visuality to ! ! 155 Analogically, a diasporic structure enables an analysis of the hierarchies of privilege within mobility and immobility that alter discourse across diverse and cosmopolitan spaces precisely due to the multiple temporalities that collide and thereby unravel unitary orders of representation. In extending this analogic principle to the study of visual and literary culture, it also disrupts the binary understanding of imperial orders of representation including Orientalism and the subversion to it. Instead, complicating this oppressor/oppressed model is the collision of multiple imperialisms and racial discourses whose impact spill over and beyond the body politic. 91 Cristina Garcia’s Monkey Hunting (2003) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Brazil-maru (1992) present a contradictory imaginary of mobility in which representations of Japanese and Chinese immigration to the Americas disrupts the relationship between place and identity. As such, the texts present a paradox in the defiance and reestablishment of difference. Monkey Hunting tells a story that spans 120 years, multiple geopolitical locations and perspectives. Monkey Hunting’s diasporic narrator presents the perspective of three main characters, Chen Pan, a Chinese !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! create a slippage between body as subject and body as object. Moreover, visuality is only one of the ways through with racial discourse operates (5). 91 Thomas Hobbes 1651 Leviathan conveys the analogous function of the body politic. The “Great Leviathan is the political anatomy that conveys a social order in relation to biological bodies. The head is to the individual body as God is to the world. In this order, the king is the head, then strictly followed by nobles, clergy, merchants, peons, and at the lowest level are slaves (Hobbes 6). Grosz provides two views regarding the body politic. The first view is based on a causal understanding of the body politic. The relationship between bodies and cities as contingent creates a false divide in which the consciousness of the mind is separated from the body that is understood in this framework as the operating tool. The second explains the body politic as representational. A series of correspondences based on a set of invented codes make analogous the biological and political body. In this view, the King and other members of the court and state correspondence to points parts of the body, such as the head, legs, arms, etc. Grosz contends that these two views of the body politic only account for the unidirectional flow of cause and effect models (244-246). ! ! 156 immigrant laborer (coolie) who arrives in Cuba in 1857. Deceived into signing a labor contract that sentences him to indentured servitude and cruel labor alongside African slaves on sugarcane plantations in Cuba, Chen Pan’s trans-Pacific voyage begins this multigenerational story of diaspora. The narrative then jumps nearly one hundred years to New York City in 1968 where the character Domingo Chen, a Cuban immigrant of mixed-race descent and Chen Pan’s great grandson, is found working in the kitchen at the Havana Dragon. The third main narrative voice belongs to Chen Fang, Chen Pan’s daughter in Shanghai who he never met and always believed was a boy. Brazil-maru is composed of vignettes, divided into five main sections that are each told from the perspective of a different character connected to Esperança (hope), a Japanese colony in the rural interior part of São Paulo, Brazil. The character Ichiro begins the first section. The first few vignettes are set aboard the ship named Brazil-maru during the year 1925. The ship departs from Japan at the port of Kobe with 600 emigrant-family units bound for Brazil as contract laborers. Ichiro is nine-years-old upon arrival in Brazil, but he recounts his first experiences in Brazil from his perspective as an older man. Beginning the novel from the viewpoint of a man who arrived in Brazil as a young boy suggests that the narrator is a reliable cultural and linguistic translator since he spent his developmental years in Brazil. At the same time, he is also part of a Japanese community, and so he should have the ability to translate between Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese languages and cultures for the characters in his novelistic networks. The narrator in both novels assumes the perspective of different characters across time and space to produce interrelated, yet distinct, vignettes. This effect formalistically enables the narrator to traverse temporal spatial bounds according to a structure that resembles the dispersed and often senseless effects of historical migrations that splinter family trees across the globe. Its logic does ! ! 157 not come from novelistic sequencing in which plot or motivation provide inertia, but rather, the narrator speaks from a diasporic time and space that might be better understood in terms of the itineraries and unplanned excursions of mobility including diaspora, forced migration, refugee states, immigration and emigration. Of course, these terms in themselves refer to micro histories of individuated experiences that cannot be summoned into any coherent or unifying definition of one kind of diaspora or migration. Each history and individuated experience has its particular social, economic and political propulsions. Literary expressions of such movements thrive in the flux of movement and the multiplicity of perspectives that leap freely through historical periods and geopolitical spaces, not looking for a unifying thread, but demonstrating the push and pull of a post-modern and post-structural narrator with multiple citizenships that traverses across colonial, anti-colonial, national, dynastic, capitalist and communist territories. Although my study focuses on literary and visual text, this type of study is not limited to such genres. Roland Barthes discusses the fragments of discourse in terms of a second order language, “referring to objects or episodes whose meaning underlies language, but can never exist independently of it.” Even as discourse depends on language as an anchor, signification can take on many forms. Barthes discusses the variation of materiality and imaginary as “trans-linguistics” whereby “the materials of which may be myth, narrative, journalism, or on the other hand objects of our civilisation, in so far as they are spoken (through press, prospectus, interview, conversation and perhaps even the inner language, which is ruled by the laws of imagination)” (Barthes, par 3). Piecing together the fragmented racial labor discourse on Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos demonstrates that the inscription of corporeality can take on many forms, but at the same time, newly juxtaposed diasporic imaginaries dismantle racial labor discourse to reveal it as the transposition of the body politic to biological bodies. ! ! 158 Macarena Gómez-Barris and Herman Gray’s study of spatiality and collective memory assert what they call the “sociology of the trace” as a methodological intervention into the study of political violence and its aftermath that seeps intergenerationally into sociocultural and psychic realms. I would add that racial labor discourse is one such form of political violence. In expanding the objects and spaces that constitute “evidence,” their work uncovers the technologies of political brutality and the erasure of mass institutional violence. In their analysis of sites of atrocities that political institutions have covered up or reinvented, they contend that the “social trace” must enter into scholarly practice as a critical category of inquiry. For Gómez-Barris and Gray, archival evidence must extend to the “inscriptions, traces, the audible, the inaudible, cacophonies, incoherences, assemblages, translations, appearances, and hauntings” (4) to make transparent the punctures of history. Punctures are the holes that are blatantly missing from the annals of history, the discovery of literal or figurative perforated stubs instead of crucial pages of information. These traces are not necessarily even material absences but rather unmistakable apertures; however gaping or miniscule that survives any kind of reprocessing or recycling. Memorials and other such places that commemorate and produce collective memory convey erasure and advance political agendas as much as they pay tribute to individual lives, and thereby further a particular perpective of the event in question. Toponyms in Macau, written in both Portuguese and Chinese on public streets convey such punctures of history in the physical landscape. The official languages of Macau are Portuguese and Chinese so one can expect to find bilingual signage in all public areas of the city. However, with less that one percent (.7) of the population that speaks Portuguese, one might not so readily expect to find a Portuguese speaker. Indeed, this disconnected relationship between the signage of language and the living practice of language attest to the complex five-hundred-year relationship between Portugal and China. Today, ! ! 159 the history is portrayed as a long-standing alliance, prominently displayed in the Macau History Museum. Upon first entering the museum, the visitor will walk into a room with two large glass displays on each side. One display contains a series of emblematic Portuguese material culture including a battleship carrack to depict the power of Portuguese maritime history. On display directly on the opposite side is a Chinese junk vessel, which highlights the maritime explorations of Zheng He who moored his fleet in Zanibar in the early fifteenth century (see figures 8 and 9). 92 Apart from the space of the museum, the display of the alliance between Portugal and China is apparent throughout the city at places such as the façade of São Paulo’s Cathedral. In contrast to unavoidable displays of this political memory, less obvious markers in the city also draw the visitor’s attention to a period of political and economic turmoil in Macau. Historian Beatriz Basto da Silva in her study of coolie emigration via Macau observes that the city’s toponyms mark the history of the coolie trade in Macau. Indeed, if a stroller visiting Macau were to wander off the Portuguese calçada (stone paving) of the main Senado plaza in search of a quieter street, she might find herself diverging down a sidewalk just parallel to it. Perhaps, an attentive eye might notice the placard with the words "Rua dos Cules" or Coolie Street (figure 12). Unexpectedly, the curious visitor might see that the Chinese characters for the street Rua dos Cules is (Tiān tōng jiē), and do not actually translate to Rua dos Cules, which would be (Kǔ lì jiē). Instead, the Chinese characters at this particular location could mean either “Passage to Heaven Street” or even “Passage to Day Street” since Tiān can mean both !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 92 Significantly, this display implicitly creates a hierarchy between a Chinese and European age of discovery. These displays highlight seemingly parallel moments but ones that also selectively emphasize the earlier development of Chinese technology in relation to Portuguese, and by extension European. For example, the display depicts Zheng He’s maritime voyages throughout the Indian Ocean as occurring earlier than the first European, Vasco da Gama, who reached Zanzibar in 1499. ! ! 160 heaven and day in this context. Perhaps a better translation to English might even be the phrase “Street Leading to Heaven.” Just yonder Rua dos Cules is the Rua da Cadeia, or Prison Street, where men were detained before making the circum-Oceanic voyage for labor. Similar to the incongruity found on the Rua dos Cules placard, the Chinese and Portuguese signage do not mean the same thing. Instead, in Chinese it states (Tiān tōng lǐ), which could translate to English as “Heaven Through Interior” or “Day Passes Inside” or perhaps the phrase “Street to Interior Passage to Heaven.” The characters in parenthesis, say or “Street of Cyclical Days or Heaven.” Perhaps this is a poetic way of describing time passing as a cycle. Nevertheless, the obvious connotation to prison is not coherent unless one chooses to read into the meaning of cyclical day as a description of prison life. Notwithstanding, the explicit reference is unclear, and the visual and material cacophony is a testament to a kind of visual and material evidence that witness in materiality and memory the incongruity of the cycles of luxury and labor in which the street leading to heaven and the route for labor dwell in the same toponymy of memory. Ultimately, piecing together these social traces and the fragmented stories of people who became fictional mandarins and coolies stems from the recognition of the intertwined relationships carved on circum-Oceanic circuits that indelibly connected distant lands as Luso-Hispanic Archipelagos. ! ! 161 Figure 10. Portuguese Carrack. Museum of Macau. Photo by Ana Paulina Lee Figure 11. Chinese Junk Vessel. Museum of Macau. Photo by Ana Paulina Lee ! ! 162 Figure 12: Rua dos cules (detail), Macau. Photo by Ana Paulina Lee Figure 13: Rua dos cules, Macau. Photo by Ana Paulina Lee ! ! Bibliography Andrews, George Reid. Afro-latin America 1800-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Araripe, Júnior. Teoria, crítica e história literária. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1978. Print. Azevedo, Artur. “O Mandarim.” Teatro de Artur Azevedo. Rio de Janeiro: Funate, 2002. ---. Palestra. Teatro de Artur Azevedo. Rio de Janeiro: Funate, 2002. Barthes, Roland. 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Creator Lee, Ana Paulina (author)

Core Title Luso-Hispanic archipelagos: the imaginary of Asia in Brazilian and Cuban literary and visual culture

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 06/30/2019

Defense Date 04/28/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abolition,Brazil,china,Citizenship,coolie,Cuba,Mandarin,OAI-PMH Harvest,Slavery

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Díaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee chair), Gómez-Barris, Macarena (committee chair)

Creator Email anapaulinany@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-425661

Unique identifier UC11286604

Identifier etd-LeeAnaPaul-2588.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-425661 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LeeAnaPaul-2588.pdf

Dmrecord 425661

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Lee, Ana Paulina

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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