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Orientalism and Identity in Latin America: Fashioning Self and Other from the (Post)Colonial Margin. Ed. Erik Camayd-Freixas. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2013. ISBN 9780-8165-2953-7
This timely volume of essays, which analyzes the centuries-old encounter between Latin Americans and Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese cultures, adds to other recent collections that look at Orientalism in the Hispanic world. In this case, the focus is on the "the formation of Latin American constructs of the Other and the self, from colonial times to the present" (3). In the introduction to the volume, titled "The Orientalist Controversy and the Origins of Amerindian Culture," the editor, Erik Camayd-Freixas, provides an enlightening approach to Hispanic Orientalism that concomitantly provides coherence to the volume. Perhaps its most original contribution is his analysis from the perspective of the probable Asian origin of Amerindian peoples. As he points out, the connection between orientalization of both "degenerated" Asians and "primitive" Amerindians produces a continuum of exoticization and otherness. Camayd-Freixas also presents the traits that make Hispanic Orientalism different from that of other European countries. He then delves into the selforientalization that characterizes some Latin American publications, including the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas's Pueblo enfermo (1909) and the Peruvian César Augusto Velarde's Patología indolatina. Next, the editor addresses the veneration of the Orient in Latin American literary modernismo, which, in his view, "departs from hegemonic paradigms to reconfigure the Orient in parallel with Latin America's own peripheral, uneven, and conflictive modernity" (8). Camayd-Freixas eventually comes to the conclusion that the orientalization of the Amerindian has been used as an ideological tool by Europeans, criollos, and mestizos at the expense of the first peoples themselves. He closes his introduction with a study of Octavio Paz's appropriation of Asian philosophy and culture to understand his native Mexico: "Paz's poetic quest-to return to Asia in order to arrive at America through the time bridge of dualistic thought and ideographic writing-may be considered a culmination of Hispanic Orientalism" (16).
Brett Levinson opens the volume with the most theoretical of its essays, "The Death of the Critique of Eurocentrism: Latinamericanism as a Global Praxis/Poiesis," which was originally published in 1997. Focusing on the topics of truth, silence and objectivity, he explores the contradictions present in the Latinamericanist and de-orientalist critiques of...