Diseños asiáticos: Orientalismo y modernidad en México

This dissertation proposes a study of Orientalism as a key discourse in the articulation of Mexican identities in the context of debates about modernity and nationalism from 1900 to 1968. Through an analysis of the references to South and East Asia by canonical Mexican figures—José Juan Tablada, José Vasconcelos, Octavio Paz, and Roger Bartra—this thesis argues that, far from being a rhetorical artifice of cosmopolitan escapism, Mexican Orientalism was a discursive practice complementary to cultural nationalism. These Mexican intellectuals conceived Asia (more specifically Japan, China and India) as a non-European counterpoint for configuring the relation between race and aesthetics in the construction of a modern national identity. In concentrating on processes of cultural circulation, reception, and adaptation, the main object of this investigation is to bring a comparative transnational perspective to the study and criticism of postrevolutionary nationalism, traditionally associated with discourses about the indigene promoted by the Mexican state. Studying how one of the strongest Latin American nationalist traditions was informed in multiple instances by a dialogue with other, Asian, notions of identity, aesthetics, and politics, my research thus emphasizes the epistemological value of interperipherical analysis for the study of Mexican and, by extension, Latin American aesthetic practice. The ultimate concern was to demonstrate that the very idea of Latin America had multiple encounters with conceptions of the Orient in its tradition of canonical intellectual thought