Rosario Hubert’s Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature joins the still select but increasing (and increasingly important) corpus of cultural analyses of the interactions between Chinese and Latin American cultures. It does so mainly from the methodological perspective of world literature, namely by tracing and reflecting on some of the complex histories of cultural circulation from China to Latin America. In Disoriented Disciplines, Hubert weaves together different archives and conceptual frameworks, switching deftly between more panoramic descriptions of intercultural circulations, with their infrastructures and contexts, and fine-grained analyses of specific authors and texts, accompanied by incisive methodological reflections. Disoriented Disciplines is a must-read book for anyone invested in thinking transculturally between Asia and Latin America. In fact, I highly recommend the book to anyone serious about work in comparative literature, world literature, translation studies, and Latin American studies.The book’s introduction closes with a list of adjectives, “keywords that convey the writings of China in Latin America” in the book: “disoriented, undisciplined, assumed, translatable, lacking, opaque, ignorant, mediated, marginalized, scattered, slippery, overlooked, unstable, mobile, trafficked, clandestine, edgy, twisted, superficial, moving, illegible, displaced” (22). These keywords showcase the book’s metaphorical fields and the concomitant conceptual directions: its focus on circulation and movement, on the one hand, and its tightrope act between critically challenging biased assumptions and rewriting and revalorizing some of them (such as disoriented and undisciplined) on the other. In sync with this double thrust, Disoriented Disciplines sets out to accomplish two main aims: First, it traces the writing of China in Latin America as a set of processes of material translation, focusing on the circulation of agents and artifacts. Second, it identifies a Latin American critical praxis that bypasses conventional academic modes and disciplines, an “indiscipline” that is rooted in the late development of sinology in Latin America but which has led to a rich array of comparative criticism in a wide range of texts embedded in a capacious textual infrastructure.Hubert’s book guides the reader through three moments of intense circulation between China and Latin America: the mid-to-late nineteenth century (with a focus on the coolie trade and Latin American modernism), Maoist diplomacy and the moment of Third-World solidarity from the 1950s into the 1970s, and the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Sandwiched between these three are two chapters that focus on crucial figures of Latin American literature from the perspective of their engagement with China: Jorge Luis Borges and José Juan Tablada (with an appearance by Severo Sarduy). While the three frame chapters provide a wide-ranging panorama that traces the contexts and infrastructures of Sino-Latin American circulations at these historical junctures, the two in-between chapters with their specific focus allow for a more thorough conceptual and methodological engagement. Both Borges and Tablada (and to a certain extent Sarduy) are must-include references for work on Latin American cultural perspectives on China. But Hubert works with these “usual suspects” in particularly insightful ways: In Chapter 2, the focus is on Borges as an unlikely sinologist—as an irreverent translator, as a spuriously creative comparatist, and as a world-literary practitioner and critic who must make up his own disciplinary pathways on the go. In Chapter 4, Hubert probes beyond the surface of Tablada’s ideographic practices by insisting on the material and medial specificities at work, especially the importance of specific artistic and artisanal practices. While Chapter 2 models an undisciplined approach to China from within Latin American culture, Chapter 4 extends the scope of translation to encompass affect and hapticity. But whereas “indiscipline” drives the overall methodological framework of the book, the intriguing proposal of a haptic and affective translation remains confined mainly to the one chapter.By underlining disorientations to the usual (U.S.–European) disciplinary frameworks, Hubert starts to shift theoretical agency from academic (meta-)discourses to objects of analysis. However, while the examples of undisciplined or undisciplining voices in the book—such as Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Jorge Luis Borges, or Bernardo Kordon—might be at the margin of academic discourses on China, they nevertheless represent empowered, privileged perspectives. Hubert calls attention to the voices of Chinese coolie laborers and the trauma of the “Middle Passage” of the Yellow Trade (trata amarilla)—which need more historical and critical work and have remained muted in certain Latin American discourses, even though such a “coolie passage archive” has certainly not been completely “overlooked.” And in fact, this is an example of a fragmented archive whose contours start to emerge once we bring different perspectives, disciplines, languages, and texts together.I dwell on this case of circulation (of the trafficking of individuals between cultures) as one example of the rich array of intercultural scenarios in Disoriented Disciplines because it is precisely such marginalized histories that push the envelope of world-literary methodology, albeit from a different direction than Hubert’s “indiscipline”: as something that is, in fact, mostly extradisciplinary, as not fully grasped by existing discourses nor usually allowed to participate in the shaping of such discourses and disciplines. Coolies are neither quite only artifacts nor quite yet agents in the circulatory or translational logics of world literature. And world literature’s routines of translation—in the capacious sense used by Hubert in the book—reach their limits here. When Hubert’s book “advocates for indiscipline as a core method of comparative studies” (back cover), its inspiration comes from practices of the likes of Borges or Tablada. What would it mean to extend “indiscipline” beyond such world-literary heroes (or usual suspects)? Hubert invites us to shift our critical practice so as to be able to engage in work like that of Disoriented Disciplines, namely to trace “forms of circulation”—in this case of Chinese cultures in Latin America—“that are virtually unreadable and undecipherable with the conventional tools of literary criticism” (195–196). The “writing of China in Latin America” is shown in the book to cross “the boundaries of established fields of knowledge, unfolding as an undisciplined critical praxis of translation that produces fragmentary archives” (194). But what would a different critical practice (one of indiscipline?) mean for our own work, within, beyond, or maybe even against world-literary approaches?Cultural objects, networks, and imaginaries are never “unreadable” or “undecipherable” per se, even as they also never become completely transparent or accessible either. To use such labels (and their cognates in Hubert’s list of adjectives, such as “lacking,” “opaque,” “ignorant,” “scattered,” “slippery,” “overlooked,” “clandestine,” “twisted,” “superficial,” and “illegible”) especially in the context of Chinese languages and cultures, risks echoing a prevalent bias of the West, that of the unreadable Chinese script, that of the inscrutable Chinese. Instead, Disoriented Disciplines reminds us of the multiplicity of perspectives, texts, and methodologies at work in cultural contact (or translation) zones. And of the need to remain open to these and yet other perspectives, texts, and methodologies, even (and especially) when we might not be able to inhabit or practice them. Intercultural and comparative work cannot limit itself to one methodological framework or one cultural and disciplinary positionality, even as such work remains necessarily fragmentary, incomplete, partial, and open-ended. I cannot match Hubert’s quirkily suggestive self-descriptive list of adjectives here, but I can offer some adjectival pairs that characterize Disoriented Disciplines: erudite and elegant, wide-ranging and conceptually incisive, and rigorous and enjoyable.
Andrea Bachner (2026) studied this question.