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1. Introduction
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction Understanding others is knowledge. . . . To die but not be forgotten is longevity. Lao-tzu “China” can no longer be limited to the more or less fixed area of its official spatial and cultural boundaries nor can it be held up as providing the authentic , authoritative, and uncontested standard for all things Chinese. Ien Ang For the last several decades, academic circles in the humanities have been questioning the construction of binary oppositions when dealing with issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, or religion. This relatively new approach has brought a whole new spectrum into literary and cultural studies. Likewise, in the shadow of the so-called New World Order, another crucial line of research has led literary and cultural studies to problematize the old paradigm that contrasted “the Orient” versus “the West.”1 This paradigm of binary oppositions and dichotomies between Eastern and Western worldviews at the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s positions the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the minds of the U.S. political elite as the next military and economic superpower competing with the newfound undisputed supremacy of the United States. Thus, the great shadow of the recently awakened “sleeping giant” casts fear and resentment in the Western collective subconscious, particularly in the United States. As Chinese President Hu Jintao (1942–; president 2003–present) continues the campaign to build new commercial ties and to extend his country’s influence in Latin America, so grows the resentment in the so-called First World. In fact, in 2005 the Pentagon considered the PRC for the first time a threat to U.S. interests in Asia. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (1954–) not only defined China as “a problem for the international economy,” but also demanded changes to its economic policies. Of course, today’s network of geopolitical and hegemonic dynamics between East and West is preceded by a long history of interaction in every Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture imaginable field (commercial, military, religious, artistic, political, human), which goes back many centuries. As early as 100 BCE, during the reign of Emperor Wu Ti (156–87 BCE; Chinese emperor 140–87 BCE) of the Han Dynasty (206BCE–220CE), the Chinese territorial conquests in central Asia allowed them to open the Silk Road that linked the Middle Kingdom (Chung-kuo in Mandarin) with the Roman Empire. Since then, China has informed the imaginations of Westerners, particularly after travelers like Marco Polo (1254–1324) and, before him, in 1253, the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck visited the Kublai Khan’s territories and wrote about their observations.2 As surprising as it may seem to some readers, the island nation of Cuba is a crucial landmark in the history of Chinese interaction with the West. Its capital city, Havana, once boasted one of the first Chinatowns in Latin America and one of the most populous ones in the Americas, perhaps rivaled only by the one in San Francisco.3 It was there that several interethnic societal experiments that would later be replicated in other nations in the Americas were put to the test. Therefore, the debates about “Chinatown” as a Western invention and as a frail simulacrum of the native land should start with Havana as a point of departure. Both the mistrust and the affinity that the Chinese generated within Cuban society resonate in the cultural production by Cubans and about Cuba since the last decades of the nineteenth century. As could be expected, the stereotypes about the Chinese and their Chinatowns (both hostile and positive) that abounded in the United States coincide, for the most part, with those that originated in Cuba. In most Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Cuba, however, racial classifications still seem to be more flexible than the ones that predominate in the United States. The literary and cultural representation of the Chinese in Cuba is inseparable from the interpretation of racism before and after the Cuban Revolution (1956–1959).4 Phenotype and heritage are not the only factors in this regard. Lok C. D. Siu has addressed these differences: While the term “Asian American” represents a panethnic collective identity encompassing all the different ethnic groups from Asia in the United States (Espíritu 1992), it is not well known, much less used, elsewhere in the Americas. The term derived from the history of the 1960s grassroots Asian American movement, and because no similar social movement took place elsewhere in the Americas, ethnicity remains...