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 DISORIENTATIONS:
LATIN AMERICAN FICTIONS OF EAST ASIA

A dissertation

by

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María del Rosario Hubert
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The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

In partial fulfillment of the requirements
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for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of
Romance Languages and Literatures

Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 2014
 UMI Number: 3626721

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Dissertation Advisor: Professor Mariano Siskind Author: María del Rosario Hubert

“Disorientations. Latin American Fictions of East Asia”

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between fiction, knowledge and

“knowing” in Latin American discourses of China and Japan. By scrutinizing

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Brazilian and Hispanic American travel journals, novels, short stories and essays

from the nineteenth century to the present, Disorientations engages with the
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epistemological problems of writing across cultural boundaries and proposes a novel

entryway into the study of East Asia and Latin American through the notions of
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“cultural distance,” “fictional Sinology” and “critical exoticism.”

Comparative in spirit, the argument is divided into three chapters that create a
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constellation of historical and textual problems around a specific form of knowledge.

Chapter 1 studies the relationship between cartography and ethnography in

nineteenth-century Latin American travelogues of China. It demonstrates how

traveling diplomats and businessmen involved in the coolie trade employ a

paradoxical rhetoric that distances the Chinese as a subaltern, exotic Other and

simultaneously approximates it as an compatible, potential fellow countryman;

juxtaposing thus the rhetoric of dilettante tourism and racial positivism. Chapter 2

analyzes the problem of philology and the global circulation of non-Western

literatures in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. By examining Sinology as a disciplinary

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discourse, I show how Borges assembles a contingent canon of Chinese literature,

translates without an original and capitalizes the constraints of the literary market in

his numerous reviews on Chinese literature published in the 1930’s and 1940’s, thus

producing a fictional epistemology of China that works as a meta-literary exercise of

world literature. Lastly, Chapter 3 is a thorough discussion of fiction (particularly the

adventure novel and immigration narrative) as a form of cultural knowledge. By

analyzing the uses of exoticism in contemporary Latin American narratives about

Asian travel, I hold that post-Boom writers relate to the particularistic aesthetics of

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Latin Americanism from a global stance by parodying “orientalism”, and

contemporary Brazilian novels about Japan do not engage with a revision of a foreign
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canon, but rather, revisit a particular tradition of Japanese-Brazilian immigration
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literature.

Disorientation, I contend, is a rhetoric that not only revisits the hegemonic

archive of “the Orient” from a Latin American point of view, but mostly, explores
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the literary potential of peripheral epistemologies in general.

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 Table of contents

Abstract .................................................................................................................................................................................. iii

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................................... vi
List of illustrations ........................................................................................................................................................ ix

Introduction. “Disorientations. Mapping Latin America and East Asia” ................ 1

Chapter 1. Peripheral Sinographers: Nineteenth-Century

Latin American Travel Writing on China .................................................................................... 14
1.1 Geographical awareness and travel writing ..................................................................... 17
1.2 Latin American Eastbound travel ........................................................................................... 19

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1.3 China and the coolie trade ......................................................................................................... 22
1.4 Tanco Armero's assertion of long-distance ..................................................................... 26
1.5 Henrique R. Lisboa's approximation of China ..............................................................
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1.6 “The Yellow Question” .................................................................................................................... 46
1.7 Conclusion: distance / distant readers .................................................................................. 63
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Chapter 2. Sinology on the Edge or Borges’s Fictional
Epistemology of China .................................................................................................................................... 68
2.1 Fictional epistemologies ................................................................................................................... 72
2.2 The Humanist construction of China .................................................................................... 77
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2.3 The assassination of the Sinologist .......................................................................................... 80

2.4 The chinoiserie detective ............................................................................................................... 92
2.5 Borges critic and translator of Chinese literature ........................................................ 104
2.6 Chinese literature reviews 1937-1942 ................................................................................. 110
2.7 The rich opacity of translation .................................................................................................... 122
2.8 Chinese literature and the fantastic ........................................................................................ 131

Chapter 3. Critical Exoticism: Contemporary Fictions of Asia ........................................ 136

3.1 The aesthetics of dislocation ..................................................................................................... 137
3.2 Orientalism removed, refuted, and ridiculed .................................................................. 143
3.3 Travel literature / Fictions of travel ....................................................................................... 159
3.4 Contemporary Nisei writing ........................................................................................................ 166
3.5 Brazilian Japonism .............................................................................................................................. 167
3.6 Inhabiting Otherness ......................................................................................................................... 171

Works cited ......................................................................................................................................................................... 180

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 Acknowledgements

This dissertation is about distance, or rather, about strategies to challenge it. I

would not have been able to complete it without the affection and support I receive

from friends, family and dear ones scattered in different parts of the planet.

I first and foremost want to thank Mariano Siskind for being, without a doubt,

the most outstanding advisor one could ever dream of and more: engaged

interlocutor, rigorous critic and enthusiastic director; a true professional and personal

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role model. Mariano walked me through the different stages of the PhD, alerting me

of the anxieties and always illuminating the relevance of our job as cultural critics.
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Even if I will no longer be his student, I will always look up to him for guidance and

advice. Diana Sorensen showed unlimited generosity and commitment to my project

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since day one, and so much I have learnt from her about geographic imaginations,

map-makings and disciplines but also about the the dynamics of scholarly life and the
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profession as a whole. Nicolau Sevcenko’s lectures were eye-openers into Brazilian

cultural history and into fiction as a form of study of social imaginaries, but it was his

unlimited imagination and capacity to bridge remote cultures through literary texts

what lead me to pose so many research questions. David Damrosch’s seminars on

world literature and cultural criticism were determinant factors in the approach I took

in this dissertation to the study of Latin America’s global inscriptions. In different

ways, all four have all been exceptional advisors and I am deeply thankful to them.

Many people in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at

Harvard were also part of the development of this dissertation, either through their

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seminars, lectures or conversations: Doris Sommer, Luis Fernandez Cifuentes, Brad

Epps, Luis Girón-Negrón, Mary Gaylord, Sergio Delgado, José Rabasa, Virginie

Greene, Lorgia Garcia-Peña, Clémence Jouet-Pastré, Johanna Liander, Adriana

Gutierrez and Stacey Katz. Visiting professors Gonzalo Aguilar and Beatriz Sarlo

provided me with invaluable feedback for this and other projects. Special thanks to

the staff at RLL for always keeping the wheels in motion: Frannie Lindsay, Kathy

Koviello, Mike Holmes, Katherine Killough and Andrea Kupski-Keane.

Also at Harvard, I want to thank the David Rockefeller Center for Latin

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American Studies for the many travel awards and the fantastic office where I spent

the frenzied last year of the PhD with my dear colleagues Cinthya Torres and Max
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Seawright and the super jovial staff and cohort of visiting scholars. I’m also infinitely
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grateful to the Asia Center for the generous fellowship to spend a summer at Jiaotong

University in Shanghai, and the Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat Fellowship, which

provided me invaluable time to write and study Mandarin.

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Sedi Hirano was an enthusiast informant in matters related to Japanese

immigration Brazil and the warmest host in São Paulo. In Argentina, Álvaro

Fernández Bravo, Florencia Garramuño, Anna Kazumi-Stahl, Martín Bergel,

Edgardo Dieleke, Irene Depetris Chauvin, Fernando Lasala are always attentive

readers, professors and friends. Friends! So many to mention: Antonio Arraiza,

Carlos Varón González, Simos Zenios, Juan Torbidoni, Ana Paula Hirano, Ernest

Hartwell, Manolo Nuñez Negrón, Daniel Aguirre, Lotte Buiting, Nicole Legnani,

Edgar Barroso, Yinan Zhang, Nicolas Chevrier, Viridiana Ríos, Daniela Dorfman,

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Luigi Patruno, Pablo Martín Ruiz, Bruno Carvalho, María Ospina, Martín Gaspar,

Mariano Ocantos, Christine Gouverneur and my dear friend and Cambridge babcia

Marilina Weintrub. Special mention of recongition is to the Periodicals Reading

Room gang at Widener Library for the anonymous collegiality in so many hours of

reading. From a distance, but not far: Angélica, Horacio and Carlota Maschwitz,

Alejandra Cordes, María Pierrestegui, Fátima Perea, Angeles Servente, Damasia

Ezcurra, Karina Katz, Diego Mantilla, Candelaria Mantilla, Baby Mantilla, Manuel

Torino, Manolo Chada, Marina Bissone, Danila Silveyra, Josefina Romero, Monique

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Hoschet, Teresa de las Carreras, Luisito Silveyra, Mena Virasoro, Fernando Mantilla,

Carolina Otamendi, Flor Gastey and Iván Llonch-Buxeres.

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I was lucky to have two other places I have called home apart from
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Cambridge and Buenos Aires during all these years: Tito Hubert and Sharbani Roy

always have a room ready for me in Seattle, and divert me from the routine of PhD

stress with cuisine, manicures and surprises! Also, the Gimenez family is my family
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in Barcelona. Tani Hubert is my sister and touchstone, and to her I am thankful for so

many things. My mother Cota has a lot to do with my choice to transform Literature

into a profession: together with my dear grandmother Rosi, she passed on to me her

love for books but mostly, she demonstrated that it is possible to accomplish both a

successful career and a devoted family life. This dissertation is dedicated to her and

to the loving memory of my father. Lastly, I want to thank Joan Camprodon, for his

unlimited patience, constant encouragement and precious care; with all my love for

more adventures to come!

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 List of illustrations

1. (page xi) Modern reconstruction of the map of the Atlantic Ocean according
to Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1474). Ernest Rhys, Ed., A Literary and
Historical Atlas of North & South America (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton &
CO., 1911)

2. (page 35) Thomas Cook, Spring Tours to China & Japan and a tour around the
World via the Trans-Siberian Railway and Russia, 1909 (Thomas Cook
Archives)

3. (page 45) Johan Moritz Rugendas, “Plantation chinoise de thé dans le Jardim
botanique de Rio de Janeiro.” Malerische Reise in Brasilien von Moritz
Rugendas. Paris: Engelman, 1835.

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4. (page 54) John Thomson, “An opium den in China,” Illustrations of China and
Its People: A Series of Two Hundred Photographs, with Letterpress Descriptive
of the Places and People Represented. Vol 1. London: Sampson Low, and
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Searle, 1873–1874.

5. (page 55) “O chim e sua adaptaçao ao trabalho no Brasil,” Revista Illustrada

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n.154, 1879

6. (page 56) Lisboa, Henrique Carlos Ribeiro, “Mineiros Chineses,” A China e Os

Chins, Recordações de Viagem. Montevideo: Typographia a vapor de A. Godel,
1888.
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7. (page 56) Lisboa, Henrique Carlos Ribeiro, “Agricultores Chineses,” A China e

Os Chins, Recordações de Viagem. Montevideo: Typographia a vapor de A.
Godel, 1888.

8. (page 59) Lisboa, Henrique Carlos Ribeiro, “Typos de habitantes da China,” A

China e Os Chins, Recordações de Viagem. Montevideo: Typographia a vapor
de A. Godel, 1888.

9. (page 62) Jean-Baptiste Debret, “Différentes nations nègres,” Voyage

pittoresque et historique au Brésil, ou Séjour d'un artiste français au Brésil,
depuis 1816 jusqu'en 1831 inclusivement, epoques de l'avènement et de
l'abdication de S. M. D. Pedro 1er, fondateur de l'Empire brésilien (1834-1839)

10. (page 62) Johan Mortiz Rugendas, “Brazilian-born slaves,” Voyage Pittoresque
dans le Bresil. Traduit de l'Allemand, Paris, 1835.

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11. (page 67) Self-portraits. Henrique Lisboa and Nicolas Tanco Armero.

12. (page 112) Borges’s reviews of Chinese Literature organized by title, German
and English translation reviewed and original title in Chinese.

13. (page 179) Ricci, Mateo (1552-1610). “Kunyu wanguo quantu,” [Map of the
Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth]. printed by Matteo Ricci, Zhong Wentao
and Li Zhizao, upon request of Wanli Emperor in Beijing,

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Fig 1. Modern reconstruction of the map of the Atlantic Ocean according to Paolo dal
Pozzo Toscanelli (1474). This was thought to be the westward route to the Spice
Islands followed by Christopher Columbus during his first voyage. The outline where
North America actually lies is shown on the map in light blue.

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 Introduction

DISORIENTATIONS: MAPPING LATIN AMERICA AND EAST ASIA

The discovery of America was a product of disorientation. When Christopher

Columbus set sail westwards in 1492, he expected to land in Cipango, afterwards

visit the province of Mangi and finally seek the Grand Khan in Cambulu, in the

province of Cathay. Oraculously following Marco Polo's Divisament dou monde,

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Pierre d´Ailly Ymago Mundi and Toscanelli’s map -that indicated that these

kingdoms were located to the immediate West of Europe (fig 1)- Columbus crossed
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the ocean four times without knowing that rather than opening a new maritime route

to India, he had instead encountered a whole new continent to the eyes of European
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cosmography. I call this an episode of disorientation, not only because of the

fortunate mismatch between the actual toponomy of the planet and its incipient
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cartographic representation. Rather, I refer to it in light of what José Rabasa calls the

“semiotic of errancy” of Columbus’s Diario, a paradoxical rhetoric by which the

pursuit of the known (be that of Cipango, gold or spices) assumes the mode of a

wandering through new territories: “y por eso no fago sino andar para ver de topar en

ello” [and for this I do not do anything but wander about to see if I come upon it]

(Friday, 19 October 1492) (55). Although the destination of the voyage is the “Far

East,” the inauguration of a new sea route entails to keep a record of phenomena

never before observed and therefore Columbus simultaneously breaks down a code

(an inherited encyclopedia of knowledge about the East) and produces new signs

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(from the realm of the marvelous). The writing of the Diario follows here the new

scriptural economy of the Renaissance as described by Michel de Certeau: “the

concrete activity that consists in constructing, on its own blank space (un espace

propre) –the page- a text that has power over the exteriority from which it has first

been isolated. Columbus’s “semiotic of errancy” thus, reveals how writing bears the

power to construct a text and impose an order of the world, both by acknowledging

the absence of a record or the ability of the writer to transform a received tradition.

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I began with this foundational episode of disorientation in the narrative of the

discovery of America to reflect upon Latin America’s own literary potential in the
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production of knowledge of East Asia. Given its limited agency in the mappings of

the world, the region’s historical position as an object -rather than a subject- of
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narratives of discovery (geographic, scientific, religious), and its former transoceanic

links to European Empires in Asia, I argue that “Latin America” is a fertile site to
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reflect upon the geopolitics of enunciation of global discourses, and particularly, of

South-to-South discourses. By surveying comparatively Brazilian and Hispanic

American travel journals, novels, short stories and essays from the nineteenth

century to the present, this dissertation explores the relationship between fiction,

knowledge and “knowing” in discourses of China and Japan. I engage with texts that,

in the same vein of Columbus’s Diario, discuss “already known” cultures of East

Asia but, in the assumption of an alternative access to Asia, explore the fictional

potential of the “yet unknown,” and thus map, translate and imagine East Asia

through fiction. In the light of an original form of geographical, philological and

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aesthetic relation to China and Japan, these texts revisit the European humanistic

archives of Asia and fictionalize the epistemological process of accounting for

cultural difference, giving way to what I conceptualize as “cultural distance,”

“fictional Sinology” and “critical exoticism.” Far from the imperial and metropolitan

place of enunciation that defines the gaze of “orientalism” (Said 1978), I argue that

the marginal position in the globe offers the Latin American writer the freedom to

displace and redefine its relation to other peripheries, and thus critique notions such

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as the primitive, the subaltern or the exotic. I argue that this gaze not only questions

the European representations of Latin America and Asia, but also, revises the
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epistemological frameworks that account for alterity. Disorientation, I contend, is a

rhetoric that not only revisits the hegemonic archive of “the Orient” from a Latin
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American point of view, but mostly, explores the literary potential of peripheral

epistemologies in general.
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Comparative in spirit, the argument is divided into three chapters that create a

constellation of historical and textual problems around a specific form of knowledge.

Chapter 1 studies the relationship between cartography and ethnography in

nineteenth-century Latin American travelogues of China, mainly the two still

unstudied A China e Os Chins: Recordações de Viagem (Montevideo, 1888) by

Henrique Lisboa and Viaje de la Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia

(Paris, 1861) by Nicolás Tanco Armero. Building on a tradition of post-romantic

travel writing, these Brazilian and Colombian travelers in China negotiate a

universalistic ethnographic gaze –derived from Jesuit accounts and incipient

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Sinological works- with a particularistic political agenda related to slavery and

immigration back home. As opposed to the expansive European empires in Asia,

Hispanic and Brazilian businessmen and diplomats travel in China not with the aim

of military annexation of Asian territories, but rather in the quest for Asian

populations to bring back to replace African labor. Consequently, in the depiction of

the country and its inhabitants, Latin American travelers employ a paradoxical

rhetoric that distances the Chinese as a subaltern, exotic Other and simultaneously

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approximates it as an compatible, potential fellow countryman; juxtaposing thus the

rhetoric of dilettante tourism and racial positivism. I hold that this gambit supposes a
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redefinition of relational geography, from physical distance to subjective distance;

rather than a straight line between fixed points in axial coordinates of a map, the
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distance between Latin America and China is calculated in irregular curves that

contemplate direction and magnitude (cultural desire). In other words, these Latin
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American travelogues of China evidence that the process of time–space compression

(Harvey 201), by which temporal and spatial distances in the context of the early

globalization of capital are elided as a result of innovations in technologies of

communication, travel, and economics, but also, I argue, of cultural desire.

Chapter 2 analyzes the problem of philology and the global circulation of

non-Western literatures in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. By examining Sinology as

a disciplinary discourse, I show how Borges assembles a contingent canon of

Chinese literature, translates without an original and capitalizes the constraints of the

literary market in his numerous reviews on Chinese literature published in the 1930’s

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and 1940’s. Given Borges's ignorance of Mandarin and the absence of an

institutional framework for the production of scholarship and translation of Chinese

literature in Argentina, Borges relies on the work of foreign Sinologists (he is a

distant reader, in terms of Franco Moretti 57). Yet, because of the central place he

occupies in the Argentinean cultural field in the 1930's and the privilege in the

reading of foreign literatures assigned to his own locality, Borges circulates Chinese

literature through fictional mediations. I make use of Beatriz Sarlo’s formulation of

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Borges’s privilege site of enunciation: “placed on the limits between cultures,

between literary genres, between languages, Borges is the writer of the orillas, a
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marginal in the centre, a cosmopolitan on the edge. He entrusts literary processes and

formal procedures with the power to explore the never-ending philosophical and
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moral question of our lives. He constructs his originality through quotations, copies,

the rewritings of other texts, because, from the outset, he conceives of writing as
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reading, and he distrusts, from the outset, any possibility of any literary

representation of reality (Sarlo 45). Therefore, in the understanding of world

literature in dynamic terms, “not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a

mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works

as to bodies of material, available for reading established classics and new

discoveries alike” (Damrosch 7), I argue that Borges's fictional Sinology produced in

the “edge” is a meta-literary exercise of world literature.

Lastly, Chapter 3 is a thorough discussion of fiction (particularly the

adventure novel and immigration narrative) as a form of cultural knowledge. By

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analyzing the uses of exoticism in contemporary Latin American narratives about

Asian travel, I contend that post-Boom writers relate to the particularistic aesthetics

of Latin Americanism from a global stance by parodying “orientalism.” I hold that

this critique is not only referential (rejection of a particularistic representation of the

Oriental/Latin American) but also theoretical (rejection of exoticism). The novels’

critique of orientalism supposes a revision of European travel literature that

universalized exotic images of Asia (Jules Verne, André Malraux, Henri Michaux).

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Assuming an alternative positioning vis-a-vis Asia, these novels display a

fragmentation of voices bound by one single fictional narrator that edits and rewrites
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the traveler’s account while considering the conditions of production of his text. In

the specific case of Brazilian fiction, I argue that many contemporary novels about
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Japan do not engage with a revision of a foreign canon, but rather, revisit a particular

tradition of Japanese-Brazilian immigration literature. Chapter 3 holds that the

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representation of Asia in these works responds to a cosmopolitan gesture by which

the Latin American intervenes a foreign canon, be it a European genre specific to the

experience of colonialism, or a local tradition of immigrant writing.

As it follows from the chapter description, my dissertation focuses on the

work of writers and intellectuals from Latin America that explore the literary

potential of their lateral geopolitical locality in a global context, or, what Mariano

Siskind identifies as the “desire for the world”: the invocation of the world

alternatively as a signifier of abstract universality or a concrete and finite set of

global trajectories traveled by writers and books (that permits) an escape from

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nationalist cultural formations and establishes a symbolic horizon for the realization

of the translocal aesthetic potential of literature and cosmopolitan forms of

subjectivation (3). In lines with central problems to the tradition of Latin American

criticism, I am interested in the revision of hegemonic paradigms of representation,

but not in the understanding of subalternity to the interior of Latin American class,

gender, race and language structures.1 Rather, I explore how the external narratives

of sublaternity -Latin America as a region of the exotic, peripheral and primitive-

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serve to explore the rhetorics of travel, reading of foreign literature and the

formulation of aesthetics of diversity, particularly in reference to other peripheral

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areas of the West. As Graciela Montaldo notes in the her study of the fictional

dimension of cultural geographies, reading texts that deal with spaces, territories and
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geographies outside of the national (or regional, I add) borders illuminates a

problematic zone opened by economic and cultural modernization: the reformulation

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of group identities in relation to others (Ficciones culturales 66). In this respect, my

methodology consists in analyzing conditions of travel, circulation of texts and the

impact of cultural representations against the backdrop of a changing global scenario

that alters the forms of circulation of people, texts and discourses and thus produce

new “planetary consciousness” (Pratt 24). Chapter 1 contemplates the emerging

massive interconnectedness of the world in the late nineteenth century. At a time

1 See for example, the work of Decolonial Theory and Latin American Subaltern Studies, which,
in study of Latin American difference -Amerindian categories of thought and Afro-Caribbean
experiences -question paradigms used in representing colonial and postcolonial socities
("Founding Statement" 111).

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when steamships accelerate trade, tourism, science and missionary work, and thus

human transit between the Northern metropolis and Southern colonies increases

dramatically, how can we reflect upon other forms of relations that run along

horizontal directions? What do these contact zones tell us about the nature of large-

scale migrations from Asia to the Americas? What kind of cultural maps does the

Latin American traveler convey when portraying the world from a non-colonial, yet

marginal, point of view? The chapter on Borges addresses the conditions of

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production of knowledge of China in the Argentine cultural field during the global

conflict of World War II. How does the reordering of the literary market produced by
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new trade barriers, and the subsequent institutionalization of a publishing industry in

Spanish in the Americas alter the forms of circulation of foreign literatures in a

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peripheral cultural field? Lastly, the novels I analyze in Chapter 3 explore the

fictional potential of globalization for accessing the world at large. In the lines of
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Fredric Jameson’s skepticism about the possibility of transparent contact with

foreign cultures, these novels assume that in this stage of globalization there are no

cultures, but only the nostalgic phantasmagorias of what used to be fully

representable national cultures: “in postmodernity we cannot appeal back to the

fetish of national culture or national authenticity; our object of study is rather

Disneyfication, the production of simulacra of national cultures; and tourism, the

industry that organizes the consumption of those simulacra and those spectacles of

images” (“New Literary History” 379).

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 Since my project is vast in time and comparative in spirit, I have decided to

narrow down the Asian scope of analysis so as to exploit the availability of sources

and the production of conclusions of more historical nature. The choice of East Asia

as a region of interest is because the Pacific Rim (mainly China and Japan) has been

the main point of material and symbolic exchange with Latin America since colonial

times (Hu de Hart 23) and of human migration in the nineteenth century. Actually,

the vast majority of works about Orientalism, travel writing to Asia and the

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circulation of material culture deal with this East Asia, and it is also with the aim of

establishing a dialogue with such works that Disorientations focuses on China and
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Japan. Along the lines of Brazilian historian Rogério Dezem’s Matizes do

“amarelo”: a genese dos discursos sobre os orientais no Brasil 1878-1908, I

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consider it is vital to produce a nuanced account of the historical specificity of Asian

immigration in the Americas in order to delve deeper into the rhetorics and
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imaginary projections of Asia in Latin America.

The critical legacy of Orientalism

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), studies of the

representation of Asia in the Humanities and Social Sciences have been dominated

by this critical approach. Said's idea of orientalism as a discursive strategy by which

European culture was able to manage –and even to produce- the Orient politically,

sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the

post-Enlightenment period, became a remarkably useful tool to reflect upon Eastern