Transpacific Development: Chinese Cities in the Latin American Literary Imagination

Black and white photo of an indoor/outdoor hallway in 20th century architecture.A full report of Transpacific Development: Chinese Cities in the Latin American Literary Imagination can be found here.

During the mid-20th century, Latin America dreamed of participating in world history. Developmentalism was the name intellectuals and policy makers gave this dream, a modernization theory that advanced economic growth by means of mass industrialization. The industrial city became the privileged site of political and cultural struggles. While it is true that most modernization projects put Western industrial cities as the paradigm of development, a group of Latin American writers gazed at non-Western models. China, in particular, offered an alternative road to economic and social progress since the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. I will compile a series of travel accounts Latin American authors wrote about Chinese cities when developmentalism was the dominating economic ideology. My aim is to explore these literary representations in order to produce an anthology, design a course and create a lesson plan which deals with the impact of Chinese modernization projects over Latin American urban imagination in the developmentalist period.

Researcher: Rodrigo del Río

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