부산대학교 도서관

The aim of the present research is to analyze the image of the Chinese in Latin American literature in the 21st century. It’s a novel topic which is little studied until now. The innovation of this research is not taking the country of China or its culture as the object, but the image of Chinese subjects or individuals. It is intended, on the one hand, to analyze the representation of the Chinese profiles and, on the other hand, to summarize the similarities and differences among the images of the characters, as well as the function and possible reason of such images. To achieve this objective, we have chosen six works in our corpus and divided them into two classes: that of the Chinese perceived by another subject from within or outside the Chinese culture. In the end, a preliminary reflection is added, prior to the final conclusions, to present three recent works, with which we extend the corpus to the present year, just before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in China. In the present thesis, we have introduced several theories: orientalism, imagology and stereotype, the last two are rarely used to study such topics. And some relatively new concepts are also included in the analysis, such as, the concept of auto-orientalism and the idea of Michel Foucault's heterotopia. The research shows that there still is a great number of orientalist stereotypes about the Chinese in Latin American literature. We believe that some writers create an oriental world, and the repeated stereotypical characteristics of Chinese characters demonstrate their orientalist strategies to attract and satisfy the values of Latin American readers. On the other hand, some writers, by exaggerating the caricatured image of the Chinese or directly exposing the prejudices about them, reduce or mock, to a certain extent, the stereotypes. But the most important thing is to reveal the problems of their own society: as the imagology indicates, the reflection on oneself is often carried out from the description of the Other.