China como patriótico desahogo: usos de la alteridad en los Viajes del chino Dagar-Li-Kao de Fernando Garrido
Annotatsiya
As the culmination of a restless career, Fernando Garrido published in 1880, under the pseudonym El Ermitaño de las Peñuelas, the novel Viajes del chino Dagar-Li-Kao por los países bárbaros de Europa, España, Francia, Inglaterra y otros. Garrido, a leading figure in the birth of Spanish socialism in the 19th century, makes use of a fictitious voyage to Spain by a Chinese writer in order to set up a formal device that enabled a ferocious critique aimed at Spanish society. While Europe was witnessing an intense racialization of representations of the Orient, the positive image of the Chinese that Garrido used is both historically singular and malleable. As a consolidated signifier with an unstable signified, “China” in Viajes del chino Dagar-Li-Kao puts otherness in the service of a “patriotic unburdening” that has Spain as its main focus of interest.