Unreliable Documentation: Maps of the Orient in Bernardo Carvalho

• In Event: Asia/Asians in Contemporary Latin American Culture

Abstract

The “Orient" has often offered to those who explore it the challenge of mapping its unknown territories; usually, however, these maps provide a false sense of security as travelers lose themselves in mysterious lands and cultures (or so they choose to see it). European Orientalism assembles the contradiction of wanting to establish order in exotic territories and yet maintaining a sense of disorder within them. This conflicted desire is distorted when it enters Latin America, which shares with the Middle East and Asia the effects of that same European fantasy of order/disorder. Bernardo Carvalho’s Mongólia presents the uneasy interaction of Latin American mystery and Orientalist geography in a single text. What results is a narrative wandering between similar voices, contemporary characters lost without modern technology or first-world resources, and maps that, detailed though they may be, dissolve into abstract peripheral geographies. In today’s world, someone can only become lost in an inconceivable, perhaps fictional, space, somewhere beyond the means of GPS and the Internet. For the Brazilian characters of the novel, this space is the Mongolian hinterland, explored haphazardly in a journey that seems to lack a destination. Despite all the forms of documentation—journals, photographs, maps—used in the quest to find the missing citizen of the story, the absent technology sends the characters back in time into an Orientalist unknowable territory. Mongólia examines the limits of documentation in overlapping peripheries, blurring the borders of Brazil and Mongolia alike.

Author

• Allison E White, Tulane University