Araceli Tinajero's Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano falls within the present revisionist trend with respect to Spanish American modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The text's uniqueness stems from its focus on allusions to images, artifacts, and thought from the East?primarily Japan?found in central and peripheral writings within the Spanish American movement. The author knows the Japanese language and culture and brings her knowledge to bear in her discussion of modernist writers who, chiefly as chroniclers and correspondents, made their way to the East and there invented/constructed a form of exoticism (Orientalism, following but diverging from Edward Said) while discovering affinities between non-European tendencies within their own American environment and Eastern culture. The result of this encounter was a unique, non-European Orientalism. Drawing on ethnography, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, and travel theory, Tinajero analyzes a selection of modernist texts to show how writing at the ""margin"" of Western modernism-modernity is at once within and without the main-stream. The examination of Oriental cultural artifacts in modernista texts contributes to our understanding of modernism, of the East-West encounter, and of the culturally specific configurations of these phenomena in South America . Tinajero's concept of Orientalism focused on Spanish American modernism is a fresh approach. It represents a valuable contribution to Spanish American modernist scholarship.
