Intersections of Latin American and South

Asian Literature in the Twentieth Century

LATIN AMERICASOUTH ASIA March 7, 2016 - No comments

A review of Cartographies of Engagement: The Parallels and Intersections of Latin American and
South Asian Literature in the Twentieth Century, by Roanne Leah Kantor.
In her dissertation, The Parallels and Intersections of Latin American and South Asian Literature in
the Twentieth Century, Roanne Leah Kantor has three main objectives: firstly, to establish
“comparisons between Latin American authors who lived in South Asia and their South Asian
contemporaries from 1906 to the present” (p. vi) and secondly, to thereby recover a literary
exchange that spans a full century in time and several thousands of kilometres in space: from
Latin America to South Asia, two regions that comparative literary scholarship had yet to
associate. This allows Kantor to expand the existing methodological framework of comparative
literary scholarship—her third objective.
Kantor departs from what she sees as the two main methodological approaches in the field:
“cartographies of domination” and “cartographies of contiguity”. The first describes analytical
approaches that focus on historical relations of power, such as postcolonial studies, and the
second focuses on “relations based on physical proximity and historical routes of exchange”.
Kantor finds neither methodological approach suitable for her study and therefore develops a
methodological framework that she terms “cartographies of engagement”. It highlights the more
personal routes of authors and texts around the globe, which do not automatically follow the
lines “of political domination and economic exchange” (p. vii).
Throughout her dissertation, Kantor traces the personal routes of authors and texts from Latin
America to South Asia, and from South Asia to Latin America, with case studies and critical
readings of both primary literature and already existing scholarship on authors and texts. Her
own research thereby contributes to Latin American literary scholarship and South Asian
Studies—two well-established fields in their own right as well as two distinct epicentres of
postcolonial studies. Kantor situates her own study both within and outside these fields of
geographically clearly demarcated scholarly discourses. First, she draws from a wealth of
critical material on authors such as Pablo Neruda, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Octavio Paz. Second,
she bridges these particular cartographies of literature and scholarship.
In Chapter 1, Kantor focuses on a meeting and its repercussions between the Pakistani poet
Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Chilean poet and future Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda in 1962. Kantor
shows how both poets responded to the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War and how
shared experiences of political oppression in their lives produced strikingly similar aesthetics in
their writings—despite and across the huge distance between them. Kantor traces this
“aesthetics of confinement” (p. 32) and its development to an “aesthetics of revolution” (p. 41),
as she calls it, in Neruda’s and Faiz’s collections, and analyses how these aesthetic ideals
compare to the poets’ lived experiences.
The set of writers at the centre of Chapter 2 are the Chilean novelist Augosto d’Halmar and the
South Asian poet Miraji. The connections in this case are not shared experiences of political
oppression, as with Faiz and Neruda, but instead expressions of trans identity in both writers’
lives and works; this enables Kantor to draw new cross-cultural comparisons within the
frameworks of both postcolonial and queer theory. Doing that, Kantor goes against the grain of
previous scholarship that has d’Halmar and Miraji at opposite ends of a colonizer/colonized
binary (p. 49). She sets out to uncover both the “original sense of self” and the “cross-cultural
bonds of identification” (p. 51) that are the results of d’Halmar’s and Miraji’s trans experiences.
In Chapter 3 Kantor revisits Pablo Neruda and, more specifically, his alleged Burmese lover
Josie Bliss. For this chapter, she primarily focuses on archival analysis in order to show how
generations of Neruda scholars have contributed to the Orientalist stereotyping of Josie Bliss,
perpetuating Neruda’s own stereotypical representation of her as the Oriental other. In order to
write against this misrepresentation in Neruda scholarship, Kantor argues, we need to re-
evaluate Orientalism as an academic methodology, and not just focus solely on the Orientalist
tropes of individual texts. This will help us to recognize the intrinsic bias towards an Orientalist
view of the Asian other that Kantor identifies at the heart of Latin American Studies.
In Chapter 4, Kantor focuses on three Latin American sojourners to India and their literary
representations of a country that they found, to varying degrees, unfamiliar and alienating.
Kantor chooses the term sojourner consciously, taking inspiration from Shumei Shih’s use of
“sojourner” (Françoise Lionnet and Shumei Shih, Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005) to describe the lived experiences of someone who falls “in between the
position of tourist and that of a permanent immigrant, both in terms of the purpose of their
journeys and the length of their stays” (p. 101). Kantor focuses on Octavio Paz, Severo
Sarduy, and Josefina Báez, three Latin American sojourners to India, and analyses their
strategies for representing South Asia. As in Chapter 3, Kantor dissects both primary and
secondary literature to unearth misreadings and misrepresentations of the South Asian other.
This time, however, she calls on the readers of Paz, Sarduy, and Báez to dispense with
readymade interpretations that align South Asian referents in the texts with Orientalist
stereotypes. She instead favors a “reparative reading” (Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 124) that allows us “to
understand sojourner texts on their own terms, rather than merely according to our own” (p.
98). In this way, Kantor aligns Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading with her own concept
of cartographies of engagement, to account for individual experiences and representations
rather than pre-established interpretations.
Chapter 5 takes a somewhat different turn to the previous chapters. Kantor moves away from
the close reading and interpretation that constitute the centerpieces of her arguments
throughout the earlier chapters, and instead focuses on the agents in an increasingly
transnational literary market. She does so to highlight the parallels between the Latin American
literary boom of the 1960s and the rise of South Asian literature in English that began two
decades later. Chapter 5 also concludes the dissertation as such.
Each chapter “is defined by a different kind of imaginary through which authors understand the
nature of contact between their two regions” (p. 20). Thus, the structure of her dissertation
mirrors her methodological concept of cartographies of engagement: she presents us with a
collage of case studies that resist strict chronology in favour of a more comprehensive
argument. The project is eminently ambitious in temporal and geographical scope, and in terms
of the material that Kantor engages with. She covers South Asian literatures in English, Hindi
and Urdu, and Latin American literature in Spanish. Kantor meets these challenges with ease
and skill. Her arguments are as convincing and interesting as they are readable, her writing is
clear, her style engaging, and the dissertation as a whole is a joy to read. Her readings of
primary as well as critical material more often than not go against the established grain of
particularly postcolonial scholarship. This allows Kantor to expand the scholarly fields she
engages with and to broaden her own field of comparative literary scholarship both in terms of
content and methodology.
Kantor’s interdisciplinary study will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields, including,
but not limited to, literature, postcolonial studies, history of the book/archival research, and
queer studies.
Christin Hoene
English Literature and British Cultural Studies
The University of Potsdam, Germany
choene@uni-potsdam.de
Primary Sources
Poems and prose by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pablo Neruda, Augosto D’Halmar, Miraji, Octavio Paz,
Severo Sarduy, and Josefina Báez.
Dissertation Information
The University of Texas at Austin. 2015. 184 pp. Primary Advisor: César Salgado.
Image: “A photograph of a Javanese mask used to represent Pablo Neruda’s erstwhile
Burmese lover Josie Bliss at the Neruda Museum in Santiago, Chile.” Courtesy of Fundacción
Pablo Neruda, Santiago, Chile.”