Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-vt8vv Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-08-15T06:41:10.914Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - Stranger

Paz’s Peregrinations through Indian Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

Roanne Kantor
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Get access

Summary

This chapter turns to the curatorial role of authors on the countershelf, tracing the impact of Octavio Paz’s sojourn as Mexican ambassador to India (1962–1968) on Indian poets and artists in the little magazine scene of the 1960s and 1970s, including Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geeta Kapur, and Jagdish Swaminathan. While Neruda often formed the image of the countershelf for South Asian authors, Paz was the nearly invisible engine through which that imaginary consolidated. Paz’s sensibility of “strangerhood” reflected his growing interest in the baroque, a form which emerged to aestheticize the rapidly and radically changing concept of the world in the era of colonial expansion. This same strategy was taken up by several creators of Indian little magazines, among whom Paz helped to establish a very particular idea of world-literary friendship: not an increasingly unified and easily digestible singular style but a series of intentionally disorienting enigmas. Both route through Latin American literature of the 1960s, but the 1970s Indian poets set a very different course for global English, one that the rise of the novelists in the 1980s dramatically interrupted and then, essentially, cut off.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Stranger
  • Roanne Kantor, Stanford University, California
  • Book: South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Online publication: 17 February 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039727.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Stranger
  • Roanne Kantor, Stanford University, California
  • Book: South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Online publication: 17 February 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039727.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Stranger
  • Roanne Kantor, Stanford University, California
  • Book: South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Online publication: 17 February 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039727.003
Available formats
×