Copyright by Roanne Leah Kantor 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Roanne Leah Kantor Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: CARTOGRAPHIES OF ENGAGEMENT: THE PARALLELS AND INTERSECTIONS OF LATIN AMERICAN AND SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Committee: César Salgado, Supervisor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Rupert Snell Syed Akbar Hyder Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba CARTOGRAPHIES OF ENGAGEMENT: THE PARALLELS AND INTERSECTIONS OF LATIN AMERICAN AND SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Roanne Leah Kantor, BA, MA Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Acknowledgements A dissertation and the degree of which it is the culmination are not solitary efforts. My first hearty thanks belong to the members of my committee, for their willingness to follow me on this adventure to a “far-off, unknown” destination. Special thanks are due to my committee chair, César A. Salgado, for always believing in and defending this project, and to Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, for her thorough and patient attention to each chapter. I am also very grateful to two UT professors who were not on my committee but whose advice and support have been invaluable to my graduate career: Karen Grumberg and Snehal Shingavi. In addition to the support offered by the program in Comparative Literature, dissertation would not have been possible without the intellectual environment facilitated by the LLILAS-Benson and the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas. I also owe debts of gratitude for those who supported particular chapters. My thanks to Syed Akbar Hyder and Daniel Majchrowicz for organizing the safarnamah roundtable where “My Heart, My Fellow Traveler” was born. Thanks also to Max Bruce, Sean Pue, Chris Moffat, and the participants of the 2015 Yale Modern South Asia Workshop for helping to develop it over the course of the next year. “Transmigrations” would not have been possible without the generous support of the Tinker Foundation, and the scholars and archivists whom it allowed me to meet during my research in Chile. Thanks especially to Ricardo Loebell for his exceptional generosity, and to Debra Castillo, for acting as a champion of this chapter. Thanks to Ignacio López-Calvo, Cristián Ricci, and the anonymous reviewers at Transmodernity for their astute comments iv on the article version of “Chasing Your (Josie) Bliss,” a piece that went through many evolutions before finding its final shape. Finally, my deepest thanks are due to the friends and family who accompanied me on this journey. Thank you to my colleagues in the UT Program in Comparative Literature – especially Frank Strong, Katie Logan, Dusty Hixenbaugh and Hannah Alpert-Abrams – my colleagues in South Asian Studies at Cornell University – especially Andrew Amstutz and Anaar Desai-Stephens – and my friend and long-time colleague Rebecca Lippman at UCLA, whose valuable insights have helped shape this work. Thanks to my beloved family both natal and affine. Among these, I owe special thanks to my parents, Susan and Glenda, my in-laws Patricia and Alan, and most especially, to my sister Sonja, my own “twin in a different landscape,” who has gone through everything – including writing a book – in parallel with me. Thank you last and most of all, to my husband Hayden, who was there for me every step of the way, and who has always been my most careful and constant reader. v CARTOGRAPHIES OF ENGAGEMENT: THE PARALLELS AND INTERSECTIONS OF LATIN AMERICAN AND SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Roanne Leah Kantor, Ph.D The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: César Salgado “Cartographies of Engagement: The Parallels and Intersections of Latin American and South Asian Authors,” establishes comparisons between Latin American authors who lived in South Asia and their South Asian contemporaries from 1906 to the present. Working in South Asian literatures in English, Hindi and Urdu, and Latin American literature in Spanish, this project recovers a century-long literary exchange between two previously unassociated regions and suggests a shared trajectory of professionalization for authors in the Global South. In the first half of the twentieth century, authors from both regions traveled abroad as a means of supporting themselves – whether through cultural exchanges, diplomatic postings, or in visiting positions with foreign universities. I suggest that their growing commitment to transnational solidarity was not a precondition for these travels, but the product of them. In the second half of the century, authors from both regions experienced a radical shift as their writing gained cache in the global north. I therefore conclude by demonstrating the connections between the emergence of Latin American Boom literature and its translation into English in the 1960s, its influence on the subsequent generation of South Asian Anglophone writers, and their own emergence as a global phenomenon beginning in the 1980s with Midnight’s Children. vi In bringing together two world areas that are rarely associated, it reveals a paradox in contemporary methods of comparative literary scholarship: even as disciplines expand to accommodate an ever greater diversity of language traditions, the frameworks for comparing those traditions remain remarkably narrow. In mapping the circulation of authors and texts around the globe, literary scholars have typically relied on just two different types of what I call “literary cartographies.” First, “cartographies of domination,” describe historical relations of power, as elaborated in postcolonial and decolonial theories. Second, “cartographies of contiguity,” describe relations based on physical proximity and historical routes of exchange, such as area studies designations or the more recent “oceanic turn.” By contrast, this project carves out methodological space for “cartographies of engagement,” which highlight the routes of authors and texts that contravene larger patterns of political domination and economic exchange. vii Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................ xi Introduction: On Literary Cartography .................................................................. 1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 What is Literary Cartography? ....................................................................... 2 Routes over Territories: What is Cartography of Engagement? .................... 5 East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Locating the Ethics of “Engagement” ............................................................................................................. 10 Let’s Get Engaged: Comparison as Tactics ................................................. 13 Contents ....................................................................................................... 15 Part I: Parallels .................................................................................... 15 I. “My Heart, My Fellow Traveler”: Webs of Engagement and the Itineraries of Faiz Ahmed Faiz ......................................... 15 II. Trans-migrations: A Chilean Novelist, an Indian Poet, and Transcending the Limits of Queer Regionalism ............... 16 Part II: Intersections ............................................................................ 17 III. Chasing your (Josie) Bliss: The Troubling Critical Afterlife of Pablo Neruda’s Burmese Lover ........................................ 17 IV. Sojourners: The Shared Stylistics of Latin Americans Living in India .................................................................................. 18 V. “Chronicle of a Boom Foretold: The Rise of South Asian Literature in Light of Latin America” ............................... 19 “My Heart, My Fellow Traveler”: Webs of Engagement and the Itineraries of Faiz Ahmed Faiz .................................................................................................. 21 Introduction: Perfect Understanding ............................................................ 21 Fragile Futurity: Prison Verses 1948-1954 .................................................. 27 Faiz and The Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case ........................................ 29 Neruda and the Ley Maldita ................................................................ 30 Aesthetics of Confinement .................................................................. 32 Visions for the Future: Cuban Prose, 1973 .................................................. 38 The Soviet Sphere ............................................................................... 38 viii Safarnamah-e Cuba ............................................................................ 39 The Aesthetics of Revolution .............................................................. 41 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 44 Trans-Migrations: A Chilean Novelist, an Indian Poet, and Transcending the Limits of Queer Regionalism .................................................................................. 46 Introduction .................................................................................................. 46 Conversion Therapy: The Queer