ABSTRACT
The histoires croisées of the global South are becoming an increasingly relevant field of research, but these South-South interrelationships remain, with a few exceptions, largely unacknowledged. This chapter focuses on cultural and literary exchanges between Latin America and India. It shows that such horizontal exchanges can lead to an articulation of similarities with relation to a third party like Europe beyond the bipolar vertical structure of difference, such as North versus South or center versus periphery. This productively decenters the genealogy of Orientalism in Latin America, in that discourses such as Spanish-American modernismo, for example, can no longer be understood as a mimesis of European-style Orientalism. On the contrary, they evince their own logic, context, and agenda. The chapter analyzes the works of Vicente Fatone in Argentina during the first half of the twentieth century and those of José Vasconcelos in post-revolutionary Mexico. These cases unfold the heterogeneity fundamental to the lettered city. This chapter addresses key questions such as an early consciousness of world literature, the institutionalization of so-called oriental knowledge or wisdom via philosophy, and the confluence of East and West in a world revolutionary movement articulated from the South.
