ABSTRACT
Given the different historical trajectory of Latin America’s anti-colonial project, its connections with the Afro-Asian projects of political and economic sovereignty, which gave rise to transnational anti-imperialist networks and wherein lie the origins of the idea of the Global South, are only beginning to be studied in their entirety. This chapter focuses on the post-Bandung cultural consolidation of the imaginary of the Third World beyond Asia and Africa by including Latin America in this transnational flow of ideas. For this, the chapter looks at the travel writings of the 1967 Nobel Laureate for literature, Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, 1899–1974), who came to India to attend the Asian Writers’ Conference held in December 1956 in New Delhi. We look at how these chronicles on Asia, and India in particular, embody “the Bandung spirit” and constitute an important body of writing that brings Latin America into the ambit of literary solidarity that was being constituted across the Afro-Asian networks. The chapter also looks at the translation into Spanish of a novel by Bhabani Bhattacharya by Asturias and Blanca Mora de Araujo in the context of the role of translation in the cultural project of the 1960s.
