Global South Modernism: Tagore, Victoria Ocampo, and the Geopolitics of Horizontal Relations

Abstract

This article explores cultural dialogues between countries located in the (so-called) global South, focusing on India and Argentina through the nexus between the Bengali author, artist, and educationalist Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and the Argentine writer, publisher, and feminist Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979). The article examines the dialectical tensions that arose out of their encounter in Buenos Aires in 1924 which, while forging productive cultural networks through the globalist paradigms proposed by Ocampo's modernist review SUR and Tagore's Bengal-inflected notion of visva-sahitya – as well as the latter's significant contribution to the Argentine cultural scene – it also brought to the fore the geopolitics of empire by foregrounding India's and Argentina's fraught colonial relations with imperial Britain. 1