Patricia Novillo-Corvalán to talk at Goethe University

Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán from the Department of Comparative Literature is to be guest speaker at a symposium entitled ‘Envisioning World Literature from the Global South’ at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany on 20-21 January 2016.

Patricia’s paper entitled ‘South-to-South Encounters: Pablo Neruda and Ceylonese Modernism’ explores the formation and consolidation of modernist dialogues located in the global South by examining the cultural networks fostered by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda during his consular career in South Asia in the late 1920s.

Neruda was assigned to diplomatic positions in British Burma (now Myanmar) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), followed by brief consular stints in Java (now Jakarta) and Singapore, over an intensive period of five years (1927-1931). Neruda’s complex émigré status is problematised by the fact that he moved from a former Spanish colony on the ‘fringes’ of the Western world (he usually referred to his native Temuco as an ‘obscure province’) to a succession of British colonial outposts. In so doing, Neruda challenges the notion that aesthetic innovation is the product of the West through a migratory trajectory that moves from South America to South Asia, slotting in European capitals such as Paris and Madrid as fleeting stopovers, rather than final destinations. Such cultural encounters in the global South map out a non-Eurocentric migratory movement that rethinks the production of modernism from colonial and postcolonial spaces that can significantly revise and expand the contours of modernism.

By skipping over the centres of modernism, Neruda foregrounds the creative potential of the global South, while showing that these south-to-south encounters can reshape and potentially enrich cultural relations with the global North. In agreement with Susan Stanford Friedman, this paper proposes a ‘planetary’ mode of reading that tracks ‘the circulation of aesthetic modernisms on a transnational landscape’ in order to recuperate vital networks of cultural exchange between former European colonies, as well as the reception and circulation of Neruda’ poetry in the metropolitan centres of modernism.