Octavio Paz's Writings on India Inspire Global South Art Connections

Octavio Paz's works 'In Light of India' (1995) and 'A Tale of Two Gardens: Poems from India, 1952-1995' (1997) explore connections between Mexico and India through a poetics of the glimpse, emphasizing partial viewing and comparative sense-perception. These texts model a method of seeing without full clarity or control, finding oneself in the other. Paz's approach anticipates twenty-first-century initiatives like the School of the South programs by the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation in 2022, inspired by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García's 1935 formulation. His comparative framework offers new directions for global art history and postcolonial critique, relating artists and intellectuals across the global south. The article, published in ARTMargins Volume 12, Issue 2, pages 31-42, with doi:10.1162/artm_a_00350, analyzes these articulations of south-south relations.