Octavio Paz’s India

Alejandro A. González-Ormerod

Third World Quarterly, 2014, vol. 35, issue 3, 528-543

Abstract: Third World citizens have the unique difficulty of attempting to self-define as a community independent of colonial Orientalism. This paper explores the emergence of Third World Orientalism, where the people of underdeveloped states are themselves the perpetrators. It critiques scholars’ description of Third World interactions, which simultaneously dismiss the impact of intra-orientalist prejudices as non-existent, unimportant or benign. The use of Paz’s exploration of Indian identity illustrates how the benefit of being even a nuanced, cosmopolitan intellectual was also an alienating weakness in trying to conceive what it meant to be a member of the developing world. Using Paz as a prism, Indians became subject not only to evolving historical circumstances, but also the personal evolution of individuals who studied them. The instability created by these fluctuations made identity inherently paradoxical. Paz creatively conciliated these paradoxes by ultimately embracing them.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2014.895119 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:35:y:2014:i:3:p:528-543

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2014.895119

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().