Latinos and Magic Realism

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It is dangerous to cultivate binaries, but we all do it, at least as prelude to undoing them. Let’s then entertain the notion that for many literary scholars magical realism constitutes a triumph, a genre for the times with an expanding worldwide audience, while for many others it is tantamount to a compensatory aesthetic, or even a dead-end ideology aiming to mask its racialist tendencies. Is it possible to tease out the core elements of this glaring split in order to unearth an entangling web of imbuing contradictions relevant to all sides? Moreover, where do Latinos and Latinas fit in this convoluted history? I will try to engage this terrain through Latino literature and criticism with the aim to show that it provides a telling window through which to view magical realist debates as well as the lurking questions regarding the role of literature in the age of neoliberalism. I will not deal with the history of magical and marvelous realism in European art or Latin American literature or its evolution throughout the twentieth century. These stages are, by now, well documented and often referenced, particularly through foundational anthologies such as Magical Realism: History, Theory, and Community assembled by Louis Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris in 1995.1 I will, however, begin by broaching the general sense one gathers from that volume’s contemporary essays— that is, the notion that magical realism had not only arrived but could be largely welcomed by comparative literature for reasons that can be roughly charted as follows:a. Magical realism convokes a rich array of related literary forms, opening up new links to earlier periods and different narrative modes.