Introduction

Abstract

The “post-” in “post-magical” realism is a way to embrace the plurality of literary, artistic, and cultural reactions to it, whether as expansions or reconstructions of the origins of the genre, or a mode and an aesthetic and a style, or even a movement. If magical realism is a mode (of cultural expression) as Zamora and Faris propose (9), and as we have discussed in our working group, then this mode works alongside the realist mode, most prevalent and defined and refined by Western culture, expanded into its colonies and dominating almost globally. As an “alternative” to the “objective,” “rational” mode of writing of Western modernity, magical realism has been contrary to the realist “flat” take on being. In an ontological magical realist view, there is more to being than realism proposes. Thus, magical realist writing overflows (in comparison) with beings, layers of actions, histories upon histories, psychological traumas and dramas, and the richness of the Baroque, associated with the specific Latin American Baroque style, supposedly present on every page. But the “dichotomy encoded in the critical term ‘magical realism’ positions its users outside of the world portrayed in the ‘magical realist’ texts we wish to enter, for the term implies a clearer opposition between magic and reality than exists within those texts” (Zamora and Farris 3). Therefore, magical realism might also be a mode of reading, even a way of othering that the reader enjoys or rejects. A critique of such use of the magical realist framework would be part of post-magical realism’s theoretical work. It is this critical problem that this journal issue explores.