LITR 5731 Colonial-Postcolonial Literature                                      1st Research Posts 2009

Charles Colson

18 October 2009

Magic Realism: Latin American Postcolonial Literature?

     My first graduate degree was in Latin American history, so as I began to read more and more about postcolonial literature, I was surprised at the paucity of coverage for that region.  After all, the term “neocolonial” was ubiquitous in the writings of historians.  Dependency theory offered a popular means to explain the relations of the Latin American periphery with the European-American center.  The subaltern studies approach[1] to history had made the migration from South Asia to South America, suggesting to me that there would be postcolonial influences to be found in the region’s literature.  I knew already that the colonial/postcolonial divide in mainland Latin America is not as clear as it is in the Caribbean, Africa, or the Indian subcontinent and followed a different progression of events.  Political independence had arrived by 1826 for Spain’s colonies (with the notable exceptions of Cuba and Puerto Rico), but after almost three centuries of cultural and ethnic mestizaje, or mixture, the distinction between colonizers and colonized was not nearly as clear as in many other locations.  However, I was interested to note, during the late 1940s and 1950s when postcolonial literature was developing in other parts of the world, magic realism appeared in Latin America.  Did magic realism qualify as “postcolonial”?  I decided that the goal of my first research post would be to find out why there was so little coverage of Latin American postcolonial literature and what—if any—characteristics Latin American magic realism shares with the postcolonial literature of other regions.

     I began my research with websites.  I had previously seen parts of Emory University’s Postcolonial Studies website at http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/ since it was linked from the course website for Dr. White’s LITR 5731, but further exploration yielded information more relevant to my question.  The list of authors included Latin Americans, Africans, and one North American.  The “Terms and Issues” entries were helpful as background and included one on the definition, themes, and characteristics of magical realism.  Another helpful resource, http://www.postcolonialweb.org, came out of efforts at Brown University.  The home page illustrated the same problem I had noted elsewhere, however.  The color-coded map of the world and the links below reflected what Bill Ashcroft has called the “great omission from the early development of postcolonial theory.”  There was no representation of the “oldest, second largest, and most complex European empire—that of Spain“ (25).  Upon further exploration, I found that portions of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures had been included under the heading of “Political Discourse” and provided useful background on the development of postcolonial literatures and the relation between English studies and postcolonial literatures.  Links within the site that dealt with themes in theories of postcolonial literature supplied me with information regarding characteristics that might be compared with magic realism.  While websites such as these provided necessary background information, perhaps the more valuable were their references to other, more focused scholarly works.

The second phase of my research was directed toward journal articles and monographs (both print and electronic).  Suzanne Baker’s “Binarisms and Duality: Magic Realism and Postcolonialism,” online at http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/36/Baker.html, was directly applicable to my questions.  While noting the problematic nature of the terms magic realism and postcolonialism, Baker draws examples from Canadian and Australian texts to argue that “the most dramatic effect of the colonization process is that the colonized are forced to occupy two conflicting worlds or spaces” (n. pag.).  Magic realism, with its acceptance of both the realistic and the fantastic, creates a hybrid or “dual spatiality.”  Its “subversive possibilities,” Baker concludes, offer a means of resistance to the imperial center’s realist depiction of a single unified worldview (ibid.).  Stephen Slemon’s “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse” carries the idea of binarisms still further, focusing on the opposition of the representational code of realism and that of fantasy in two Canadian magic realist novels:

Since the ground rules of these two worlds are incompatible, neither one can fully come into being, and each remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the “other,” a situation which creates disjunction within each of the separate discursive systems, rendering them with gaps, absences, and silences. (409)

Both of the novels he examines thematize a kind of postcolonial discourse, Slemon says, involving a plurality of voices, the recovery of silenced voices, and “marginalized presences press[ing] toward the center” (420).   In this context, he proposes, the magic realist text’s narrative language (like the “speaking mirror” of García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude) reflects the real conditions of speech and cognition within the social relations of a postcolonial culture (411).

The investigation of my original questions took me into both history and literary theory—the old and the new fields of my graduate education.  The amalgamation of previous knowledge with what I have learned from my recent reading leads me to believe that the reason for the comparative lack of Latin American coverage in the field of postcolonial literature can be found in the historical bases of colonization, decolonization, and the rise of “English studies.”   As Santiago Colás has pointed out, Edward Said’s definition of colonization did not distinguish between the process that the Spanish crown began in 1492 and that which the British crown began in 1757.  Not only did the “implantation of settlements” in the New World and the Indian subcontinent occur at different historical moments, but the colonizers belonged to different nations and to different classes within those nations.  Those nations occupied different international positions.   The settled territories were geographically distinct, the colonization was accomplished through different financial and technological means, and the inhabitants developed distinct social and cultural habits (383).  Decolonization actually came about as the result of a conservative backlash among the criollo colonists in the context of Napoleonic domination of the metropolitan center and it was virtually complete more than a century before Britain’s colonies began the process.  The historical position of English as a “power language” and the privileging of the literature written in that language led to the Anglocentric focus of the majority of postcolonial studies.  Spanish-speaking America does not share that background.  Not only does Latin America not fit the postcolonial historical and cultural model, but Latin American intellectuals are wary of (if not resistant to) what they see as the imposition of a EuroAmerican theory.  Not nearly as many of them have participated in the discourse of postcolonial literature as have those from former British colonies.  While magic realism was itself the literary representation of German art critic Franz Roh’s art category, it was adopted as a way of representing and responding to the enigmas of everyday reality in Latin America.  First during the 1940s and 1950s, later during the “boom” period of the late 1950s and 1960s, the “badge of magical realism . . . signified a kind of uniqueness or difference from mainstream culture ” (Slemon 407).  In short, it can be seen as representing resistance to the imperial center.  Magic realists incorporate various techniques that have been linked to postcolonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature.  Study of magic realism from other regions has yielded insights into the commonalities of magical realism with the wider field of postcolonial literature.  Baker notes the binarisms of “white and non-white, civilized and barbaric, colonizer and colonized, vocal and silent, center and periphery” in Australian novels (n. pag.).  Based on his reading of Canadian texts, Slemon argues that the representation of social relations is “templated into the text’s language of narration and into the text’s thematic structure” in three ways: a transformational regionalism that is “metonymic of the postcolonial culture as a whole,” the “foreshortening of history so that the time scheme of the novel metaphorically contains the long process of colonization and its aftermath,” and the “thematic foregrounding of those gaps, absences, and silences produced by the colonial encounter” (411).  Such readings from former British colonies make it clear that not only is this genre of the former Spanish colonies a useful tool in postcolonial literature for adding depth and emphasis to its works, its coupling of the normal or natural with the fantastic or supernatural in the common world setting is a powerful and effective method of projecting the postcolonial experience to readers of all backgrounds (Bahri).