August Wilson famously and often stated that his influences primarily consisted of the “four B’s:” the blues, Romare Bearden, Amiri Baraka, and Jorge Luis Borges. While the blues, Bearden, and Baraka tend to get the most attention, Wilson’s debt to Borges remains abstract and elusive – something that made perfect sense in his mind, but is difficult for readers and theatergoers to bring into sharp focus. This chapter provides an overview of Wilson’s comments on Borges and offer two stories by Borges, “Shakespeare’s Memory” (1983) and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote” (1941), as texts through which aspects of Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (2003) might be understood.

This chapter touches on three moments in Modern Hebrew realist literature. The earliest is the late nineteenth century, in which Modern Hebrew was first widely read. Focusing on S. Y. Abramovich’s “In the Secret Place of Thunder,” I argue that the novella’s formal clash between realist and religious social worlds constitutes an attempt to think through the uneven capitalist development of Eastern European Jewish towns in the period. I then turn to Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel, He Walked through the Fields, a novel paradigmatic in the development of narrative interiority in Hebrew realism. I argue that interiority is invented in order to retain the historical perception of a reality that has gone into crisis. The last text is Avivit Mishmari’s 2013 satirical novel The Old Man Lost His Mind. I argue that the novel should be read against its postmodern predecessors, which registered the terminal crisis of older national-hegemonic historicity. In Mishmari’s novel new developments in Israeli capitalist social form – the advent of anti-liberal capitalism alongside older neoliberal sensibilities – are allegorically juxtaposed to one another, in an effort to restart the Israeli historical imagination.

Critics have tended to view magical realism as a global genre or as an organic expression of cultural difference. This chapter suggest that Latin American magical realism articulates in literary and aesthetic terms an essentialist self-conception that also underlies the hegemonic political project in mid-twentieth-century Latin America. I highlight the specificity of Latin American magical realism by reconstructing the lineage of the concept, from its role in interwar discussions of realism and the avant-garde to current incarnations of the genre. Through a discussion of Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), I argue that magical realism, insofar as it renders equivalent the epistemological and the ontological, turns political claims into a function of one’s cultural identity. In so doing, magical realism makes palpable the sort of self-conception projected by development populism in mid-twentieth-century Latin America, a modernization project that could only sustain itself if antagonistic political commitments were neutralized by appeals to a regional or national cultural identity.

This chapter explores a range of narrative fiction in Arabic in addition to two novels that hybridize Anglophone Arab literature with Arabic poetic influences. Theoretically anchored in critiques of bio/necropolitics, forced displacement, magical realist environmentalisms, and planetarity, the chapter examines eco-ambiguous visions of desertness in Ibrahim Al-Koni’s Gold Dust, forest/border thresholds in Hassan Blasim’s “Ali’s Bag,” bio-connective ambivalence in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and Beirut Hellfire Society, and (eco)lienation in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. Stretching from the North African desert to the European forest, from the North American city to contested spaces in the Middle East, the (dis)located works by the diasporic writers addressed here trace the contours of a planetary geoaesthetics that is concerned with borders and their transgression, resistance to immunitary bio/necropower, and reconstructions of comemorative geographies. An Arabic diasporic literary geography hence emerges as an ever-expanding space of encounter for unbounded modes of being, witnessing, telling, and resisting.

This chapter explores the rise of an allegorical mode of imagining in twenty-first-century fiction by Australian women. Analysing a mode of literature associated with universality, ahistoricism and abstraction in such a nationalist, historical and gendered context might appear a contradictory enterprise. However, it is one necessitated by the doubleness of allegory itself, which is marked by an enigmatic and therefore productive relationship between the timeless and historical, the literal and figurative, the aesthetic and material. This chapter examines a range of novels written by Australian women and published in the twenty-first century, focusing on Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), Kathryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace (2017), and Carmel Bird’s Field of Poppies (2019). Existing in the liminal space between fantasy and realism, the allegories surveyed here intersect with various genres, such as the speculative, magical realism and Indigenous futurism, and often veer into the dystopian. They provide an uncanny and defamiliarising model for drawing attention to contemporary national problems related to gender, the postcolonial, asylum seekers and the Anthropocene.

Chapter 4 seeks to understand the logic of cultural rehabilitation as it applies to aspects of indigenous belief, knowledge and practice denigrated by colonialism and apartheid. This chapter situates the concept of indigenous knowledge in relation to that of the ‘indigenous resource base’ as formulated by Ato Quayson. Similar to other African writers, authors like Zakes Mda, Thando Mgqolozana and Diale Tlholwe make judicious use of this resource base, incorporating elements of myth, folklore and ritual into their narratives, thereby encouraging recuperation and healing. Recuperative elements in the works of these novelists are, somewhat paradoxically, also linked with a cosmopolitanism sensibility. In the final part of the chapter I consider the varying ways white writers like Brett Bailey, André P. Brink and Marguerite Poland have drawn on African myth, belief and ritual practice for their own purposes.

This chapter examines the tensions between the supporters of two modes of writing Latin America – magical realism and testimonial writing – under the lens of the figures of the falcon and the tortoise, a simile employed by one of Cuba’s first and most prominent theorists of testimonio, Miguel Barnet. It explores how the hybrid mode of testimonio was conceptualized in the first two decades of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and, more generally, in Latin America, and how these concepts presented a challenge to the literary establishment in Latin America and beyond. Through examining the key positioning of Cuban testimonio in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution, the chapter argues that the role assigned to testimonio in these early conceptual formulations shared many commonalities with the aims of magical realism, but also some important differences based on positionality and power. As such, the schism of 1971 represented not only a political fracture between Cuba and some Latin American nations but also a tipping point, or moment of transition, in terms of Latin American literatures’ potential in the world.

This chapter examines the tensions between the supporters of two modes of writing Latin America – magical realism and testimonial writing – under the lens of the figures of the falcon and the tortoise, a simile employed by one of Cuba’s first and most prominent theorists of testimonio, Miguel Barnet. It explores how the hybrid mode of testimonio was conceptualized in the first two decades of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and, more generally, in Latin America, and how these concepts presented a challenge to the literary establishment in Latin America and beyond. Through examining the key positioning of Cuban testimonio in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution, the chapter argues that the role assigned to testimonio in these early conceptual formulations shared many commonalities with the aims of magical realism, but also some important differences based on positionality and power. As such, the schism of 1971 represented not only a political fracture between Cuba and some Latin American nations but also a tipping point, or moment of transition, in terms of Latin American literatures’ potential in the world.

This chapter considers the “globalization” of magical realism in the 1980s and its relationship to the consolidation of postcolonial literary studies in the same moment. Even as Latin America was being progressively marginalized in favor of taxonomic accounts of magical realism as a signature postcolonial style, Salman Rushdie and other South Asian authors became “pilgrims.” They use textual journeys to Latin America to declare the centrality of that tradition to their own forays into literary magic. Through references to Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and others, Rushdie and Zulfikar Ghose pose Latin America as a funhouse mirror that reflects back a hyperbolically distorted but ultimately referential image of postcolonial political life. Ghose is joined by Anita Desai in his approach to Latin America as a concave mirror, one that allows inverting the implied political meaning of institutional affiliation in “America” by redirecting their attachment southward. Finally, Sunny Singh interrogates the postcolonial critical desire for magical realism to act as a transparent window onto traditions of home, framing it instead as a looking glass – both opposite and identical.

Chapter 3 reads Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in Lumumba’s Congo, and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, a neohistorical romance set in nineteenth-century Paraguay. Bennett’s work unsettles late imperial English realist conventions to contest the apolitical apathy that characterizes much contemporary fiction about Africa and offers a related critique of Irish revisionism. Enright’s experimental novel explores the meaning of ‘female adventure’ and ‘emancipation’ in a catastrophic wartime setting. Both novels express anxieties about whether the novel as form can offer something more than just passive or compromised testimonies to violence in the Global South. In both instances, new modes of Irish political fiction struggle to release themselves from inherited colonial discourses.

Realism has occupied an ambivalent place in the career of the novel through the twentieth century. After its heyday in the nineteenth century, realism was abandoned by many literary movements—most famously Anglo-American modernism and Latin-American magical realism. This chapter argues that realism has made a comeback in contemporary times through a postcolonial allegorical appropriation of the novel where realism functions to critique literal and epistemic violence and project alternative worlds. Contemporary world realism arises from a nexus of ethical, epistemological and aesthetic concerns that position the novel as a space for reasoned reflection on the traumatic emergence of the contemporary world system. The chapter explores the implicit historicism of world realist aesthetics and novelists’ engagement with conflicts about historical process, world-systems, and temporality shaping debates in world literature today.

To a God Unknown has typically been viewed as one of John Steinbeck’s most problematic novels, not least because of the its jarring mixture of realistic and fantastic elements. This chapter reevaluates Steinbeck’s early novel by placing it in the context of emergent ideas about race and climate in the American West. To a God Unknown is an experimental work that attempts to fuse realist and symbolic modes in ways parallel to the genre of magical realism, which first developed in post-Expressionist art of the 1920s. By exploring Steinbeck’s thinking during his composition of the novel, particularly his interest in “race psychopathology” and his reading in early climate science, we discover how Steinbeck’s magical realism is a pioneering attempt to understand and represent the aridity and drought that define the climate of the West and have profound implications for the kind of human society it can sustain. Through formal analysis in historical context, the chapter lays the groundwork for considerations of Steinbeck as a writer of the Anthropocene and of environmentalist critique.

While the naming of Caribbean works as speculative fiction has enabled the possibility of this regionally specific genre to take shape in the twenty-first century, there has been a long tradition of literary works that seek to represent alternative and multiple realities by fragmenting realist forms and employing the rich folkloric and spiritual traditions of the region. Figures such as the soucouyant and mermaid often symbolize gendered realities, the zombie represents psychological trauma, and spirits emphasize the continuation of the past in the present. Drawing on elements of fantasy, these works are thus often deeply informed by socio-political concerns and traumatic events, and arguably transform, rather than bypass, the historic character of Caribbean literature. Through the utopian/dystopian scenarios recognizable within speculative literature, readers are returned to the issues of memory, history and identity, while also pushing at the imaginative limits of community and embodiment in their creation of alternate possibilities.

Magical realism is a world literary genre that stages and enables radical crossing of illicit boundaries. Intradiegetically, the mode explores questions of faith on the same ontological level as rationality. In the Arabic and Hebrew-Mizrahi contexts, magical realism serves to puncture the purportedly rational language of the state with the fantastic as a vehicle of minoritarian empowerment. These texts narrate subaltern histories without constantly reproducing the hegemonic language of Othering and subjugation. They disrupt dominant national, ethnic, religious, racial and gender historiographies and ontologies in their respective contexts, but this disruption is all the more powerful when Arabic and Hebrew texts are placed in relation extradiegetically. The networks of relationality created by this dual reading allow us to see ‘Arabness’ with the proverbial third eye – from the positions of minority and majority simultaneously, thereby allowing for a complex, textured and multifaceted understanding of its identitarian and performative meanings.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

Tracing its roots back to Romanticism and invoking a counter-realism associated with postmodernism, North American magical realism invites a variety of communities to resist inequity and oppressive rhetoric and culture and to revise historical, social and religious traditions. Its canon includes North American writers as diverse as Toni Morrison; Latina authors Cristina García, Ana Castillo and Julia Alvarez; feminist magical realists Laurie Foos and Aimee Bender; Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch; and indigenous authors Louise Erdrich, Thomas King and James Welch. A new wave of writers drawing upon magical realism – including Kelly Link, David Levithan, Micah Dean Hicks, Anna-Marie McLemore and Leslye Walton, and often using young adult literature – continues to redefine 'American-ness'. Magical realism carves out space for developing better understandings of established and new (or newly acknowledged) communities, allowing mainstream and disenfranchised authors alike – bound by geography, race, gender or other collective categorizations of identity – entry into the main discourse.

The countries of Australasia, from the continent of Australia to the many small island nations of the Pacific, were colonised by European imaginations as places of strangeness or paradisiacal wonder. Those fantasies stand in stark contrast to the brute realities of colonialism. This chapter examines how Australasian magical realist literature ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonialism. This chapter's overview is focused on Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, where the circumstances of colonisation encouraged dominant traditions of fiction writing. However, the chapter also recognises how magical realist literature from Australasia engages traditional forms of storytelling to rupture the hegemonies of empire. Indeed, Indigenous authors have been significant contributors to Australasian magical realist writing, which ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonial history to represent experiences of trauma and dispossession, but also to assert a dynamic and polysemous sense of survival embodied in the dynamic and polysemous nature of magical realist fiction itself.

Instead of seeing Boom authors as the beneficiaries of international economic developments and marketing campaigns or as passive victims of US political propaganda during the Cold War, it would be wiser to acknowledge their ideological and literary agency. Magical realism, as well as other Boom aesthetic choices, including modernist experimentalism, responded to two separate developments. First, independently from a potential influence of CIA-backed political propaganda in Latin America, they were an inevitable outcome of the direct literary influence of US and European masters. Second, magical realism and other modernist formal experimentation used by the Boom authors, rather than being a nod to anti-communist US propaganda during the Cold War era, were a direct and personal reaction precisely against the strict internationalist political dictums coming first from the Soviet Union and then from Cuba. They responded to a self-affirmation of the authors' autonomy and individual/national approach against Soviet and Cuban revolutionary impositions.

This chapter explores the controversial relationship of magical realism to indigeneity from its beginnings in indigenismo in mid-twentieth century Latin America to that of contemporary indigenous writers in Australia and the Americas. It reveals that the relationship of magical realism to both indigeneity and indigenous writing is fraught with cultural politics that reflect the political challenges faced by indigenous communities in relation to settler culture. This is explored in three parts: firstly, through considering the appropriation of indigenous ideas and motifs into early magical realist; secondly, through the propensity of critics in postcolonial studies to identify works by indigenous writers incorporating traditional stories as magical realist; and finally, through the writing of Alexis Wright (Waanyi) and Eden Robinson (Haisla), who create a new direction in magical realism that is embedded in local indigenous cultural systems and simultaneously draws upon the transcultural hybridity within contemporary indigenous life.