Magical Realism in the Context of Cold War Cultural Interventions

The rejection of ‘committed’ literature by Latin American magical realist writers is legible within Cold War cultural interventions and the tensions between politics and aesthetics. For some critics, the rejection of such literature by most Boom authors evoked the dictum of anti-communist politics espoused by the United States, which had institutionalised modernism as a counter to Soviet programmatic realism. However, this chapter argues that Latin American magical realism responded instead to a self-affirmation of the author’s individual/national autonomy against the political dicta coming first from the Soviet Union and later from Cuba. The chapter will then explore the uses of magical realism in other national contexts during the Cold War, where the form became progressively more aligned with ‘free world’ ideologies.