Pop fetishes an d transgenic cults: Remixing the magical -folkloric tradition in global Latin -American fantastic fiction

Abstract

This essay aims at studying the special codification of the magic and superstitious element (rooted in the peripheral, local tradition) in the Latin American fantasy short story of the new millennium, as testified by the oeuvre of a whole new generation of authors such as Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, Luciano Lamberti, Liliana Colanzi and Federico Falco, whose texts, triggering an intense dialogue with the classics of the genre from the sixties and seventies and intentionally trivializing some of their most notorious achievements (most of all the spectralized second coming of the autochthonous, originary past buried alive in the set-up of the postcolonial modernity), show a tendency toward the contamination of the canonical reference images and structures of the ominous, now impossible to frame in any clear cultural dynamic, or to refer to any readable axiologic statement. By doing so they highlight the current annexation of the surviving peripheral cultures to the amorphous patois of the global, where any tradition, direction and origin is neutralized.