An Ever-Expanding World Literary Genre: Defining Magic Realism on Wikipedia

Abstract

Magic realism is a disputed genre in world literature scholarship today. While many Latin American critics have advocated for its historical and geographical significance, others see it as an inherently postcolonial aesthetic formation, a worldwide literary trend, and even a global commodity. Indeed, since its emergence in the first half of the 20th century, magic realism has remained an attractive and active category, as new artworks are classified as such worldwide. To address these tensions, this essay engages with definitions, general information, and lists of authors and literary works classified as magic realists on Wikipedia. To do so, we compile a thorough database of all writers mentioned in Wikipedia’s entries for magic realism in fifty-six different languages. We visualize this data and close-read Wikipedia entries to understand better which writers are most often identified as magic realists, to which literary and linguistic traditions they belong, and how definitions of magic realism in different languages interact. We trace how the narrow and broad definitions of magic realism tend to both compete and overlap on Wikipedia. We argue that magic realism on Wikipedia can be better understood as a glocal phenomenon. In this sense, we reflect on what the worldliness of magic realism means in a non-academic context and ask how the broad circulation of magic realism can inform our understanding of world literature.