The Latin-American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1928 in Buenos Aires caused a sensation, and in subsequent years the work was regularly performed across much of the continent. The work also found many imitators, but Latin-American composers understood the work differently from their peers elsewhere. Whereas in Europe and North America, The Rite’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers such as Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos drew direct parallels between Stravinsky’s paganism and indigenismo, the evocation of the continent’s pre-Columbian past and indigenous heritage. In a move characteristic of settler colonialism, what they found in Stravinsky’s work was not a European import but an Asiatic, pre-Christian legacy that could act as a foundation for an indigenous form of musical modernism beyond Eurocentric models. By contrast, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier associated Stravinsky’s Scythians with the descendants of the Yoruba, the largest group of enslaved Africans in Cuba. In this way, the chapter analyses transnational networks and entanglements between Russia, Europe and several Latin-American countries.

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.

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.

This chapter tells the story of surrealism during the period of decolonization (and neoliberal re-entrenchment) that extends roughly from the end of World War II to the contemporary moment. It traces the overlapping but also discontinuous genealogies according to which anticolonial movements throughout the world – and in particular throughout the Global South – drew upon, rejected, and reinvented surrealist thinking. By studying surrealism as an anticolonial movement, this chapter inverts the common narrative by which it originated in Paris after World War I and “spread” to other countries, whether through the travels of individual European artists and writers, or through groups of second-order adherents. In place of a set of surrealist techniques and adherents disseminated throughout the nether reaches of the colonial world, this chapter explores the ways in which anticolonial thinkers throughout the Global South, particularly in North Africa and throughout the Americas, have built Afro-Caribbean, tricontinental, pan-African, and otherwise trans-Oceanic networks of artistic and political activity through the medium of a surrealist movement rendered plastic through translation.

Chapter 6 turns to popular culture, especially poetry written by the city of Veracruz’s official chronicler Francisco Rivera, to explore how little the elite constructions of blackness detailed in previous chapters permeated the public sphere in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Reading the same Cuban intellectuals who helped Baqueiro Foster and Katherine Dunham Africanize “La bamba,” Rivera adopted an Afro-Cuban vernacular to define the city of Veracruz’s musical and historical relationship to the African Diaspora. A symbol of the city’s identity, his verse articulates a collective cultural memory rooted in the history of public spaces: the city’s main square, streets, parks, and piers. It blackens the city’s identity while lamenting the declining popularity the Afro-Cuban musical genres, chiefly danzón, that had enlivened local culture in the nineteenth century and especially during the 1910 Revolution. In short, he argued that, to resuscitate Veracruz’s African-descended musical heritage, the national elite needed to celebrate its festive improvisation and polyvocality: two pillars of the political participation that epitomized the democratic yearnings of the 1910 Revolution. Without the danzón’s resurgence, postrevolutionary democracy would remain a farce, and the PRI would continue to rule without regard for the people it supposedly represented.