Chapter 6 opens with examination of several reports by informants and agents in the Guatemalan National Police Archive. It discusses the language used and its implications. Then it analyzes the file of president Jacobo Árbenz from YEARS. Next, it studies the over 2,500 pages of José Revueltas’ file found in the Archive of the DFS. Most of the documents refer to Revueltas’ trial after the events of 1968. The chapter discusses the language employed by the agents, how Revueltas’s “responsibility” for the events of 1968 was established, and how surveillance of Revueltas did not end until his death. Subsequently, the chapter scrutinizes the files of Gabriel García Márquez. These files show the ambiguous position held by García Márquez in Mexico—he was described as “guest of honor” and “KGB agent” simultaneously. It discusses the writer’s political views and his silence regarding Mexican state violence.

Chapter 7 reverses the perspective of the previous two chapters and reads several literary works to unearth their dialogue with the State’s surveillance. It begins with the analysis of García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, emphasizing the role played by poetry in the novel and how it confronts hegemonic power. It then discusses the short story “The Most Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” and the ambiguity of the sense of liberation in its ending. The chapter then turns to two works by José Revueltas: the short story “Hegel and I,” which deals with the possibilities and limits of knowledge; and the novel “Errors,” which criticizes of the the Mexican Communist Party. The chapter continues with the analysis of several poems by Guatemalan writer and guerrillero Otto René Castillo, focusing on the relation between praxis and theory that all intellectual faces, and the importance of the lover’s gaze in the poetic construction of a new reality. Lastly, it examines the autobiographical text Thunder in the City, written by Mario Payeras . The author evokes his time in the urban guerrilla in the early 1980s in Guatemala City and provides a remarkable view into the State’s surveillance.

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 traces the reappearance of key features of literary modernism – especially narrative foretelling and the archival sleuth – in South Asian dictator fiction. It reveals that several techniques credited to Anglo-American modernists became “revenants” in South Asia through affiliative movement toward an unacknowledged middle generation in Latin America. Mohammad Hanif, joined by Salman Rushdie and Mohsin Hamid, portray the specter of political violence in Pakistan by adapting some of the most recognizable traits that boom superstars Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa developed out of their own readings of the North American modernist William Faulkner. Modernist narrative complexity has often been cast as apolitical or even reactionary. In contrast, South Asian authors suggest that such styles undo the easy certainties the dictator offers and uses language to challenge him on the grounds of the literal power to “dictate.” At the same time, Hanif and others use revenant structures to manage the “overheard” quality of writing in English – that is, as a way of addressing two totally distinct audiences at once.