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 shows how the countershelf can offer a “contrary” theory of global modernity hinged around the totemic date of 1492 – simultaneously the fall of Muslim Spain and the violent opening of the “New World.” Approaching the quincentenary of these twinned traumas, novelists of the 1980s and 1990s linked them conceptually through a renovation of what had been a common theme in South Asian writing for more than a century: the Andalusian allegory. Gestures that “displace” waves of trauma in the subcontinent onto medieval Spain can be traced through Urdu writers including Hali, Abdul l’Halim Sharar, and especially Mohammad Iqbal. At the end of the twentieth century, Salman Rushdie, Intizar Husain, Tariq Ali, and Zulfikar Ghose creatively recapitulate these same affiliative projects, as did authors from the Americas, Octavio Paz and V. S. Naipaul. And yet, it was this same anxiety about comparable histories of colonization, in the very same moment of the 1990s, through which Latin America was pushed beyond the boundaries of the “postcolonial world.” The layered historical fictions of this chapter suggest a need to reevaluate postcolonial historiography on its own grounds.