A Short History of Magic Realism: Exotica, authenticity and subversion.
Paulo Lemos Horta

Coined by Munich photographer and art critic Franz Roh in Weimar Germany and given currency by postwar Latin-American fiction, magic realism has enjoyed a critical renaissance with the ascendency of postmodern and in particular postcolonial schools of theory in the humanities. Magic realism has been pressed into service to describe third world cinema, postmodern culture and postcolonial literature, and further to prescribe political visions subversive of the hierarchies of the enlightenment, patriarchy and empire. Yet with each formidable claim made on the term's behalf, magic realism's meaning and genealogy grow more opaque. This paper brings into focus the definition of the term, its genealogy, and its relation to postcolonial theory today.

My research into the origin of magic realism in Weimar Germany traces the link between magic realism and postcolonialism to the very inception of the former term. Two main finds prove relevant in this regard. First, Franz Roh stressed magic realism's "New Exoticism" as authentic to an experience of the New World - in contrast to the Old Exoticism of European painting. Second, Franz  Roh refused to chart the politics of magic realism in accordance with the ideologies of the Weimar Republic, choosing instead to champion Mahatma Gandhi as the example of the politics of passive contemplation that he espouses in coining the term. On the basis of these two claims made on behalf of magic realism it is not too fanciful to think of Franz Roh as one of the first proponents of what we would now recognize as a postcolonial school of criticism.

The rhetoric of authenticity and of emancipation from colonial oppression remain key to the priveleging of magic realism as characteristic mode of postcolonial expression. It proves instructive to look at the origin of magic realism in Weimar Germany to ask: then and now, how authentic is magic realism's "New Exoticism?" In Weimar Germany as in North America today, what are the politics of the Western critic's investment in the struggles against the legacy of imperialism elsewhere? Does this gesture entail a politics of vicarious emancipation, or simply escapism?