Aspects of Transculturation in Latin America: The Case of Marvelous Realism

Abstract

When Angel Rama borrowed the concept of “transculturation” from Fernando Ortiz’s anthropological studies and applied it to the literary production of Latin America to refer to those works which broke with the old dichotomy between the indiscriminate importation of European models and the expression of an autochthonism turned to local conditions, his proposal was received with acclaim by Latin Americans. Later, though, the concept was associated with the idea of a resolution of conflicts by means of the configuration of something new and original, resulting from the mixture, or even fusion, of antithetic elements, which gave way to a reaction on the part of literary critics and scholars. In this paper, we will try to show how this concept, in spite of the criticism it has received, not only has had a fundamental role for the understanding of Latin American literary and cultural production, but also continues to be an extremely useful analytic instrument, especially if we move our focus from the notion of synthesis, which is simply one of its aspects, to that of a contradictory tension that can never be completely resolved. For this purpose, we will take as an example the case of “marvelous realism”, which resulted from the transculturation of different forms of the European fantasy genre and aspects coming from Native and Afro-American cultures.