Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature

Since the success of Gabriel García Márquez's 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the following Latin American literary 'boom' of the late sixties and seventies, magical realism has had a steady following, an international influence and become established as a literary genre. Yet its definition has remained vague. Through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this study rethinks magical realism, making an argument for using Deleuzian readings of literature in general while dealing with the implications of a new approach for prevalent postcolonial studies in particular. With One Hundred Years of Solitude used as a model, Eva Aldea takes a Deleuzian approach to major anglophone works by Rushdie, Okri, Morrison, and Ghosh. She shows how the power of magical realism lies not, as is commonly held, in its subversion of the real and the magical, but in allowing the two to remain radically different and yet indiscernible at the same time, challenging existing readings of the genre.